Pontiac procar pics

consort

no skip i wish i did. had a 64 for a few years until i finally told myself for the 99th time that it was to far gone. got in baytown, tx. were it had sit at a chemical plant for 20 years and salt and the spray over the gulf had even rusted out the frame. i had it for 8 years on jackstands till finally realized it would never happen. got a couple of other projects but i Will find another consort. solar and gordon k. sold my dad a lot of cars and then van types and suburbans. consorts always will be my favorites. any year but pontiac for sure. 389,400 or 455 had em all and other than nylon cam gear replacement never had any major problems. 2 66 models were just on the site but i had just spent 65k at the auction on cars and couldnt pay them much attention as i was on another path but now i,m gonna look for one thats done. no more projects for awile. red and blue pancakes ( 4 ) and a beacon was pretty much the standard back when i was riding ambulances.
 
Kyle Martin said:
no skip i wish i did. had a 64 for a few years until i finally told myself for the 99th time that it was to far gone. got in baytown, tx. were it had sit at a chemical plant for 20 years and salt and the spray over the gulf had even rusted out the frame. i had it for 8 years on jackstands till finally realized it would never happen. got a couple of other projects but i Will find another consort. solar and gordon k. sold my dad a lot of cars and then van types and suburbans. consorts always will be my favorites. any year but pontiac for sure. 389,400 or 455 had em all and other than nylon cam gear replacement never had any major problems. 2 66 models were just on the site but i had just spent 65k at the auction on cars and couldnt pay them much attention as i was on another path but now i,m gonna look for one thats done. no more projects for awile. red and blue pancakes ( 4 ) and a beacon was pretty much the standard back when i was riding ambulances.
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My first-ever ambulance was a '63 Consort that had belonged to the ambulance co. down in Harlingen. They had traded it to Summers, and I got it from Joe Summers in 1971. It replaced our REACT team's old '60 Chevy wagon ambulance that we got from the racetrack where we worked. While I bought a couple of ambulances here and there from GKA, most of what we had over the years came from Summers. Aside from a '61 Buick Flxette, the other cars from Summers were Oldsmobiles, with our first two Type II vans also coming from Summers. One of our best Consorts was a '66 combo that had come from a small funeral home in NM and had seen minor transfer duty. What I liked was that it had a Carter carb and got good gas mileage for a Pontiac coach. Also ran like you wouldn't believe. The two best GKA ambulances we had were a '66 Chevy BelAir wagon that they built for the Singleton Funeral Home chain. Singleton had funeral homes all over West Texas; and C.V. Singleton was a distant cousin. But our workhorse ambulance was a '71 GKA lowtop Suburban that had belonged to a funeral home in Dallas that had bought the truck new in '71. At that time Dudley Hughes F.H. had the county ambulance contract and had sub-contracted with this small f.h. But in '72, Sparkman-Hillcrest snagged the contract and didn't sub-contract with this small f.h. From '72 until we bought the truck in '81, it was used as a first call car. We ran it until '89, when it literally started to fall apart. We kept the engine and tranny and scrapped the rest (keeping the Q, 4 pancakes and 17, of course).

If you haven't seen Steve Loftin's ambulance video, it was filmed between '62 and '72 in Corpus and features some neat Consorts, as well as station wagons and Suburbans. I think he still has the video available if you need one.
 
'53 National from Hassell & Foster FH in Palestine, TX. Firm exists today as Bailey and Foster FH.

Photo from Rescuing Texas History 2007 collection.

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Undated photos of Miami-Dade Junior College receiving a new Superior Pontiac Tiara combination for their mortuary science program.

Images from Florida Photographic Collection.

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The A. P. Boza F. H., Tampa, Fla. donated this car. This was in 1967 or 68. Left to right in picture #2 Arthur Colton (head of the Miami-Dade School of Mortuary Science),Mr. Boza, John Chew(Embalming Instructor at MDSMS) and Louis Diez, nephew of Mr. Boza and student at MDSMS. I too was there as a student at the time.
 
Steve, We had a embalming lab at the school.The car was used for removals from funeral homes that let us embalm for them. After we had done the embalming and sometimes even cosmetizing and dressing, we then returned the deceased to the funeral home.
 
In 1968, Capital City Ambulance in Des Moines, had two '61 Pontiacs that were painted white over maroon with chrome wheels and chrome baby moon hub caps. The next time I saw Bob Hutt, owner of Capital City, I told him what sharp looking rigs the Pontiacs were, and he told me that he bought both of the cars used in the movie Disorderly Orderly from Schaeffer's in L.A. He said he used one of the Pontiacs to tow the other one with a tow-bar. Going through the mountains took its toll on the tow car as it blew the engine. So they reinstalled the driveshaft in the towed car and hooked up the car with the blown engine and made the trip back to Des Moines without further trouble. He also said that they had to straighten the front bumpers on both cars from where the studio had chained them together for the smash-up scene.
 
Very interesting! The color of Schaefer's fleet was called "root beer" and wasn't quite a true maroon. But the Schaefer rigs were easy to spot for many years, until they discontinued using coach-type ambulances in favor of Type II vans, etc.
 
Interesting indeed. Clicking either of the IMDB individual color '61 shots posted enables seeing several additional photos. One is clearly maroon and the other 'root beer' as Skip mentioned. Now go back to the color shot where they're chained together and note the round graphic on the rear of the white high top portion is missing. It doesn't match the one chained up. If paint hadn't been changed during shooting I count four '61 ambulances minimum used.

Two, three, or four seems like a lot having been only 3 years old regardless.
 
Ken Elliott said:
In 1968, Capital City Ambulance in Des Moines, had two '61 Pontiacs that were painted white over maroon with chrome wheels and chrome baby moon hub caps. The next time I saw Bob Hutt, owner of Capital City, I told him what sharp looking rigs the Pontiacs were, and he told me that he bought both of the cars used in the movie Disorderly Orderly from Schaeffer's in L.A. He said he used one of the Pontiacs to tow the other one with a tow-bar. Going through the mountains took its toll on the tow car as it blew the engine. So they reinstalled the driveshaft in the towed car and hooked up the car with the blown engine and made the trip back to Des Moines without further trouble. He also said that they had to straighten the front bumpers on both cars from where the studio had chained them together for the smash-up scene.
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It would be interesting to know if either of the 2 survived and if they are still here in Iowa. As a kid, I was just in awe of these 2 long wheel base Pontiacs as we just had a '62 Chevy wagon as an ambulance in Blue Earth, MN(no offense Paul!). That '62 Chevy wagon ended up in the local demolition derby in the late '70s.
 
Steve Loftin said:
This car stands out from the others because it has bullet lights instead of sealed beams, no beacon, red instead of clear spotlight, and windows that haven't been blanked out.
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As always, you're the one who would notice the difference. Even I hadn't noticed it until you pointed it out!

If the producers used numerous units in filming the movie, I'd bet that Schaefer made a good bit off that, especially the ones that saw some damage.

Joe Ortiz, who leases emergency and specialty vehicles to the movie studios in California, has a steady business in leasing some of his vintage and current firetrucks and ambulances. Since he and I are the same age, it's obvious that he was much too young when this film was made to have been doing that sort of thing.
 
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