Lockie’s Bel Air

To me, this car personifies the excesses of 1950s American automotive design. Larger and lower than the classic ’57 model, the 1958 Bel Air dripped chrome. The heavy bodywork sat on top of a massive ‘X’ framed chassis and the whole car just floated over any irregularities in the road surface.

I was introduced to Lockie during my third form year. A friend who knew about my interest in aircraft took me to meet the elderly West Coaster, who had served with the RNZAF in the Solomon Islands as a navigator on PBY5 Catalina flying boats during the Second World War. Born and bred in Reefton, Lockie was driving a Rover P6 at the time, but he was a Chev man through and through. He didn’t like the Rover (“Poms can’t build a motor car, you need to be a contortionist to get into it”) and used to talk fondly of the Chevrolet cars that he had owned, particularly of “Old Goldie”, the 1958 Chev Biscayne with the Blue Flame motor.

A few years later during the school holidays Lockie phoned up one morning and told me that I had to get over there. “I’ve brought myself a Motor Car!” he exclaimed. And that’s all he said. He wouldn‘t tell me any more over the phone so I biked over at top speed, arriving to find the largest car I had ever seen sitting on the back lawn. Lockie was delighted with his buy, even though he said it meant that he would be living on bread and dripping for the forseeable future. He promptly presented me with the key. “Take it for a drive” he urged me.

I‘d never driven column shift before but could recall a friend’s older brother, who had an HD Holden sedan, showing me how it all worked. So I jumped in the car, crossed my fingers and off I went. I turned the key and the small block V8 started up, rolling the bodywork on its springs as I nudged the throttle. To a 17 year old, this was an unforgettable experience. What a contrast to Mum’s Morris 1300 – I was hooked!

During the time that Lockie owned the car I regularly got to drive it. Whenever I was finished I would reverse it into the garage so that the wall of chrome at the front was showing. Lockie even urged me to take it to school one day as he was sure this would do my mana no end of good, though I never took him up on the offer. Which is not to say that I didn’t attract attention from other sources. Such as the traffic cop who pulled me over when I had gone down to the dairy to get Lockie some milk (as I’d called in on my way back from school I was dressed in my school uniform) and asked me if I owned this car? When I stated truthfully that I didn’t and explained who the owner was I then had to wait while the MOT officer got on the radio to verify my story. Personally I think he had stopped me because he wanted to have a good look at the Chev!

But sadly Lockie didn’t get the same fun out of the Bel Air that I did. A fall that he had some years earlier had damaged his spinal cord, leaving him with a loss of mobility and a withered left arm, and he had difficulty working the column shift. And when a relative in the motor trade offered to swap the Bel Air for his 1966 Impala, complete with automatic transmission, Lockie accepted. But to me, it was never the same.

All that I have left of the Bel Air is the newspaper advertisement from when Lockie brought it. The headline reads A Piece of History and I see that the asking price was $3,500. While researching this illustration, I was amazed to find the same Bel Air on TradeMe, where it is listed for $35,000, which to me is a great return on investment! All these years later the upholstery is well worn but there are only a couple of signs of rust in the door panels.

Just goes to show, as the saying goes, “old Chevys never die...”