1948 Pontiac Silver Streak
Fleetleader Special Two-Door Sedan

The 1948 Pontiac is a special car for me.  It was my first car that I owned - albeit for only 48 hours.  There's a long story about that, which is best left alone.

For what now seems time immemorial, I had always wanted a 1963 Pontiac 2-door sedan, and in 2004 I started to earnestly search for one.  Days and days of searching revealed that there might be two or three that I might be able to purchase: one in Oklahoma City, one in Pennsylvania, and one in Alberta (Canada).  The latter one was a Canadian-built model, which meant that it had a Chevrolet frame and mechanicals.

Unfortunately, the Canadian-built Pontiacs never quite had the same "look" as their USA-built counterparts, so it was dismissed.  The car in Pennsylvania had been fixed up very nicely, and was beyond my price range.  It also meant that there was no "hobby time" there for me, either.

That left the car in Oklahoma City.  All intact, it required a significant amount of taking apart (that qualified it as a hobby car) but unfortunately the asking price was beyond my budget allocation.

I continued with the search, to find in a car sales magazine a lonely little text ad that indicated that there was a two-door 1947 Pontiac in Saskatchewan.  I contacted the person selling it, and he immediately apologized, saying that the car was really a 1948 model.  Nonplussed, I asked to have some photos sent by e-mail and after some questions by e-mail and by 'phone, I bought the car.   No haggling, no negotiating.  Then the trick was to get the car back to Winnipeg. Only some 200 miles away, the car was located in a small town .... Moosomin, Saskatchewan.  I attempted using a U-Haul trailer behind my wife's Chevrolet Blazer, but the rental people indicated that their trailer and the Pontiac would far outweigh the towing ability of the Blazer.

So I searched for several weeks until, at a car show
in early September of 2004, I met a chap who hauled vehicles for a living.  We spoke on Sunday morning, concluded the final price for hauling that evening by telephone, and less than 24 hours later the Pontiac was in my driveway!  The photos on the next pages will convey better than any words what I'll be looking forward to.

A couple of interesting notes.  If you would like to see what this car possibly looked like in 1948, albeit in a maroon color, click HERE.   The car shown in the photos in that web site has different tail light lenses than on my car, but otherwise what you will see is unbelievable!  That burgundy wine color is what I envision for my finished RestoRod, by the way!  And if you look v-e-r-y carefully, you will see that the car in the photos has Saskatchewan license plates ... the same Province in Canada as my car came from!

With information documented by GM Canada's Vintage Vehicles Services it is now known that this car was the 8th produced out of 515 in that model year.  A Canadian-built Pontiac, assembled at the Oshawa (Ontario) plant, it was ostensibly a 1948 Chevrolet except for the engine, which would have been imported from the USA.  Click on the icon at left for more details.

If you are still intrigued by my car, you might also wish to CLICK ON this page and view the pages from a 1948 Pontiac (Canadian) dealer sales brochure.  (That image with the lady in the wide brimmed hat at the top left of this page is from the USA sales brochure).

And I'm also a proud Member of the Manitoba Pontiac Association (incorporating Buick and Oldsmobile).