Last Call: Car Phone Edition

Phone from car, ca. 1950s
This “Phone From Car” phone may not be as convenient as its portable modern descendant, but it probably is a lot safer. I’m guessing pretty much everybody can ID the car, but does anyone know the locale?
Last Call indicates the end of Hooniverse’s broadcast day. It’s meant to be an open forum for anyone and anything. Thread jacking is not only accepted, it’s encouraged. 
Image: Vintage Everyday

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  1. salguod Avatar

    I did 3 car shows in Toledo this weekend with Dad and his Eldorado. Friday night was a cruise-in in Perrysburg, Saturday was the Maumee Summer Fair and Sunday the AAA show in Sylvania. It was a little hot and tiring, but a lot of fun. Car got a lot of attention.
    At one point a gentleman came up and mentioned that he had a one just like it at home, but it wasn’t drivable anymore and he really should get it out again. I pointed out to Dad that a couple years ago we saw an Eldorado at the Arthritis Foundation show and he was the one saying that had a car like that at home that he wanted to get out.
    It was a great weekend.

    1. smalleyxb122 Avatar
      smalleyxb122

      I really need to pay more attention to the local show schedule. I didn’t do a damned thing this weekend, and you’re telling me that there were (at least) 3 opportunities to ogle cars, instead of sitting home sifting through craigslist.

      1. salguod Avatar

        Yep, and there was a Scamp pickup at the AAA show.
        The Perrysburg thing happens every Friday night, I guess.
        I assume that you are in the Toledo area, right? If you find yourself at a show and see a green ’57 Eldorado, tell my Dad I said hi. 😀

  2. smalleyxb122 Avatar
    smalleyxb122

    Well, the obvious guess of St. Louis was wrong. I never would have guessed Portland, OR.
    http://media.oregonlive.com/oregonian/photo/2013/07/13078184-essay.jpg

    1. dr zero Avatar
      dr zero

      That looks like something out of Fallout. Will Fallout 5 be set in the PNW?

      1. danleym Avatar
        danleym

        Wow. I lived in St. Louis, there was a very similar sign about a mile from my house, I thought it was that one.

        1. Joe Dunlap Avatar
          Joe Dunlap

          Am i missing a comment? How did we determine it was Portland?

          1. Maymar Avatar
            Maymar

            I assume the same way I did – right click and “Search Google for this Image”.
            Also, I’m severely disappointed to look up the current site of this plaza, just to find another, more non-descript plaza that looks like hundreds of plazas within a half-hour drive of my home, on the other side of the continent.

          2. smalleyxb122 Avatar
            smalleyxb122

            I actually found it the old-school way. I googled “Gateway shopping center”.

  3. ptschett Avatar
    ptschett

    Speaking of phones…
    Yesterday, about noon, I set my decrepit mid-2007 MacBook about the task of updating its photo library thumbnail cache, since it’d been bothering me about it for a while. Then I went and cooked lunch. After the cooking of some 1/4 -1/3rd lb. hamburgers and the food coma from eating two of them plus half a cookie-sheet of fries, I came back to the computer to find the screen blank, and the hard drive making this interesting, syncopated, rhythmic quarter-note click, quarter-note pause, two-eighths click-click, quarter-note pause noise. Uh-oh….
    I’d been meaning to upgrade my computer hardware for a while; I was holding out for just a bit longer, waiting for the rumored Broadwell 21″ iMac. But I also was thinking I wouldn’t mind a decent portable machine too. So I headed to Best Buy, hoping to come home with a new machine that day (though what I really wanted to do was to watch the NASCAR Sprint Cup Watkins Glen race, even though they don’t run the boot.)
    After wandering around the Apple tables for not terribly long and being pestered by numerous different salesmen I decided the new MacBook was too avant-garde with the one USB-C port, the MacBook Air was too biased toward battery life instead of performance, and that what I really wanted for general purposes now and as a decent portable machine for later was the MacBook Pro 13.3″ with the Retina screen and midrange RAM/storage/processor specs. Which happened to be the one model they were completely sold out of. D’oh!
    I went through the process of getting the new machine ordered anyway, and also signing up for their rewards card (I expect to buy several thousand dollars worth of tech stuff in the next year or two, and this was a big enough purchase to justify the rigamarole to get the initial-purchase 10%-off deal.)
    Then I came home. I watched the last ~30 laps of the NASCAR race, which were fun (particularly the last lap where the outcome would have been different if only Harvick had an extra half-pint of gasoline in the tank.) I tried to get my prior computer, an even-more-ancient G3/700 MHz iBook going on more-modern networking equipment, and failed miserably. So I looked up hard drive replacement on the old MacBook on iFixIt.com… how bad could it be?
    Turns out that the mid-2007 MacBook was pretty user-friendly for hard drive replacement, and I actually already had the necessary tools (thanks to the $5 security-bit assortment from Mac’s Hardware that I already owned, since it had the right security-Torx bit for removing the MAF sensor from my ’96 Thunderbird.) I had the old drive out in about 10 minutes.
    So I decided to head back to Best Buy and picked up a 240GB solid-state drive, twice as big as the spinning-rust pining-for-the-fjords drive. Threw the new drive in there, formatted it, then told the computer to load up the latest backup from the Time Capsule when it got there.
    It turned out that the last backup, for whatever reason, was from the last month of June. Most of what I’d lost was photos, and mainly photos from the 2015 iteration of the Fargo Airsho(w). But the iPhone still had copies of those…
    Unfortunately, when photos get loaded onto an iPhone using iTunes/iPhoto they seem to get down-sampled from full resolution. But I was able to recover at least the lower-rez versions via Dropbox and put them back into the library.

  4. dukeisduke Avatar
    dukeisduke

    It’s a ’59 Chevy Impala. The lines running over the top of the seatback say it’s a ’59, rather than a ’60, which used the same dash.