The woman appeared to be genuinely stumped. Hanging on a pegboard on a wall in front of her were several metal frames with elongated curved lines. She wasn’t sure what they were.
They’re car grills, said the man accompanying him, who I assumed was her husband. Then he proceeded to point out some other car parts on the wall, including what he called a fire chief wheel cover with the raised head of a Native American man.
I had just passed the array of auto parts on the wall and in boxes on the floor in a booth at the antiques mall, but had merely glanced at them. I didn’t dawdle long enough to even wonder what the grills were. But now, listening to her, my interest was piqued. I realized that I don’t often come across hubcaps and other car parts at auction – items my auction buddy Janet called “guy things.” I did recall some plastic grills that were sold about a year ago.
I was intrigued by the woman’s curiosity at what she had stumbled upon. I’m always interested in the types of items that other people are drawn to just as much as those that catch my eye. Listening to the husband school his wife made me want to know more about the car parts that this seller had assembled.
Once the couple moved on, I headed back to the booth and looked a little closer. The grills, in fact, were pretty sweet – not necessarily to be used on a car but re-purposed as something else in the home (I’m sure some guys would consider that blasphemy). There were several hubcaps with the chief’s head, grill ornaments, a red GMC hubcap, and several others with metal spokes.
The Native American chief’s head was actually GMC’s Pontiac logo, which was discontinued in the late 1950s. The car brand itself was retired two years ago. There were several styles of the logo as hood ornament.
Pontiac was the name of an Ottawa chief who led a rebellion against British takeover of the Great Lakes region during the French and Indian War in the 18th century.
These appeared to be vintage hubcaps and they brought back memories, especially of the old Rambler that my sister won when we were just teenagers and she didn’t know how to drive. So, our cousin Raymond did the driving for us.
Back them, they were known as hubcaps. I wondered if they were still called that. Now, it seems, you can call them hubcaps or wheel covers, and they have evolved way past their original practical use into the realm of decoration and style.
The first hubcaps were small center caps used to protect the hub of the wheels on the very first autos. The caps kept dust out of the grease in the wheel bearings in the hub while leaving the wooden spokes exposed, according to the website hubcapmike.com.
By the 1920s and 1930s, the wooden spokes gave way to steel, but the center hubcaps were retained because they were still needed for protection. Car companies, though, used them for decoration and stamped their insignia on them. Cadillac was the first to move from the small cap to the full wheel cover, making it a “symbol of luxury and class,” according to the website.
The most popular Cadillac hubcap was the 1950 chrome Sombrero, which looked like a Mexican sombrero hat and sparked aftermarket imitations of the style. By the 1970s, manufacturers began replacing chrome and aluminum hubcaps with plastic ones, according to hubcapmike.com.
Some say that the greatest tribute to the hubcap and the car itself can be found on the face of the Chrysler Building in New York, completed in 1930. The exterior of its high floors include a line of hubcaps, Chrysler eagle radiator caps, fenders and hood ornaments.
Several of the hubcaps in a cardboard box on the floor at the antiques mall appeared to be moon center caps or racing discs, which were pretty popular in the 1950s, according to hubcapmike.com. Some were stamped Chevrolet – another said “V8” – and may have been baby moon hubcaps. I found four such Chevrolets that sold for $40 at an auction last year.
I also found some nice hubcaps on the web from much earlier cars: Desoto, Packard, Edsel (and Rambler), among others. Some were selling upward to $100. That was around the price for the car parts at the antiques mall.
