The Corvair could do it all.

Drive through the water. Drive-up rocky and rough mountain paths. Break on a dime. Plus it was really super cool looking! The Chevrolet Corvair would be around forever!

Except that it wasn't around forever. Unless you call the decade of the 1960s forever.

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The Corvair existed from 1960-1969 and was a competitor in the car market with vehicles like the Ford Falcon, Plymouth Valiant, and Studebaker Lark (now there's a name to remember!).

While over 200,000 Corvair's were sold in its first six model years, I think a lot of the 'older generation' had some second thoughts about the engine being in the rear. But that was OK, the Corvair was built for younger folks, and for the economy. Back in the old days of huge doggone near boat size family sedans, the Corvair was compact.

So what happened to the Corvair?

There were some, uh...well, safety concerns with the car, and Ralph Nader's 1965 best-selling book Unsafe At Any Speed proved to be something of a death knell for the Corvair.

But as you can see in this 1960 Corvair commercial, it could do anything!

By 1970 the Corvair was...no more. Done. Over. The end.

So the question becomes, who had one? Or better yet, who has one? I would think a well-maintained and shined-up Corvair would be worth a few bucks these days, certainly more than they did in 1960 off the showroom floor. A regular Corvair Monza coup would run you about $2,273. Now of course if you opted for a hot convertible, well that would cost you around $2,483!

CLASSIC CHEYENNE: The Cole Shopping Center

In December of 2020, Blue Federal Credit Union completed its new headquarters at the corner of Converse and Pershing in Cheyenne. Well, it’s not so much a ‘corner’ as it is the smooth edge of a roundabout, but anyway. Before Blue FCU built its new campus, the site was at one time a premier shopping destination for Cheyenne. From the 1950s through 2016 it was Cheyenne's Cole Shopping Center.

Local businessman Frank Cole bought the land that would become a Cheyenne gathering place in the 1950s when the corner of Converse and Pershing was the edge of town. Starting in 1952, three different Safeway grocery stores called the Cole home over its half-century of existence.  A plethora of other stores served the neighborhood too. From the movie theater to Blockbuster; there was the Cole Department Store, the fabric store, the East Branch of the Carnegie Library, and so much more.

As Cheyenne grew and changed, the Shopping Center fell into decline. Stores closed and new ones didn't take their places. The anchor of the area, Safeway, closed for good in 2016 with much of the rest following. In 2018 the buildings were demolished and the new construction began. 

The Cole was so integral to the neighborhood that when we asked on social media for folks’ memories we were flooded with hundreds of responses. 

Check out many of those memories below, along with several pictures of the Cole Shopping Center, mostly from near the end in the twenty-teens.


Cheapest Places to Live in Wyoming

Do you like money? Do you like not like spending it? Well then my friend, I have an internet list for you. Or friends at Homesnacks crunched a bunch of numbers to find the cheapest places in Wyoming to live.

The Homesnacks folks looked at US Census data and the cost of living for the area. "We were especially interested in home and rental prices in places with more than 1,000 residents," they say.

If you like small town living in the natural beauty of the wilds of Wyoming, you'll find plenty of ideas on this list.

 

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