BRANSON, MO. — It's 1957: The sky over Flint, Mich., glows at night from the spark-showering assembly lines. At Ford's River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, the hammering goes on day and night. Corvettes get fuel injection. Chryslers get tinsel-bright tail fins big enough for Sputnik to see. The Detroit Lions win the NFL championship.
Motor City is firing on all cylinders.
That was then, and this is now, and now -- as most everyone knows -- is the most desperate moment in the history of American automaking. So you might expect a certain longing for the glory days. Yet on a recent winter morning at the '57 Heaven museum here, only a handful of out-of-towners meander through the tail-finned forest of Packards, Plymouths and Pontiacs.
The museum, opened less than three years ago on the ground floor of the Dick Clark American Bandstand Theater, includes a showroom-perfect example of every convertible built in the U.S. in 1957, as well as a large assortment of '57 hardtops, wagons and pickups -- 66 cars and trucks in all, a bestiary of iron and chrome from a time when American giants ruled the road.
Long minutes go by when no one is there to admire the barge-like Lincoln Premier Convertible (18.6 feet) or the aquamarine Hudson hardtop, its grille as bright as a tea service. Background music -- the Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis -- plays surreally to the empty hall. If a jailhouse rocks and nobody is there to hear it, does it swing?
Museum ticket sales were off 50% in 2008, according to the staff.
"The economy's been real hard on us," says attendant Ed Parks. "When you dust the cars every day, it's really kind of sad."
In September, the museum's owner, a wealthy car collector and real estate developer named Glenn Patch, gave employees the bad news: He plans to sell the cars and the contents of the museum. His asking price: $17 million.
Like Detroit itself, he says, "I'm looking for a bailout."
There are dozens of car museums in the U.S., some organized by historical significance, some by make (the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Indiana, for example) or model (Kentucky's Corvette Museum). The '57 Heaven is the only collection of note organized around a single year. From a historian's perspective, says Ken Gross, former head of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, "it's a very eccentric way to collect cars."
But it was a hell of a year. If 1967 was the Summer of Love, 1957 was the Summer of Chrome.
