Collector Car Corner/ Cars We Remember; 1960 Fords, the designers, and Robert McNamara

By Greg Zyla —

Q: Greg, I read your column in our local newspaper. I owned a 1960 Ford Starliner, and to this day, I wish I would have never traded it in. It was a daily driver work car for 15 years. However, gas was getting expensive in 1975, so I finally traded it for a six-cylinder Mustang. Next came a Ford Taurus and then an Escort.

A friend told me that my 1960 Starliner might have been one of the widest cars ever built and that Ralph Nader tried to change the design because he said the horizontal fins were too wide to be street legal.

I am now wondering if this is true. Is this car legal in all 50 states? If you can provide any information about the l960 Ford Starliner that I might not know, I would appreciate it. Are there many of them still around? Thanks, Frank G., Pottsville, Pa.

A: Frank, I’ve written about Ralph Nader before, especially about his 1960 book “Unsafe at Any Speed” In that book, there is one chapter where he condemns the Chevy Corvair and single-handedly ruined the car’s reputation.

Although I remember reading about the Starliner, I can attest that the 1960 Ford Starliner was indeed the widest Ford ever produced and may be the widest car by a half-inch ever sold by any manufacturer.

However, there are no current laws forbidding anyone from driving a classic car like the Starliner, and there never will be, I hope. If there ever is a law, it will most likely come from a state like California.   

As for the fins, I would opine that Ford wanted to mimic the successful 1959 Chevrolet and its wild rear fins that resemble a large eagle-type bird in flight. I remember watching television ads where Chevy allowed just split-second views of that splendid design, and all of the cars on trailers were covered on the way to the dealers for their annual big new model celebrations. For those who are younger, the new car introductions back in the 1950s and 1960s were impressive and usually lasted a week where the dealer offered free hot dogs, donuts, refreshments, and some even gave away 1/24 scale assembled plastic replicas of the new cars. (I still have a few in my collection.)  

The 1960 Starliner was extremely popular with the NASCAR teams, as its bubbletop design gave it an aerodynamic advantage over previous Ford models. They all rode on a 119-inch wheelbase, which was common for cars back then.

A great trivia fact is that the late Alex Tremulis/Tjaarda designed the good-looking Starliner and is the same guy who designed the famous 1948 Tucker, among many other designs. Although not in the class of Harley Earl over at GM, Tremulis was a well-respected car designer. He receives credit for most of the 1960 Ford designs except the new 1960 Ford Falcon.

This is where Robert McNamara enters the picture, as he oversaw Elwood Engel and John Najjar, both key figures for Ford’s design studio in that era. As for (here’s more confusion) Alex Tjaarda (sometimes misremembered as Timulis and designer of the Ford Starliner and large Fords, he did work on advanced concepts, but not the 1960 Falcon, which was primarily shaped by Joe Oros’ team under McNamara’s directive for simplicity. Now for us baby boomers, the name McNamara is a top of mind auto executive. He rose through the roles of Controller and General Manager of the Ford Division, and on Nov. 9, 1960, he became President of Ford Motor Company, the first person outside the Ford family to hold that position since the company’s founding. I’d say that’s an impressive resume, but things would get even “bigger” for McNamara.

Specifically, five weeks after becoming Ford’s president, President-elect John F. Kennedy offered him the role of U.S. Secretary of Defense.

McNamara accepted and served as Secretary of Defense from January 1961 to February 1968, making him the longest-serving person in that role. He was a key figure during the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, introducing systems analysis into defense planning.

After leaving his office at the Pentagon, he became President of the World Bank (1968–1981), focusing on global development. McNamara’s methodical approach at Ford – emphasizing cost control, safety, and efficiency – shaped his later government decisions, where he applied similar data-driven methods to defense policy. 

The reason I’m so familiar with the name McNamara is that during the Cuban/Russia missile crisis, I watched the evening news every night with my parents and brother, and McNamara was on TV every night explaining the crisis, regardless of what news team you watched on ABC, NBC, or CBS.

Back to the 1960 Starliner, a full-size Ford with that sleek, Impala-like bubble top roofline, accredited also to designer Bob Maguire and Alex Tjaarda in the Ford Styling Department. While these teams shared resources and design philosophies, there’s no compelling evidence that Timulis (a.k.a. Tjaarda) directly influenced the Falcon’s production styling, which was on the design board in 1959 for 1960 model year release. The Falcon was a separate compact-car program focused on practicality, not the sporty aesthetics of the Starliner.

Although you don’t mention the size of your car’s engine, three Starliner V8’s were available, all in 352 cubic inch form. A 235-horse two barrel was optional, as were a 300-horse four barrel and a high-performance 360-horse model. The base engine was an inline 223-inch 6-cylinder.

In addition to the innovative design inside and out, notable mechanical improvements came with the 1960 Ford, including extended oil drain intervals to 6,000 miles and chassis lubes extended all the way to 30,000 miles instead of the usual 1,500. 

Rare by collector standards, only 68,461 Starliners were ever built of the 900,000 total cars built by Ford in 1960. I would also think that few have survived, so they are quite rare today. 

The base price back then was $2,610 and a Starliner weighed in at 3,692 lbs. In summary, I always felt the 1960 and 1961Fords were good looking cars, especially those bubble-top fastbacks.

Robert McNamara died on July 6, 2009, at the age of 93, in Washington, D.C.. He did a fantastic job during the Cuban Missile Crisis that included possible nuclear war with Russia, who had sent nuclear warheads to Cuba. Many of our top military honchos wanted to strike Russia, but Kennedy and McNamara prevailed and avoided the conflict. As for Vietnam, both Kennedy and McNamara made mistakes. McNamara later admitted the Vietnam war was a “terrible mistake” and expressed deep regret for his role.

We’ll be starting the holiday columns soon.

(Greg Zyla is a syndicated weekly auto columnist who welcomes reader questions on collector cars and auto nostalgia at 303 Roosevelt St., Sayre, Pa. 18840 or email him at extramile_2000@yahoo.com.)