Music and cars at the Smithville Hot Summer Nights Cruise

Smithville, Mo., is a pretty small community, but they have some big events in their historic downtown.  Late in the summer, they host “Hot Summer Nights,” and last Friday night they featured their popular classic car cruise.

I’ve never been to this before, but I’ve been told that they can get as many as 300 cars here.  The threat of rain was in the air this night, but they still probably had around 200 cars and trucks around the square.

This ’57 Mercury Monterey four-door was something worth looking at.  Now these wouldn’t be on my personal list of dream cars or anything like that, but this particular one was pretty nice and mostly original looking.  With all the scooped-in panels, fins, grilles, bumpers, and two-tone paint, a car like this certainly has its own personality.  You aren’t going to mistake it for someone else’s car in the mall parking lot.

Still, as nice as that old Merc is, if I were going to choose a late-‘50s car for myself, I might have to go for this ’58 Impala coupe instead.  This one had a factory clock, hubcap spinners, and other desirable options and accessories.  Oh, and did I mention that it had a 348 under the hood?    Yeah, this was a pretty cool car.

I used to have a Monte Carlo SS, so this ’87 Aerocoupe caught my eye.  Now, I can tell you that mine wasn’t particularly speedy with that stock 305, but I always thought it looked great and drove pretty well.  At the time, I was always jealous of these limited-production Aerocoupes.  I’ve always been a big NASCAR fan, Dale Earnhardt was my driver, and he stomped the competition in ’86 and ’87 driving these babies.

And check out this ’67 Camaro SS.  The blue and white; the redlines; the little hubcaps—everything was just perfect.  This is one of the best looking first-generation Camaros I’ve seen in a long time.  I even like that 350 small-block in there.  Rally wheels and 396s are great, but a neat little car like this is pretty refreshing to look at once in a while.

Aside from the cars, this was a busy place.  It was actually kind of hard to get pictures because of all the foot traffic.  And this was not a car crowd.  I think most of them were there to see the Jeremy Nichols Band, and the cars were just a bonus.  From what I heard, they weren’t a bad band, but you know, I was still focused more on the cars.

And here’s the proof.  There are about 271 pictures from the Smithville Hot Summer Nights Cruise in the slideshow below. 
Or click this link for a nicer version of the pictures.