Miss Belvedere
On Friday the 1957 Plymouth Belvedere which has been buried underground on the southeast corner lawn of the Tulsa County courthouse was removed and trucked to the convention center.
On Friday night Tulsa’s ‘underground treasure’ was revealed to the world and honestly, to say it has a bit of rust on it might qualify as the understatement of the century.
The Belvedere was gold and white when it went into the underground concrete vault.
When it came out on Friday, fifty years later, it was more of a rusty brown and tan with a touch of green here and there.
Many years of sitting in ground water will do that to anything made of metal and ‘Miss Belvedere’ is no exception.
No one knows how long ‘Miss Belvedere’ actually sat in water but there is no doubt that the concrete vault ‘built to withstand a nuclear bomb’ which never fell was not near as good at withstanding seepage of ground water as it might have been at surviving a nuclear attack.
In spite of the sad condition in which ‘Miss Belvedere’ came out of the hole in the ground, the party in Tulsa continues this weekend with classic car shows, a sock hop and lots of food and entertainment for the thousands that have flocked to Tulsa for the unveiling of a ‘57 Plymouth put in the ground fifty years ago by a bunch of folks convinced that they needed to leave something behind, just in case…
While the ‘time capsule frenzy’ of the 1950’s and 1960’s has passed there is still the ingrained human compulsion to ‘leave something behind’. That’s why in 1998 Tulsans following in the footpath of their ancestors buried in Central Park on East 6th Street one of these:
It was buried to celebrate Tulsa’s 100th birthday and is to be dug up in 2048.
Hopefully the Plymouth Prowler will hold up better than did ‘Miss Belvedere’.
And odds are it will, as rather than being buried in a concrete vault it was buried in an aluminum container.
Over the course of fifty years, hopefully we have learned something.
If nothing else, how best to bury a car…
