Feelin’ Suburban
Auto-lover looking for adventure fell in love with this 1957 wagon: It’s Mine,
It’s not unknown for people who come to Canada from other countries to find themselves caught up in the car culture. Christophe Kientz is a bit different. When he moved here from France, he was already a full-blown American car fan.
According to Kientz, the town he hails from in eastern France had quite an active American car club. He, himself, had a 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air that had been his parents’ car. Cars from this side of the water aren’t terribly practical over there, he says. “They use too much gas to be a daily driver. Parts are available but, if you find them in France, they’re going to be expensive.” Buying and shipping parts from North America is cheaper, he says, “but you’re going to have to wait. Once you’re in the hobby, you know a few people and you’re never stuck.”
Once he was here, Kientz found his vehicle-purchasing options had expanded exponentially. With the Internet turning the whole continent into a hunting ground, he set about finding a vehicle he knew he wanted but had never seen — a 1957 Chevrolet Suburban. In 2008, he found one in Iowa and didn’t take long to make the deal.
“For years I knew I wanted one,” he says. “I had seen photos in magazines and I like the way they look. I like the wagon style, and you can sleep in the back.” The ’57 Suburban had a grille that was specific to that year, he explains, and that made it the most de- sirable in his eyes. “I had never seen one for real until I took this one off the truck,” Kientz says.
Chevrolet has had the Suburban in its lineup for a very long time and might reasonably claim to have invented the SUV — if you consider an SUV to have truck mechanicals and a station wagon body. The first-generation Suburban, in the early ’30s, had wood bodies. The second iteration was the first with all-steel bodies — really just panel trucks with windows and passenger seats. Today’s Suburbans, now the 11th generation, are the direct descendants of those early SUVs.
The truck Kientz bought wasn’t exactly stock. It had the front clip from a ’77 Camaro with a 250-cubic-inch in-line six. “That’s the way I wanted it, so I’d have power steering, power disc brakes and independent front suspension. That makes it very comfortable to use.
“The original ones are really rustic to drive.”
Pickup trucks, and their Suburban sisters, of the ’50s were a lot more like agricultural implements than automobiles, Kientz points out. Their six-cylinder engines didn’t make much horsepower and were geared to pull at low speeds, not cruise on the highway. “It was nice to have the six because no one expected that. It was kind of fun, really, but to pull the trailer, it was kind of weak.”
To prepare the Suburban for pulling the trailer owned by Kientz and his wife, Alexandra, the six was replaced by a 350-cubic-inch, fuel-injected Chevy V-8.
In the five years he has owned the truck, Kientz says it was used as his summer daily driver every year. “It’s very cool,” he says of when the Suburban was powered by the six. “It’s not very powerful. It’s not built to go fast and there’s a bit of play in the steering, but the bottom of the window is the perfect height for your arm. It’s a little bumpy and there’s a lot of wind noise.” Kientz says he was told he’d never find a ’50s Chevy truck that had both doors that fit, and the Suburban proved that warning to be correct. The driver’s door fits fine, he says. “My wife has trouble with the passenger door. When it rains, it rains inside. The noise is awful. There’s nothing you can do. They’re not built straight. That’s the way they are.”
The Suburban recently completed a pretty big test for a vehicle over half a century old. Kientz and his wife hitched it up to their Spartanette trailer and drove it across the country to Halifax. Yesterday, they drove the Suburban and trailer onto a ship and embarked for their new life in France.
“My old cars are my main hobby in life,” Kientz says. “When we decided to move to France, it was a given that my cars would come with me. It was cheaper for me to ship my cars than to sell them here and buy other ones in France.” The Spartanette trailer, though, wouldn’t fit in a container, but it was possible to ship it and the Suburban as a “roll-on-roll-off” unit — the same way new cars are shipped.
There was another consideration, too. Neither Christophe nor Alexandra had seen much of Eastern Canada.
“We thought it would be fun to finish our life in Canada by touring the country,” he says. It took about a month, but the Suburban and Spartanette made it to Halifax. Quite often, people called the trans-Canada trek an adventure, Kientz says, but he thinks it lacked the hardships necessary for it to earn that title. “It’s funny. I don’t see it as an adventure. For me, it was a vacation.”