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There is also something called a "flower car".
It's a Cadillac Hearse El-Caminoized to carry funeral flower arrangements. The ones from the late '50s and early '60s are especially cool.




Back in the 60s, we owned a '53 Cadillac flower car, just
for the fun of it. It had a Caddy 500 engine,
(the same as was used in twin array in some Army tanks back when)
a stainless steel bed liner with floor rollers, a stainless steel sliding bed
cover, and suicide doors just behind the cab doors, that
would allow access to the front of the pickup bed. GM's
coach builder made the bodies. It was either Fischer or
another one. The coach builder's badge was riveted to the
suicide door threshold, but memory does not serve. It had a
three on the tree that we converted to a rudimentary floor
shifter when the linkage wore out. It got a dandy 6 or 8
MPG. Gas was around 35 cents then. The fuel filler pipe was
under the (left?) rear tail light. You pushed the reflector
button, and the tail light would flip up, and there was the
gas cap underneath. There is a very similar Flower Car
shown in the movie "Alice's Restaurant" 17 miles north of here. I
believe theirs was also a '53.


Representative photo. This one is very close, but may be
a '54 or later as indicated by the fender's shape above the headlights.

The New England road salt did ours in. We tried to give it
away via Hemmings, but no one wanted it.
It ended in Mielke's junk yard in Sheffield, MA.


Warning to old pickup lovers:

Do not open the link below unless you have some significant
time to spend gawking at your computer screen.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/enlarge-image.htm?terms=classic+truck&gallery=1&page=0

I tried to warn you...


1937 GMC
[/ drool ]