Oldsmobile Super 88 Fiesta sells for $77,000 at station wagon-centric auction Daniel Strohl While a one-off fiberglass-bodied Dodge concept car took center stage at last week’s Mitchell Car Museum liquidation sale, the core of the auction was made up of the station wagons that Don Mitchell – “Michigan’s station wagon king” – produced, including the 1958 Oldsmobile Super 88 Fiesta that sold for $77,000. Assembled by William F. Mitchell in the 1990s to pay tribute to the many accomplishments of his father, Don Mitchell (as well as another relative who founded the Mitchell Car Company in Racine, Wisconsin), the Mitchell Car Museum in Owosso, Michigan, understandably included about a dozen station wagons among its 30 or so vehicles and uncompleted bodies. Yet when William Mitchell died in April at the age of 87, the rest of the Mitchell family decided that the costs of running the museum outweighed its benefits, prompting the auction this past Wednesday. Like all of the station wagons and station wagon bodies at the sale, the Oldsmobile Super 88 Fiesta four-door hardtop wagon might have been assembled by one of Detroit’s Big Three, but the body originated with Ionia Manufacturing, a company that Mitchell, a trained engineer, oversaw. Mitchell began offering station wagon bodies through Ionia and its related coachwork companies as early as 1938, starting with woodie station wagons before eventually offering all-steel wagons from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s. The description for the Fiesta, one of 5,175 such hardtop wagons that Oldsmobile built that year (8,498, including the Dynamic 88 line), didn’t contain any provenance for the wagon – William Mitchell obtained cars for the museum from around the country – but noted that a 305hp 371-cu.in. Rocket V-8 with 38,500 miles powered it, and that it came equipped with power steering, power brakes, tinted glass, and an AM pushbutton radio. The centerpiece of the auction, the 1954 Dodge Granada, typified Don Mitchell’s experiments with fiberglass as a body material. Sitting on a regular production Dodge chassis and powered by a 150-hp, 241-cu.in. Dodge Red Ram Hemi V-8, the concept car uses a one-piece body, an advancement over how other fiberglass production and concept cars of the day were assembled from multiple fiberglass pieces . The Granada topped the auction, selling for $228,800. Among the other cars from the museum’s location, a 1948 Pontiac Streamliner Wagon and a 1949 Buick Roadmaster Wagon sold for $165,000 each; a 1904 Mitchell B2 Runabout sold for $137,500; a 1911 Mitchell Model T Touring sold for $110,000; a 1949 Buick Super Estate Wagon sold for $93,500; a 1919 Mitchell C Cab Truck sold for $88,000; a 1908 Mitchell Model I 5 Passenger Touring sold for $78,100; a 1953 Packard Caribbean Convertible sold for $71,500; a 1954 Dodge Coronet Sierra sold for $66,000; a 1950 Buick Roadmaster four-door Woodie Wagon and a 1953 Buick Roadmaster four-door Woodie Wagon sold for $55,000 each; a 1957 Continental MK II sold for $53,900; a 1951 Buick Roadmaster four-door Woodie Wagon sold for $48,400; a 1908 Mitchell Model H Runabout sold for $46,200; a 1919 Mitchell 3 Passenger Coupe sold for $44,000; a 1956 Continental MK II sold for $40,700; a 1963 Buick Invicta Wagon sold for $36,300; a 1962 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 Fiesta four-door Wagon sold for $30,800; a 1955 Buick Special EST Wagon and a 1953 Kaiser Golden Dragon four-door sold for $28,600 each; a 1970 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow Saloon sold for $22,000; a 1917 Mitchell D 40 Jr five-Passenger Touring sold for $18,700; a 1961 MUTT M151 Truck sold for $14,300; a 1983 Cadillac Seville sold for $11,000; and a 1955 Willys Military Utility Vehicle sold for $6,325. For full results from the Mitchell Car Museum auction, visit SheridanAuctionService. - See more at: blog.hemmings/index.php/2014/08/25/oldsmobile-super-88-fiesta-sells-for-77000-at-station-wagon-centric-auction/?refer=news#sthash.YXOJRszc.dpuf
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 13:11:02 +0000
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