[north]

Just passed 500 69 Judge PHS's

Nothing new interesting about Judges but just did a bit of study on seat belt options and discovered something interesting (to me anyhow ;-)…

27% of all these PHS's had deluxe belts. What is interesting is only 9% of convertibles had deluxe belts but 30% of hardtops did. this is corrupted by the pattern judges that all had deluxe belts. But even if I remove all the pattern Judges you still have 20% of hardtops (regular GTO's and non pattern judges) versus only 9% of convertibles. This is quite surprising since convertibles typically had more options than hardtops. These numbers are the total of a few options. There are three possible deluxe belt choices... Deluxe belts with no shoulder belts (cvt only), deluxe belts with front shoulder belt or deluxe belts with both frt & rr shoulder (both offered on both hardtops and convertibles).

Another tidbit is of the 400 or so convertibles in the listing a total 27 had some form of shoulder belts. 3 had non deluxe shoulder belts (front only), 22 had deluxe front shoulder belts and 2 had front and rear deluxe shoulder belts. (you couldn't order non-deluxe front and rear shoulder belts on ragtops or hardtops).

[John V.]

First time I've seen this thread, always interested in obscure data like this one on Dealer Order Nos.

I will go back through the thread to see what conclusions you've drawn but I have long thought that the Dealer Order Nos. were taken from pads of PMD Order blanks that were distributed to each dealer. My '64 records show 5 digit DONs.

From what I can tell, each dealer got order pads numbered in the range from 70000 to 99999.

I actually have one '64 record that shows DON 70000.

All '64 records show the 1st digit as 7, 8 or 9.

On some of the '64 records (the 4 A body Plants have 3 different PHS record formats so the records from each Plant differs from one another), the box containing the DON is identified as CUSTOMER REFERENCE, the Dealer No. and the DON are listed. Meaning, the DON is useful to the Dealer to identify his orders, not something that PMD made use of by my interpretation.

I do have one '64 GTO record that shows a 5 digit DON but it is actually 3 digit preceded on the form by two zeroes. It was one of the "Zone Announcement " GTO convertibles that were among, or were, the earliest '64 GTOs built in Sept. soon after '64 production commenced and sent to each Zone and lent out to people like newspaper auto writers for promotional/publicity purposes.

There is no Dealer No. identified for this particular build so obviously an "in-house" order generated by PMD and likely explains the odd DON.

Realizing that no dealer would be selling 30,000 cars in a year, perhaps the pads were distributed in pads of say 1000 to the Dealers and it was just luck of the draw as to the range of nos. (still within the 70000 to 99999 overall range) that a particular Dealer received. Optimistically, perhaps each Dealer received 2000 Order blanks, numbered sequentially. There were dozens or more dealers in each Zone so the sequence of DONs given to any particular dealer would likely be duplicated to multiple dealers even within the same Zone.

Obviously if you could find every order submitted by a single dealer, you should likely find DONs starting somewhere within the 70000 to 99999 range and incrementing relatively chronologically to whatever DON represented the final order submitted for '64 by that dealer. Surely some DONs would be missing as Order blanks may have been spoiled or written up but never submitted for whatever reason.

At the end of the year, I assume the remaining pads were tossed, not usable for the next Model Year.

No idea if the '69 DONs follow the same pattern as what I've seen for '64 but figured I'd share it in case it helps.

I know a few posters here have had direct or family experience as PMD dealers. IIRC, it was one such poster that posted something that helped me understand the DONs, connecting them to the Order pad blanks though I can't recall the context, too long ago.