Brian Earnest
When you are a fan of big tailfins, sometimes one car can just lead to another.
East Troy, Wis., resident Bruce Frank has always been a sucker for finned MoPars, and he had a couple that he really loved a few years back — one an all-original time piece 1959 DeSoto Adventurer, and the other a project car — a 1958 Chrysler New Yorker — with plenty of promise.
“I was going to restore the ’58 New Yorker, but that got bought by somebody that wanted it way worse than I did after a period of years,” jokes Frank.
Losing the New Yorker wasn’t the end of the world, however, because the white ’59 Adventurer in his garage was still one of his favorite cars that he’d ever owned.
But then fate intervened.
“Because of that car, a couple guys knew me from way up in nowhere, Minnesota. And one of them came to me and told me this car was for sale up there,” Frank recalled. “He told me he thought it was one of the fuel-injected cars. We went up and looked at it and it wasn’t, and the money the woman was asking was just way out of line, and I passed. But about two years later another guy from way up there told me it was still for sale. She was not advertising, just trying to word-of-mouth it and she wants someone who will restore it. She dropped the price substantially, so we worked a deal for the car, and I dragged it home.”
Brian Earnest
Frank insists he wasn’t looking for another MoPar to restore, but he was willing to take another swing at the ’58 DeSoto hardtop. A restoration had already been started on the car — the engine was out of the car and had been at least partially rebuilt and the car didn’t have any rust issues. The biggest reason he brought it home is pretty simple — there aren’t many 1958 Adventurers around and if you are a finned MoPar guy, they are worth grabbing onto in almost any condition.
“They made 350 hardtops [that year], and they only came in black, white or gold,” Frank pointed out. “There is a guy out East who is keeping track of the VIN numbers on these cars. He’s restored a few of them, mostly convertibles He actually had one of the fuel-injected cars … I talked to him when I first bought this car. There are only 10 hardtops left that he’s aware of. There’s one black one, one gold one and eight white ones. One of the white ones and the gold one are in Sweden, so there are only eight of these in the States.”
“The Desotos are tough [to restore], the Adventurers are even tougher. This is the ‘Chrysler 300’ DeSoto, and some of the trim pieces are specific to the Adventure… So yeah, it’s tough to do these.”
Brian Earnest
FLASHY, FABULOUS FINS
Indeed, the Adventurer certainly appeared to be following in the Chrysler 300s tire tracks when the model was launched as subseries of the Fireflite lineup for the 1956 model year — one year after its Chrysler counterpart. Initially, the model was only available as a hardtop and came only in a white/black/gold color scheme. A total of 996 of the fancy cruisers were built for their debut year, with all carrying the hi-po 341-cid Hemi V-8 rated at 340 hp.
The 1957 model year saw the arrival of Virgil Exner’s dramatic new “Forward Look” body styles. In addition to the big, ornate tail fins, the new bodies were lower and longer, and featured new side trim and color sweep treatments, and a large new bumper grille combination. Standard features included Torsionare torsion bar front suspension, Oriflow shocks, Safety-Lock door latches, Total Contact brakes and Power-Tip spark plugs.
There were more trim changes for 1958, and a new grille with a mesh insert, along with dual headlights. The Hemi engine was eliminated and replaced with 361-cid wedge head. DeSoto offered optional Bendix fuel injection but the setup proved to be too costly for most buyers — not to mention they quickly earned a reputation for being finicky. Cars so-equipped wore special nameplates above the front fender medallions. Non-fuelie cars were equipped with dual-quad carburetors.
Brian Earnest
Like the Fireflites that they were based on, the high-performance Adventurers came standard with TorqueFlite transmission, back-up lamps and full wheel covers. Other extras included power brakes, dual exhaust, dual rear radio antennas, dual outside rearview mirrors, white sidewall tires, dashboard safety panel and special paint and trim. The latter included gold highlights, twin groupings of four deck lid bars, triangular rear side sweep inserts and special upholstery.
Along with the 350 hardtops, there were 82 convertibles built — adding up to a 78 percent drop in sales compared to 1957.
For all its great looks and matching great performance, the Adventure nameplate was only able to soldier on for two more years. The convertible was dropped in 1960 in favor of a four-door hardtop and sedan, and sales rose to 11,597 units, but DeSoto’s total sales were in a death spiral from which the company would never recover. The end finally came in November of 1960 when Chrysler announced that the DeSoto lineup was being retired for good.
ONE-OWNER DREAM MACHINE
There weren’t a lot of new DeSoto hardtops floating around in 1958, but one of them found its way to northern Minnesota and stayed there its whole life until Frank came along.
“It was a one-owner car,” he notes. “They bought it brand new, but they didn’t order it. The bought it off the showroom floor from a DeSoto dealer up in Duluth [Minn.]. It was a dealer-ordered car in Duluth, with no undercoating on it! … It was the original owners and we have pictures from up there of them with the car from years ago.”
“It was a pretty basic car. No air, no Air-Ride [suspension]. There’s very little on the car that wasn’t standard for the Adventurer.”
Even though there had been some restoration work done, Frank decided to pretty much start from the ground up with his black-and-gold Adventurer hardtop. He simply didn’t want to take anything for granted.
“The motor had been done and had been sitting off on the side. But we decided to check everything and we found mouse poop in it, so we decided to re-do everything,” he said. “Everything’s been rebuilt, everything’s been rechromed.”
Frank initially took the car to a well-known MoPar restorer in Wisconsin, but the project languished for about a year with little progress and he started looking for a Plan B. At that point he turned to another MoPar expert, Bob Schmidt, who had been involved in restoring cars for the 57 Heaven Museum collection in Branson, Mo.
“I had sworn off restorations, but when this one turned up, I thought well, at least it’s rare enough that I’ll get my money back out of it. Every thing else like this you get into it for $ 125,000 for the restoration, and you run it through Barrett-Jackson for $ 40,000. It’s just not a winning situation, you’ve got to really love the car, or it’s gotta be really rare to wanna mess with it.”
Frank wound up having the ’58 stripped and repainted. Fortunately, the sheet metal needed minimal work.
“The bodywork that had been done to it was done pretty well. We tweaked a few things … Did some work in the underside of the floor pans. But it all turned out nice. We got the best paint award down at the Milwaukee Concourse one year, which was kind of a big deal.”
Frank says he sourced a few hard-to-find pieces from a repro guy in Australia, and the dash pad from a company in Sweden. SMS Auto Fabrics in Oregon handled the important upholstery work.
“The chrome, everything was there. I took it all to a chrome shop in Neenah-Menasha [Wis.] … Chrome keeps getting more and more expensive, and there is a bunch of it on there. The tires that are on it were wrapped brand new tires when I bought the car. I have no idea how old they are. They are bias-ply, which is one of the reasons I’m not real wild about being on the Interstate with it.”
“It runs and rides really nice. I will say that my ’59 that has never been apart drives better. When you take a car apart ,sometimes they never ride and drive as good as they were originally [laughs]… But it does have the look, that’s for sure!”
Brian Earnest
Brian Earnest
SHOW US YOUR WHEELS!
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