1951 Mercury Economy Four Door
edited by David Barth, 10 January 2009.
Courtesy The Forney Museum of Transportation at 4303 Brighton Blvd., Denver,
Colorado. Photos were taken in January 2009.
The 1951 Mercury was a big car designed to be economical. It took Edsel Ford a long time to convince his father to
build it.
Prior to the 1951 model, the Mercury was priced in the thousand-dollar range, several hundred dollars below the cost
of the Lincoln Zephyr and several hundred above the Ford V8. The problem was that people viewed it as a fancy Ford
instead of a junior Lincoln.
In October 1945 the Lincoln-Mercury Division was formed to give Mercury more of an upmarket image and an independent
dealership network. The slogan for the Mercury was "Squeezes the last mile out of a gallon, more car per dollar and
fewer dollars than you think."
The 1951 Mercury gained a long-lasting image as a Fifties icon due to the death of James Dean. He would never have
driven a Mercury except in a movie. In the film, Rebel Without a Cause, he was a teenager fighting the establishment
and driving a mildly customized Mercury. The association with James Dean fixed the "Bathtub" Mercury as a car with
attitude whose driver was cool. Shortly after making that movie, James Dean died in an automobile accident, but in a
Porsche 356 Speedster not in a Mercury.
He was the first actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and remains the only person to
have two posthumous Academy Award acting nominations.
