54 seems like a good year to me, the 53 is the odd one, that was the last year for that body style, and the 216, which is why I have gone to incredible trouble to build a 216. You will be alright. I got some nice original style tires, but they were more like $800 the guy said they were radials, he either lied or was mistaken, either is likely. Either way you will be spending a whole lot of time and money, these aren't cheap to restore/refurbish, and you will have a hard time finding a machine shop that knows anything about them.
if you are starting a family, you will probably want something a little newer. Probably about 50 years newer. A lot of people use them as daily drivers, but I wouldn't. For one thing they get horrible gas mileage, and there really insn't much room in them. You can do as you please, of course. That is just my opinion. They make great toys, and I actually use mine as a truck to haul stuff in, this weekend I got flooring for the house, I didn't pay much attention to the loading until we took off and my wife was looking at the receipt and says "WOW this weighs 2200 pounds" I was kind of nervous, but I only had about 5 miles to go. The old truck performed admirably.
