Phil wrote: It is my unserstanding that Ford Motor Co. furnished 2 new Ford Galaxie 300 (plain jane) cars....They were never Galaxie 500 from what I've seen on the show. >>>
I don't know about every other year, but I do know about the 1963 models so I'll talk about that year. Ford made three different 1963 sedans, all with identical bodies but different trim levels. There was no Galaxie 300, that was two separate models. The 300 was a very basic car with almost no chrome and no fancy extra stuff like AC or a radio. It seems very few of these exist today, I suppose because the type of people who buy the cheapest car they can find will drive it into the ground (not that there's anything wrong with that) and nobody would bother to restore such a car, even if they managed to find one that would still run. The Galaxie was a little fancier than the 300, it had more chrome and more interior options. All of the squad cars on The Show were Galaxies (except for one color year when a Ford Custom sedan was used). Probably 95% of real police departments nationwide also used Ford Galaxies during that era, thanks in part to publicity from TAGS, but also because GM and Chrysler didn't offer police cars with V8 engines. The Ford police package (you know: cop motor, cop tires, cop shocks, cop suspension, etc.) included a special engine called the Police Interceptor, which Phil mentioned, but I'm sure the cars on The Show didn't have those, they were just plain Galaxies painted to look like a police car. The Galaxie 500 was fancier still, it had a lot more chrome on the body, and fancy hubcaps that covered the entire wheel instead of just the center part. (Digression alert: know why cop cars always have those little hubcaps? Because full-sized hubcaps have a little hole for the tire stem to pass through, and if you hit a bump during a high speed chase, a hubcap might go flying off, and the tire stem could get sliced by the flying hubcap, ending your chase real quick. That wouldn't happen with those little baby moon hubcaps). Today, old Galaxie 500s are much more common than plain old Galaxies, I suppose because the people who spent extra money on a new car would also take care to see that it lasted as long as possible. --Paul Mulik _______________________________________________ WBMUTBB mailing list [email protected] http://wbmutbb.com/mailman/listinfo/wbmutbb_wbmutbb.com http://www.mayberry.com/tagsrwc/wbmutbb/
