1957-58 Ford Custom /Custom 300: Dearborn's Split Personality

摘要

O n the evening of June 15, 1953, NBC and CBS simultaneously aired a television spectacular entitled The Ford 50th Anniversary Show. Featuring such entertainment standouts as Mary Martin; Ethel Merman; Marian Anderson; Bing Crosby; Eddie Fisher; Frank Sinatra; Rudy Vallee; Oscar Hammerstein II; and puppets Kukla, Fran, and Ollie; newsman Edward R. Murrow; and Henry Ford II, the show marked the half century since the founding of the Ford Motor Company in 1903. In two hours, the program reviewed, without commercial interruption, the major events and people of Ford's preceding 50 years. In those five decades, the company grew from a start-up building 670 examples of the two-cylinder Model A in 1903 to U.S. production of nearly 2 million Fords, Mercurys, Lincolns, and Ford trucks in 1953. Ford settled into the position as the world's number-two producer of cars and trucks, a position it held for decades, but the next 50 years would be radically different than the previous 50 had been for the automaker.