Pardon my fuzzy pixels, but color postcards from the mid 1950s are not easy to reproduce. My knowledge of driving big American cars ended in the late 1960s when I ran my parents Ford Galaxie 500 into a telephone pole on a slippery winter’s night. But I still recall the feel of sliding around on a front seat the size of a living room couch, sans seatbelt, sans airbag. I was happier in a Volkswagen beetle.
But enough about my checkered history with cars. This week’s photograph shows a dealer promotion postcard for the Super “88” 4-door sedan. This unused card has no date or brand, but my online sleuthing suggests we’re looking at the second generation model from 1954-56, one of the first four-door hardtops. The “88” was manufactured for half a century, through 10 style generations from 1949-1999.
This model “88,” according to the promotional postcard, featured the 185-horsepower “Rocket” engine. The Oldsmobile company was founded by Ransom E. Olds in 1897. Olds reportedly produced 35.2 million cars before being phased out in 2004. The company’s logo looked much more like a rocket in its early form.
This postcard was distributed by Zoffoli Motors formerly located on Interstate Highway and advertised as “across from the NH State Liquor Store” in Portsmouth. The company was founded in 1953 by D. Richard Zoffoli (1920-2018) whose family lived on Russell Street in the North End, an ethnic neighborhood often known as “Little Italy.” Richard’s parents Tito and Pia were immigrants from Santarcangelo di Romagna. The Zoffoli family ran a corner store at 45 Russell St. Long after the neighborhood was bulldozed by urban renewal, the site became the Sheraton Harborside parking lot in the 1980s.
A Portsmouth High School football player, Richard Zoffoli served in World War II and as a representative in the N.H. House. He was the last to survive of seven children – Lydia, Josephine, Olga, Lena, Edward and Rudolph. While producing a low-budget video in the 1980s, I briefly interviewed Richard’s brother Edward “Mundo” Zoffoli who had been a welder at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
“We were all happy people,” Mundo told me during a reunion of former Russell Street residents. “When urban renewal came through and took our houses, they put us all in debt, because they didn’t pay us enough.”
A quick scan of this newspaper turns up over 1,400 references to Zoffoli Motors. The company added a Fiat dealership in 1957. A typical Portsmouth Herald from that year shows a huge Washington’s Birthday Sale ad, plus smaller ads for the Fiat and Used Car branch.
“Be our guest for an Osmobility Test” the ad reads. A new Fiat 600 sold that year for $1,398. Customers could pick up a year-old Olds “88” Sedan, like the one in the photograph, for a little over $2,000 or drive a 4-year-old, used Cadillac off the lot for $1,000. According to an online calculator, that is equivalent to paying $9,269.54 for a used Caddy today.
Copyright by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved
Are We Still “The City of the Open Door”?