We have a guide for early Ford V8 hubcaps that you can access by clicking here, and I am going to add to it with this recent find:
This is an original 1937 Ford dealer accessory wheel cover that is unofficially referred to as a Spyder, or sometimes Spider, hubcap. Officially, Ford called it a “Hub and Spoke Cover” as seen in this 1936 Genuine Ford Accessories brochure:
Similar versions were offered for the years 1936 and 1937, although the markings were recessed for ’36 and raised for ’37. This is what one looks like installed:
For 1938, the wheel covers were revamped with a larger V8 symbol:
The 1938 version was carried over for use in 1939, as well. All three versions have been reproduced, but the originals were made of stainless steel and were of good quality. This 1936 advertisement includes them in some gift ideas for those lucky enough to own a Ford V8. Notice the catchy poem!
I started this post a couple of days ago and was going to begin by saying that, if your experience is anything like mine, you hear one question over and over when out buying car parts: “What are you going to make with that?” Well, it happened again this past weekend.
We attended the 42nd Annual Old Trusty Antique & Collectors Show in Clay Center, Nebraska, which includes a flea market. We were happy to find many desirable hubcaps that required multiple trips to the truck with arms full:
Starting at the top left and moving clockwise: Three Oldsmobile Fiesta-style tri-bar checkerboard aftermarket caps; a 73-87 Chevy 3/4-ton 12-inch dog dish; 1930 Buick wire wheel hubcap; 30-32 Chevy wire wheel hubcap set of four plus one aftermarket version with the dash in place of the bowtie; and three 64-66 Chevy truck hubcaps (one clip and two nub-style.
At one point a woman approached me to ask what I was doing with all those hubcaps. She said she was worried that she was missing out on some great new craft idea and seemed more than a little disappointed when I answered that I was going to sell them to people who needed them. . . for hubcaps. We never want to see car parts sent to the crusher but also aren’t crazy about perfectly good parts being used to make another clock or yard-art gizmo. Vintage and antique car parts have historical value, and we vastly prefer to get them into the hands of the restorers that need them to maintain the authenticity of their projects.
That being said, we do understand the love for old cars and their various sculptural parts, as well as the enjoyment that comes with surrounding yourself with them where you live. The internet is brimming with ideas for repurposing vintage car parts, but many of those ideas involve the partial, or total, destruction of the parts being used. If you are a person who likes to immerse yourself in the classic car aesthetic, here are some ideas for adding car parts to your decor while maintaining the integrity of the parts for future use:
These old Motorola radios have vibrant colors and a great vintage look, and here they were just piled up to make a small table or stand:
This vintage headlight bezel with chrome trim has been made into a mirror for a car-themed bathroom by sticking a round piece of glass into place with silicone. This bezel is from a 1956 Ford and has the original “buckskin tan” paint.
You can’t go wrong with a wall of hubcaps. From top to bottom, this one features Pontiac, Hudson Terraplane, Chevy, Nash Lafayette, Oldsmobile, and Ford dog dishes.
Emblem letters that are the stick-on type, or ones that are missing their mounting posts, can be made into magnets like these that spell “RAT ROD.”
Everyone loves a beautiful hood ornament, and a good way to display them is on chunks of wood with holes drilled into them to accommodate any mounting bolts still on the ornaments. They look so much better on a shelf than another made-in-China-by-slave-labor knick-knack.
Clockwise, from the top: a Brockway husky, a George Petty-designed Nash flying lady, and a Chevrolet golden gazelle accessory hood ornament.
This photo features a small cloche made with a sediment bowl. The glass bowl has only been modified with a wood craft piece stuck to the closed end with silicone. It sits on a base which is also made of wood.
Finally, if you embraced the galvanized metal trend and used it as wall covering or to encase a bar, it makes a great place to display old license plates with magnets. No nail holes required!
Having not lived through the 1950s myself, a decade that my Dad assures me was the greatest time to be alive, ever, in the history of the world, I did not realize what an enormous issue hubcap theft was during that period of time. Losses, in terms of dollars, were staggering. In just Los Angeles, motorists were victimized to the tune of $250,000 a year, and, across the U.S., insurance companies were out an incredible $17 million dollars for the year 1955 alone. That is approximately $165 million in 2021 dollars! Hubcaps were stolen for personal use, for resale and sometimes just for kicks by the juvenile delinquents your parents warned you about. The papers were filled with photos of detectives surrounded by piles of recovered hubcaps:
As seen in most of these photos, it comes as no surprise that Cadillac caps were frequently targeted by thieves. The wire-spoke versions were especially sought after by those with sticky fingers.
The spinner caps pictured in the foreground above (so named because they look like fishing spinners when turning) were also highly prized by thieves and cost around $17.10 apiece in 1957. Some newspapers reported that teenagers were creating custom caps by combining the centers of Oldsmobile spinner caps with Buick caps.
The above 1956 photo was taken in Lubbock, Texas. A crackdown on the theft of car parts resulted in thieves discarding the stolen goods all over town and made the police station look like an “automobile accessories firm”.
Louisville detective with a pile of recovered caps.
Pomona, California detectives surveying recovered loot.
After recovering the stolen hubcaps, police had the unenviable task of trying to find the rightful owners. This proved to be almost impossible as the caps had no identifying markings.
Fed-up members of the public began looking for theft-prevention ideas. Some were innocuous, like the removal of hubcaps between the hours of sunset and sunrise. In Illinois, that was the policy of at least one parking lot facility in order to protect the hubcaps on the cars parked there overnight. Unfortunately, a woman called police to report stolen hubcaps even though the “thief” had left the following note on her car: “Sorry. Bosses orders to take off all hubcaps. Open at 9 AM tomorrow. (Signed) Morris.” Other solutions were much more dangerous, even potentially deadly. Some owners strategically installed razor blades as an unwelcome surprise for pilferers. In Louisville, an even more dangerous situation was created when owners began standing guard over their automobiles with shotguns at night. One man who had been a frequent victim of theft lied in wait with his shotgun and when a car stopped and the occupants approached his car, he fired into the side of their car in order to “mark it for identification”. To be fair, I would be hard-pressed to think of a more effective theft deterrent than the business end of a shotgun.
With razor blades and shotgun shells taking the situation from bad to worse, authorities began looking for a better solution and hit upon engraving. Engraving hubcaps with identifying marks provided a way to prove ownership which made caps easier to reunite with owners and also made them less desirable to steal in the first place. Los Angeles was reportedly able to decrease hubcap theft by 40% in the first year after instituting an engraving program. The identifying marks used varied from city to city. Ft. Lauderdale used a number devised by the police department that consisted of the year of the make of the car, the first letter in the name of the car and the last three digits of the serial number. Other jurisdictions, like Louisville, engraved license numbers and then provided stickers to place in the window as an additional deterrent. Engraving was performed either near the valve stem opening or along the outer lip and it reportedly only took a couple of minutes to engrave all four caps.
Nashville Police Chief watches his hubcaps get engraved as part of “Operation Hubcap”.
Ft. Lauderdale patrolman supervises the engraving process.
Engraving was usually offered as a free service and was often a joint effort between insurers, law enforcement, service stations and local clubs. In Shreveport, the mayor declared “Automobile Accessories Theft Prevention Week” after someone lifted hizzoner’s caps while he was watching a football game. In that city, the license number of the car was engraved by a local safety club called The Regents.
In Tampa, service stations regularly engraved hubcaps while the car was up on the grease rack. In Alliance, Nebraska, stamping was used in place of engraving, and Stickney’s would perform the service for free along with a tire safety inspection:
It is funny, though, I have personally handled approximately a gazillion hubcaps from that era, and I have never noticed engraved markings on any of them (if you have one, send me a photo)! Hubcaps aren’t as popular as they were back in the fifties, but I wonder how many juveniles today would even know how to remove one. After all, they do say the most effective anti-theft device today is a standard transmission.
Sources:
Berg, Don. “Police Round Up $700 Worth of Hubcaps Stolen By Boys.” Ft. Lauderdale News, 9 April 1957, p. 3.
“Drive Launched To Halt Thievery of Hubcaps.” The Shreveport Journal, 11 Oct. 1957, p. 8-B.
“Fancy Automobile Hubcaps Are Strong Lures For Local Thieves.” Longview Daily News, 25 Mar. 1954, p. 3.
“Hubcap Engraving System Starts Today.” Ft. Lauderdale News, 10 Feb. 1957, p. 1-B.
“Hubcap Roundup.” The Pomona Progress-Bulletin, 8 Feb. 1954, p. 12.
““Hubcap Thieves Facing Risk of Shotgun Blast.” The Courier-Journal [Louisville], 3 Mar. 1957, p. 1.
“Loot Being Abandoned.” Lubbock Evening Journal, 5 March 1956, p. 1.
Miller, James. “Your Car Can Be Stolen.” The Miami Herald, 14 Feb. 1954, p. 5-F.
“Police Recover 48 Hubcaps; 3 Youths Held.” The Courier-Journal [Louisville], 2 Sept. 1954, p. 2-1.
“Police Push Hubcap Branding.” The Minneapolis Star, 1 Nov. 1957, p. 15A.
“Rounding Up Teenage Gang In Auto Accessory Thefts.” The Herald-Press [St. Joseph], 21 Aug. 1957, p. 1.
“Service Stations Start Engraving Hubcaps To Thwart Thieves.” Nashville Banner, 1 Oct. 1957, p. 10.
Stickney’s Inc. Alliance Daily Times Herald, 4 Apr. 1957, p. 4.
“‘Stole’ Hubcaps for Safekeeping.” Des Moines Tribune, 23 Aug. 1955, p. 1.
Vallery, Val E. “Police Start Marking System To Curb Car Accessory Thefts.” Plainfield Courier News, 16 July 1958, p. 21.
Old, aftermarket hub caps keep finding me lately, and some of them are just hilarious. Inexpensive replacement caps were sold by companies like Western Auto and J.C. Whitney, but the logos had to be altered enough to avoid pesky trademark infringement laws. Some of them are pretty good facsimiles thereof, like this Cadillac replacement cap. It is heavy duty and looks like the Caddy emblem, but has lines instead of ducks:
This one has stars instead of ducks.
Frankly, they both look better than the modern Cadillac version that has been sanitized of its history and personality. For Chevy replacements, a dash was commonly used in place of the bowtie:
This one is for a 1954 Chevy, and it is a pretty good copy, too. You have to look hard to see that it is a dash and all one piece (the real ones have a separate center insert).
The really entertaining versions are the ones with altered spelling. I have seen dog dishes that say “Dodoe” instead of Dodge, for instance. The Chrysler replacement cap pictured below says something like “Clrrfrlir, although the “i” is mysteriously undotted.
This is one of the famous “Bool” caps made for a Model A Ford:
I have heard that they also made a “Fool” version. I’m not sure who would want to drive around with those on their car (but I know of a few people who should).
