Family-Owned 1-of-1 1953 Olds Super 88 Stored 50 Years Emerges With Neat, Custom Surprises

For a couple of piston addicts from North Bend, Washington, imagination alone didn’t do it, and they went the easy way and had their convertible Oldsmobile Super 88 custom built to meet their dreams. Brothers Bill and Bob Glazier bought a new Olds in 1953 and enjoyed it for five years as it was from the factory. In 1958, they took their toy down to Lynwood, to a body shop called Barris Kustom.

George Barris owned a cosmetic clinic for automobiles. He transformed the regular Olds into a superstar, from the front bumper to beyond the rear one (it will become clear in a moment), from side to side, and top to bottom. Originally, the Oldsmobile Super 88 was yellow—pretty much like the sales brochure depicted it (check the gallery for a sample)—but it came out in a Candy Apple Red hue with scallops and pinstriping.

Barris, the customs builder, started from the front by extending the front fenders and installing stacked quad headlights. A ’58 Ford truck quad-headlight assembly was flipped 90 degrees to have the lamps one on top of the other, and the front fenders were sheared, split, and stretched to accommodate the Ford ‘lift cab’ parts. Barris welded a sheet metal backing plate on the fender to support the headlight buckets.

Over at the opposite end, the Oldsmobile received a continental kit with a molded gravel shield, and the fenders were extended some 20 inches to accept a set of four 1956 Packard lights. That’s right, four of them, two on each side, joined together into a bespoke unit surrounded by a frame fabricated from a steel rod. The taillights were fitted into the fender (from the inside rather than in the usual manner of bolting them to the outer part of the rear fender).

The livery change job didn’t go exactly according to plan, as the factory-sprayed enamel reacted badly to the Candy Apple red paint and wrinkled all over the deck lid. Enter Dean Jeffries and his artwork skills. The graphics aren’t just aesthetically pleasing; they also camouflage the imperfections in the custom paint scheme.

The Olds doesn’t really look like an Olds from the front – you can blame the ’54 Chevrolet grille bar (narrowed down to size), the ’57 Ford side trim pieces, and the 1957 Mercury skirts over the rear wheels. George Barris shaved the hood and punched four sets of louvers in the engine bay lid (96 of them in total). The front coils were shortened to get the car's front end lower to the ground, while the back was fitted with lowering blocks to bring it to the same level.

A read-and-white Naugahyde interior was put in to keep the color theme flowing in the passenger space, and the Glaziers liked it and took it to the street. The car served them for the following decade and a half, after which it was pushed into a garage and left there. That was in the early seventies, and now the time has come for the Barris-built Olds to get a new shot at life.

The sons of one of the brothers inherited the stunning automobile and put it up for sale, and that’s how Chip Foose came across it. Without further ado, he contacted the owners and paid them a visit to have the car rescued and ready for its next adventure. The Rocket V8 engine ran when the car was retired off the road, and ten years ago, the motor was still turning by hand, but that’s about all the info on it—it has not been touched since.

Oldsmobile assembled a little over 8,300 Super 88 convertibles in 1953, out of a total production of almost 335,000 automobiles. All had the 303-cubic-inch powerplant. The five-liter V8 was factory rated at 165 hp (168 PS) at 3,600 RPM and 284 lb-ft (385 Nm) at 1,800 RPM. We don’t know its mileage, and the factory rating is irrelevant, as the McCulloch VS-57 Supercharger will have had those numbers blown out from under the hood (pun intended).

In addition to the aforementioned modifications, this one-family-owned 1953 Oldsmobile Super 88 drop-top sports 1952 Lincoln bumper bullets (the famous ‘Dagmars,’ as they were known back then) and electric doors (look closely, and you’ll not see the door handles—Barris shaved them off).

This amazingly good-looking, one-of-one survivor classic is for sale, but the price is private, so you'll have to contact the owners/seller for more information about any particularities of it.