That OL' Tin Woodie

Terry Henley’s Estate Wagon

- Eric Geisert

Though there might be hundreds of reasons why anyone would want to customize an old car, nearly everyone can agree the styling associated with those old cars is head and shoulders above anything being produced nowadays.

That’s the way Terry Henley feels, and the 67-year-old who lives outside of Birmingham, Alabama, was able to find what he was ultimately looking for—a ’51 Chevrolet wagon—in a Hemmings Motor News advertisement. The ad said it was a two-owner vehicle, and was listed as part of an estate sale in California. The eight-passenger wagon was in decent enough shape, and certainly better than what Terry was able to locate anywhere near where he lived.

The use of real wood in the construction of vehicles by the Big Three was diminishing by the late ’40s, with most of it being more decorative rather than structural like it was in the early days of auto manufacturing. In 1949 Chevrolet still offered two types of wagons— one with real wood on the outside while the other had raised body lines that looked like sections of wood were part of the exterior. By 1950 the real wood option had disappeared and the all-steel woodie (aka “tin woodie”) was the only type of wagon you could get, styling that would continue until 1953 when a whole new line of Chevy wagons (the 150) made its debut.