1959 Plymouth Sport Fury
VIN: M294100967
Engine: 318 V-8
Exterior Color: Iceberg White
Interior Color: Blue
Assembly Plant: Los Angeles (Commerce, California)
Ship Date: February 26, 1959
Dealership: Greer-Robbins. Co., Beverly Hills, California
Original Purchase Date: March 4, 1959
Backstory
Shortly after her 60th birthday, Helen Brinn Marshall of Beverly Hills, California purchased a new car. This 1959 Plymouth Sport Fury, an example of designer Virgil Exner’s “Forward Look,” emerged from the Chrysler Los Angeles assembly plant on February 26, and was delivered to Ms. Marshall at the Greer-Robinson Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in Beverly Hills on March 9. Mrs. Marshall’s husband, a descendant of a founder of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, owned Laguna Ranch in Marin County, now the site of the Youth Hostel at the Point Reyes National Seashore. The Marshalls, who had relocated from Rock Island, Illinois in the early 1940s, split their time between Northern and Southern California until Mr. Marshall died in 1962.
Mrs. Marshall’s son was a Marin County, California, lawyer and real estate developer who created, among other properties, Sonoma Raceway (formerly Sears Point Raceway and Infineon Raceway) in—not surprisingly—Sonoma, California. After Mrs. Marshall’s death in 1975, he offered the car to a business associate he knew to be a car collector. That individual collected the Fury from Beverly Hills, and with his son drove it back to Marin County. Ownership later passed to his son, who in 2009 sold the Fury to Martin Swig, an owner of several Bay Area auto dealerships and a vintage racer, car collector, and founder of the California Mille vintage car rally. After a brief period of ownership, Mr. Swig asked Jack L. Hunt Auto in San Rafael, California to find the Plymouth a new home.
My acquisition resulted from divine intervention. In the Fall of 2009, I had returned to the California Bay Area, living in the East Bay just North of Oakland. A few months later, my sister visited from back East. Being my sister, on the Sunday after she arrived, she wanted to attend Catholic Mass. Being me, I had no idea where the nearest church might be. At the time, the closest House of the Lord I could recall was approximately 20 miles away, near my previous Bay Area residence in Marin County. And so it came to pass that on a late Winter Sunday morning my sister and I were driving along Fourth Street in San Rafael, past the Jack L. Hunt auto dealership, where we spotted the Sport Fury on display. At that time, I did not have a 1950’s entry in my collection. Fury—the model my Dad had favored—was my preferred type of Plymouth. And 1959 is my birth year. This harmonic convergence of factors could mean only one thing: God wanted me to have this car. I overpaid for it a few weeks later.
The Sport Fury has enjoyed a complete frame-off restoration, but retains its original black-and-yellow California license plates.
Greer-Robbins was the first Chrysler-Plymouth agency in Southern California, with showrooms in downtown Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. The dealership also sold Maxwells and Hupmobiles during its almost 60 years of operation. In the late 1930s, Perry Greer and Albert C. Robbins consolidated their Chrysler and Plymouth business at their Beverly Hills location, which remained in business until 1961. Mr. Greer died in 1967; Mr. Robbins in 1985. Among those whose resume includes early employment at this dealership are Emerson Foote, later a founder of the advertising firm Foote Cone and Belding and then President and Chairman of McCann Erickson (coincidentally, Mr. Foote also created advertising for the H.O. Harrison/James W. McAlister Company in San Francisco at the time my 1932 Plymouth was delivered there); and Mr. Robbins’s grandson, Harry Robbins (“H.R.” or “Bob”) Haldeman, later President Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff and a key character in a national soap opera known as “Watergate.”
