Surprised by a ’Bird
Ford man falls for his mom’s ’56 Thunderbird
Gene Hildebrand always considered a ’32 or ’34 Ford three-window coupe to be the car he really wanted, but then his mother called. “It just wasn’t the type of car that I’m interested in,” he said of his 1956 Thunderbird. “…That (Ford coupe) has always been my dream car, so basically, I would say I would’ve overlooked something like this.
“Now that I have it? Guess what. I won’t part with it.” Hildebrand has it because his mother wanted him to have what had long been her dream car. Some two decades before she gave it to him in 2021, he said, she’d been speaking with a cousin who worked at a Thunderbird shop in Michigan and mentioned that a 1956 T-Bird with its continental kit, and in Peacock Blue, would be high on her list. If not speciflc enough already, it had to have a hardtop.
“He called her back within a month,” Hildebrand continued, “and said, ‘Hey, this is a real coincidence, but I’ve got one that just came in. The guy passed away and his wife wants to sell it.’”
The late owner had bought the car new and maintained it well for roughly a half-century, which says a lot about the
Thunderbird’s appeal, and the fact that Ford’s confldence was well-placed when it introduced its Corvette competitor for 1955.
In Ford vs. Chevy, everyone wins
When Chevrolet launched the 1953 Corvette, it was anything but a typical Detroit offering. The new two-seater looked aggressive with its long, straight flberglass body, its grille full of teeth and its screen-covered headlamps that conjured a ready-for-road-racing image. It was a sports car so serious that it lacked outside door handles and glass side windows, even if it did rely on an upgraded version of Chevrolet’s inline six and its two-speed automatic.
The two-seat, flberglass Corvette was a flrst for the “Big Three,” and enthusiasts welcomed it loudly enough that the Corvette moved from show car to production model. No one could be sure that passion would translate into sales, and the Corvette’s flrst several years might have raised some question among General Motors executives about the wisdom of putting the car on sale. It probably raised questions at Ford, too, where the answer was the Thunderbird’s 1955 introduction.
The Thunderbird was “a new high-spirited personal car
that’s at home on boulevard or open road,” and at once similar to and different from the Corvette. Each seated two and rode a 102-inch wheelbase, but the T-bird was longer, heavier and, at $2,944, a few dollars more expensive. Advertising pointed to further big differences when it cited the Thunderbird’s “beautiful, low-silhouette, all-steel body” and its choice of threespeed manual, overdrive or three-speed automatic. A brochure illustration showed the car with its top down and side windows up, the caption driving home the “full-size safety-glass windows that can be rolled up in a ‘jiffy.’” A gloved hand was shown on an outside door handle, the importance being that “recessed, push-button door handles are a great convenience.”
Timing, though, precluded Ford from taking advantage of what might have been an excellent selling point when Chevrolet’s new modern V-8 became optional in the 1955 Corvette. That made for remarkably fair competition, as the Corvette’s 265 cubic inches provided 195 hp with an automatic — the only choice — while the Thunderbird’s 292-cid V-8 was good for 198 hp with an automatic. The Thunderbid and Corvette were not targeting precisely the same market, but there was enough similarity between them to ensure that drivers considering one would likely compare it to the other.
Tweaking a winning ’Bird
The Corvette sold 700 examples in 1955 against the Thunderbird’s 16,000, so Ford was careful with updates for 1956. The change that was impossible to miss was the addition of a rear-mounted spare tire that’s generally referred to as a continental kit, but it was more than a styling gimmick as “with the spare mounted outside, there’s space for all the luggage (in the brochure photo) and more in the Thunderbird’s big new luggage compartment. New spare tire mount moves back out of way on hinged bracket.” The downside was that the extra weight so far behind the rear wheels negatively impacted the car ’s handling, something that matters little to T-bird fans today.
More interesting was the change under the hood, where a 312-cid V-8 with 225 hp in automatic cars was now optional. In the three-speed and overdrive versions, it returned 215 hp. The Corvette lost its six and the 265 was back, now starting at 225 hp and topping out at 240. As part of its restyling, it gained not only exterior door handles, but also roll-up glass windows in place of the former side curtains.
The strange rivalry continued between the two, one a sports car that could be civilized, and the other a touring car that could be charged up. The Thunderbird was “designed for complete practicality,” “sacriflces nothing in comfort and convenience” and provided that “space for all the luggage” that should be found in a touring car. However, there was also “enormous power, tamed to obey your every command, precision handling that makes you the master … road-holding stability that breeds new confldence and skill.”
Meanwhile, Chevrolet was advertising that the Corvette “is proving — in open competition — that it is America’s only genuine production sports car.” The ad is loaded with phrases such as “extremely stable,” “the competition driver” and
“special racing brake lining” to attract the performance-minded, but it also lists options from power windows to an automatic “for the driver who requires a superlative touring car rather than a competition machine.”
Flying a blue ’Bird
It’s easy to determine where Hildebrand’s mother flts in those groups and subgroups, and he recalled the day the T-Bird was delivered to her home in Slocum Township, Pa.
“I backed it right off of the trailer,” he said. “. . . She was so excited that she was right there taking pictures of me.”
Surprisingly, she didn’t take it for a ride at once, and Hildebrand said that he doesn’t remember when she flrst drove it. She did, however, show up with the Thunderbird one day at his home in Hobbie, about 20 miles away, but he later realized that in the time she’d owned it, she’d driven it less than 300 miles.
“It was her dream car,” he said, “so I would’ve assumed she was putting more miles on it, but no … I did tell her that she had to get out and start it, but then at her age, she got to the point where she wouldn’t go out and start it any more. I went up and started it, but it sat for two years when it wasn’t even started.”
That meant his flrst task after she gave it to him was to get the Thunderbird operational. He spent an entire day cleaning the carburetor and going through the rest of it to be sure it was ready. After several starts and near-immediate stalls, it started and kept running so that he was able to back it out of its garage. Once it became clear that it was not likely to stall again, he drove it to his home and left it outside until he was certain that he’d eliminated its mouse population.
“Once I felt safe,” Hildebrand said, “I pulled it into the garage and that’s when I started working on cleaning it back up, getting the chrome shining and the paint shining.”
He found evidence that the body had received minor touch-up work, but overall, the paint was stained rather than oxidized and cleaned up well so that he could wax it. The same was true of the brightwork, and he said that he’d been surprised at how good the Thunderbird looked once he was flnished.
It was a similar story when it came to the mechanical components. “I thought I was going to have to rebuild the fourbarrel carburetor,” Hildebrand said. “I drove it home and I saw that it was leaking, so I thought, ‘I’ll leave it alone for now and see if it’ll seat itself.’ And it did, so I didn’t have to rip the carbu
retor apart. I really didn’t want to, but I thought, ‘If it’s leaking, I’m going to have to, because I don’t want a flre.’ I did not have to do anything to that.
“The transmission is leaking a little bit, not enough that I’ve had to add any fiuid to it. The rear main seal is leaking, but that’s from being original and sitting for so many years without being lubricated. But basically, I’ve added no oil to it and no transmission fiuid to it, and my wife and I do use it.”
Using it began with a short trip to the most important destination of all.
“I went right up to my mother ’s,” Hildebrand recalled, “and I said, ‘Here’s the car.’ She came out and her jaw dropped ... (I) said, ‘I’m going for gas. Do you want to go for a ride?’ ‘Well, I don’t know.’ ‘Do you want to go for a ride?’ ‘Yes.’ She hopped in the car and I said, ‘We’re going to go for gas.’
“I got it out on the Interstate at the Nuangola exit and was going over to the truck stop. She said, ‘This is the flrst time this car ’s been on the Interstate. I never took it out on the Interstate.’”
That night, he said, his mother phoned him. “She called me and said she’d just gotten off the phone with our cousin,” Hildebrand said. “‘I told him how nice it looked. It looked like the day he brought it.’”