Miss Belvedere found her forever home and is on display
The famous Tulsarama 1957 Plymouth Belvedere has found a final home at Historic Auto Attractions – A Journey Through Time, in Roscoe, Ill.
By Sanford Miles
It was June 1957 and the beginning of a seemingly never-ending “I spy a new car” story.
Until now.
Miss Belvedere in her new digs
Back in the day, Elvis was King, everybody liked Ike, Robert Young was the father that knew best, the Russians were about to launch a dog into space and Dr. Seuss put a cat in a hat. In Little Rock, Ark., educational and racial barriers were on the verge of being smashed.
Some 300 miles west of Little Rock, in downtown Tulsa, Okla., Golden Jubilee officials were preparing to bury a new gold-and-white 1957 Plymouth Belvedere as part of a Tulsarama time capsule that celebrated 50 years of Oklahoma statehood. The plan was to unearth it for the state’s centennial in 2007.
By now,
Old Cars readers know how that turned out: “Tarnished Gold” blared the
Tulsa World headline the day after the Plymouth was unearthed from its murky concrete grave below the Tulsa County Courthouse lawn on June 15, 2007.
Sinking feeling
Courtesy of the good citizens from 1957 Tulsa to the thousands from around the globe who gathered there in 2007, as well as the millions who watched the proceedings stream on the internet or on their local evening news, for your viewing displeasure, we present to you our recap of the sunken “
Titanic” — water included.
Experts surmised that, due to the vibrations of overhead traffic, a water main break on a nearby street in the 1960s, heavy rainfall in Tulsa — including major floods in 1973 and ’84 — and the fact that one little fissure in the concrete vault could cause a continental divide, well, you can imagine what happened, even if you didn’t read about it in
Old Cars.
The Tulsarama Plymouth being lowered in the ground in 1957
An overhead view of the "vault"
Buck Rudd, Deputy Chief of Building Operations for the Tulsa courthouse at the time, wasn’t optimistic prior to the unearthing.
“There’s a lot of heavy traffic going by only 15 or 20 feet from the car, Rudd said. “The vibrations from that might have caused part of the vault to crack. If moisture started getting in there, it would cause things to deteriorate over time. And 50 years is a long time. Water and time; that’s not a good combination.”
A prescient Rudd was asked if any maintenance was done on the time capsule to keep the Plymouth safe and sound all these years.
“M-maintenance?” he said, momentarily taken aback. “Yeah, we cut the grass on top of it.”
Judging by the many different water lines surrounding the vault, the Buried Plymouth might have been submerged a good part of its 50-year stay under the manicured lawn.
Seeking shelter
Immediately upon its unearthing, it looked like the rusted hulk of the ’57 Plymouth Belvedere two-door hardtop was destined to fade away. That is, until the skillful and gentle hands of one Dwight Foster, owner of Ultra One, stepped in. Ultra One is a Hackettstown, N.J.-based company that specializes in high-performance cleaners, de-greasers, rust removal products — and hope. After seeing the condition of the car after being freed from its courthouse tomb, Foster offered his company’s services to the relatives of the winner of the Plymouth Belvedere in the “Guess the population of Tulsa in 2007 and win a ‘new’ car” contest initiated during the 1957 Tulsarama festivities.