With few if any details, this 1955 Pontiac ambulance, once in service to the fire department in Palm Springs, California, will be auctioned off at McCormick’s 78th Classic Car Auction in the same city over the weekend of February 21, 2025. It looks to be in great excellent or restored condition and there is no mention of a starting bid price or reserve here on craigslist. So, if you’re in the area and are looking for an interesting vehicle to add to your flock, maybe this rescue wagon is it!
We assume this people saver is a Chieftain because there was no 4-door Star Chief wagon in ’55 and logic would have it that the coachbuilder (which company?) would have started with one. Nor do we know what powerplant lies under the hood, but a 287 cubic inch Pontiac V8 would be logical. Since the seller does say it has a manual transmission, a “3-on-the-tree” shifter would be it. An odometer reading of 63,700 miles seems plausible since these vehicles usually made short hops.
The auction house’s web page offers no additional help. All categories rated, such as the engine, body, coachwork, interior, paint, transmission, etc. are all checked off as “good.” There would have been no mistaking this vehicle when it was on an emergency run, especially with the gigantic siren on the driver’s side front fender blaring away. We have no idea if it still works, but if you’ll pardon the pun, it could probably “wake the dead.”
To check out the auction for this oddity and perhaps some others, please visit these links that we found (not included in the anemic craigslist ad). McCormick Page, Ambulance Page. BTW, kudos again to Tony Primo for the tip!
The chrome object mounted on the front fender is a Federal Signal Q2B electromechanical siren. It will severely damage your hearing if exposed to it at close range- 123dB @ 10 feet (ask me how I know…). As it has a start up current draw of 100 amps, you better have sufficient cabling, fusing (fuses are typically about the size of a Red Bull can) and likely a multi- battery system to support it. It does tend to get people out of your way when you are in a hurry.
Fortunately, this professional car will be expensive enough to avoid being bastardized into a Ghost Busters “tribute”, or some other abomination.
Many of these sirens came with a warning, not to activate inside of a building. There were many cases of the windows being shattered on the bay doors!
Hard to believe that, back in the day, when you needed medical aid, here came one of these to your rescue! And usually that was all that was sent. A couple of aides who were trained in EMT strapped you to a gurney and away you went. Now when you dial 911, you get a pilot vehicle, the meat wagon and a couple of fire engines (probably to hose you off first). Not to mention half the staff of the fire station are there too. This ambulance is a reminder of how simple (and primitive) emergency services were. The local ambulances, when I was a kid, were Packards as I recall, even into the 60s.
That siren is big enough to announce an air raid! What a great find!
There are people who actually collect 50s and 60s vintage air raid sirens and meet to fire them up. I always wanted one, but I didn’t know anyone with enough property to use it without getting arrested.
In the small town where I grew up, for many years the ambulance was operated by a local funeral home. When I needed their service after a motorcycle accident in 1979, they had a fairly new Cadillac. I was driven to a larger hospital in Tulsa, about 40 miles away, for surgery. The driver asked if I wanted the siren. My head was really hurting so I declined.
Yeah, you get picked up in an ambulance today and they charge you 600 dollars…
Michael, I was an EMT. It’s a tad more than that for an ambulance service transport. Case in point, in Boston, MA the ambulance bill was approximately $2900.00 to go from a Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) to a local Emergency Room a quarter of a mile away. Times have changed.
Gonna say that the coach work on this one was done by National
Coach. Can’t recall what town they worked out of but they did make ambulances based on a Chevrolet chassis. A lot of them
were not much more than a stretched out sedan delivery. A few years later, my friend’s father used a ’56 model much like this one when he founded AAA ambulance service in our hometown
back in the late ’60s. Many’s the time I’d ride my bike down there to make some extra spending cash by helping clean out the inside of an ambulance or a hearse. They also had a ’58 Cadillac 3-way they used until they sold it in the mid ’70s. I also recall painting a portrait of a ’55 model just like this one that I found in the National Auto Trader they used to sell at your favorite drug or grocery store. Found
many great subjects in those old books. Some of them I sold for $25 back in 2004. What great memories and a great find too.
“And here comes the ambulance”. If you watch vintage auto racing, one of these is always in the background. Think of the horror stories this car could tell. It seems there was no rhyme or reason as to the particular make of ambulances then. Many makes were used, but seems GM most often. Back then, ambulances were privately owned, with the attendants not very savvy in healthcare. Usually a paramedic was sent separately, like the TV series “Emergency”. I believe this is a restored unit and the Palm Springs Fire Dept. never had an ambulance like this in the 50s. Siren added later for schmaltz.
So, why does the fire engine show up at ambulance calls? Good question, and it seems, while the extra personnel may be needed on the call, if a fire call came in, it saves time going back to the firehouse. I never knew that.
Terry and Howard, the rationale for all the equipment is as follows; First, Law Enforcement, (LE), arrives on scene to provide scene safety. No Emergency Medical Services (EMS) provider will be dispatched into a “Hot Zone”. Secondarily, Fire Services arrives with basic medical care, extrication, and basic life saving. Tertiary, EMS is on scene to provide extended medical service and transport to a secondary provider. It may sound like a complicated scenario, but usually everyone arrives at the same time. Well coordinated teams of all the aforementioned services, take very little time in providing comprehensive and seamless services.
Howard A. In my community and most others up here in Canada, an ambulance attendant cannot leave their patient at the hospital until that patient has been triaged by the hospital staff.
Our much vaunted universal health care system is crumbling.
Well trained and well equipped firefighters will typically show up first to your home and tend to you and then pass you on to the ambulance personnel. They don’t have to hang around and burn up time and resources waiting for the hospital ER to get caught up.
That siren would break one’s eardrums!
In the 60’s in my town, ambulance service was indeed private and a local funeral director owned a Ford Econoline ambulance that he would send out for emergency service. If it was too late, they were brought to his funeral home.
Now there’s a sharp business person, get them coming or going. Years ago, if vintage advertising rings true, funeral service was done by a host of different businesses. Sometimes the most unlikely combinations, like Joes Hardware and funeral services.
In my home town it was Fisher Bro’s furniture and funeral home.😊
The funeral industry became even better business people when they began making the collective decision to largely exit the “load and go” ambulance services portion of their firms starting in the 1960s, and pretty much ending in the mid to late 1970s.
Most funeral businesses, widely known as “Undertakers” were often furniture stores, who would build coffins for their recently deceased customers’ family member(s), sometimes several at a time since pandemics and disease were more common back in the 1800s/early 1900s until the advancement of hygiene, vaccines, antibiotics became more prevalent with the advancement of modern medical breakthroughs. These “Undertaking” businesses began to slowly exit the furniture business, and begin concentrating on the funeral aspect of their business, until they became full-time funeral homes and mortuaries.
Because they already owned a vehicle that was long enough to comfortably transport their passengers (cargo) in a supine position, ambulance service became a natural progression as well. In most cases, the ambulance services being provided consisted of not much more than a fast ride to the hospital upon injury or medical emergencies, providing little to no first aid on the way to the hospital. They slowly began to introduce basic first aid supplies and training for their drivers (often-times regular funeral home employees), and things like “Oxygen equipped”, air-conditioned cars began being heralded in their advertising of the day, in things like the yellow pages of the phone book, stickers with their phone number affixed to telephones, little hand fans that were distributed at events and funerals, etc.
But these ambulance services included lots of overhead, since they always had to maintain a constant state of readiness 24/7 for ambulance calls that could come in at any time, sometimes in the middle of the night in sub zero temperatures, not to mention having to use their front line hearse serving double duty as an ambulance when not already being used for funerals or removals. Many of these funeral homes were providing ambulance services as a form of “good will” towards the community, since the goal was to also provide funeral services upon the death of their local community members. But from a business perspective, the ambulance service was a huge drain on resources, and thus overhead/expenses. True they would bill the customer (patient) after providing emergency transport to the hospital, but the amount they could bill them was usually pretty paltry in comparison to the expenses they had to incur to provide such services, and the general public was notorious for never paying the bill, since it wasn’t ever covered by health insurance/medicare, etc.
Come the advancements in prehospital care and emergency medical services, along with nationwide EMT/Paramedic training programs, and later federal bans on passenger car based ambulances in favor of much larger truck and van bodied ambulances which could carry a lot more equipment and supplies, the funeral industry essentially abandoned the ambulance services they provided in decades past.
EMS was basically taken over by the local fire departments, hospitals, municipalities, and private ambulance services whose only business was providing Emergency Medical Services and transportation of the sick and injured. In most cases of non-privatized ambulance services, the costs were subsidized by tax dollars, and even many of the privatized services were awarded contracts by the city/county and taxpayer funded.
The funeral industry was then able to concentrate on their core business, death care professional services such as embalming, cremating, cosmetizing, selling the caskets and vaults, and providing funeral services all for a (highly marked up) cost to the consumer.
This car could be a National (as mentioned previously), but it could also be a Superior Coach Pontiac Ambulance. I’m not too well versed on National’s products, but Superior Coach built on both the Cadillac Commercial Chassis, and the Pontiac sedan chassis. For the Pontiacs, they would take a brand new Pontiac sedan, cut it in half, professionally stretch the chassis, then drop a purpose-built ambulance (or hearse) body onto the stretched frame. From the cowl on back was all designed, engineered, and built by Superior. They also used commercial glass for the taller windshield. All Superior Cadillacs used the purpose-built Cadillac commercial chassis, but their Pontiacs were offered on both the lengthened/stretched version and in (I believe) the mid-60s they also offered a standard length coach with the purpose-built NON-lengthened bodies dropped onto the chassis and frame. These Superior Pontiacs were offered as ambulances, hearses, combination cars (they could serve as both an ambulance or a hearse, with special flippable floors that had a casket rack on one side and a smooth floor on the other side to accomodate an ambulance stretcher). These Pontiacs were also marketed for use as funeral home service cars, but service cars largely stopped being used in the 1950s. Finally, Superior Coach also marketed and sold a few Pontiac limousines as well during these years, usually targeted for use as “family cars” by the purchasing funeral homes/livery services.
There were also a few companies out there who would build you a funeral coach or ambulance on any make and model that you wanted it on, and in some cases the customer could buy a car right off the dealership’s lot, bring it to the conversion company, and they would turn it into whatever you wanted. One such company was the Pinner Company, who was a busy home-grown little shop, but they turned out custom-built professional cars in droves in the 60s and 70s.
This car is a classic . Not even close to a Ghostbuster car . It should be restored & left to the beauty it is . Keep it original
This car is a classic . Not even close to a Ghostbuster car . It should be restored & left to the beauty it is . Keep it original
This vehicle was up for sale last year sometime but unknown if sold, or if ad was pulled. It is again for sale on C/L for $29,500.