Dodge Ram Charger Royale With Cheese

For sale. 1993 Ram Charger with a 318 and 72,000 miles. Asking $2750. Ummmm, no.

  

As a wee little nipper growing up in the concrete wilderness of southwestern Nassau County, a scant 25 miles from Times Square, the only people who drove “trucks” where service people. If the dishwasher blew an “O” ring or the knob and tube wiring shorted out the person showing up at the door sometimes would be driving a station wagon but 9 times out of 10 they would show up in a “truck”. And by “truck” I’m referring to anything that wasn’t a car. That could be a pickup truck, van or in the case of today’s classic, an “SUV”. We didn’t call them SUVs back then. Not sure what we called them but we certainly didn’t call them “sport utility vehicles”. “Station wagon truck thing”? I don’t remember.

The Ram Charger was designed to take on the Chevrolet K5 Blazer, Suburban and Ford Bronco.

I had a friend in high school who drove a truck; his dad was an electrician. His dad gave it to him in an attempt to hopefully get him to follow in his footsteps. He became a lawyer instead. The truck was a dark green (bleccch) Ford F-100 with a green vinylish rubber interior, could only seat three across (cozy!), had a floor mounted three speed tranny, 302. 2 barrel. Slow as a rock and it guzzled gas.

Cool? Oh, yes. But, it's a "truck" 

I remember riding in it with three of us jammed in front plus a bunch of drunk yahoos in the bed giving the Confederate rebel yell as if were guest starring in an episode of the Dukes of Hazard. I may have ridden in the back several times. I tend to blot things like that out. Understand in New York State in the early 1980s the legal drinking age was 18. Well, acting like Bo Duke and his brother got old and he soon ditched the Ford F100 for a rusty Buick Skylark.

Brothers John and Horace Dodge were engineers who had worked for Henry Ford and were instrumental in the design and construction of the Model T. They left Ford and started building a Model T type car of their own in 1914. "Crazy Henry" was not happy. Unfortunately in 1920 they both died of pneumonia leaving "Dodge" to their wives. The wives sold it to a Wall Street investment firm in 1925. That company sold it to Walter Chrysler in 1928.

In the mid eighties a new program director from Reno, Nevada came to work with us at the small AM station I worked at on Long Island. He drove a Chevy S-10, Chevy’s first small SUV. We looked at him as though he was a Martian. “Dude, seriously, what is that”? Forget that when it snowed he was always the first at the station and didn’t want to hear from you if your Cutlass, Monte Carlo, Skylark or Thunderbird got stuck.

Vehicles like this Dodge Ramcharger help me to understand what people don't see in old cars that I do. I don't get it but a lot of people do.

When I got married and my wife and I searched for a new car looking at a truck or SUV was not even on the most remotest of radars for us. Oh sure, there were some SUVs around with their four wheel drive and what not but by and large trucks on Long Island, again, where not driven by the common folk. Anyone who did and was not in the service industry was chided as being some sort of “country bumpkin”. We ended up getting an Oldsmobile Achieva complete with the head gasket eating “Quad ” four cylinder engine. Outside of the occasional catastrophic engine failure it was not a bad car. Really.

If you look quickly at it you'd swear it was a Blazer or a Jimmy. That was kinda the idear. Didn't work.

When we lived in Dallas it seemed as though people thought there was something wrong with you if you didn't drive a truck or SUV. Same thing in Nashville. There is, or was, a latitudinal line in the country that seperated truck states from car states. Blue state, red state?

Reminds me of the time my father sat down in our '68 Ford Ranch Wagon (a country squire without the wood sides) with a screw driver in his back pocket. Whoops!

Then, something happened. I don’t know if the weather patterns changed or what not but long about the mid nineties we started getting pummeled by gigantic snow storms. I mean 18 to 24 inches at a time. And like two or three a year. Now, growing up there we may have gotten 20 inches once or twice but in the mid 90’s it was like every year we got pounded by a monumental mid western like snow storm. Altacockers (Long Island ese for old people) flew to Florida and stayed there but something else happened; people started buying SUVs for their 4X4 systems. They had improved greatly from the day when you had to lock the hubs by hand. Gee whiz, can you imagine doing that today? Don’t forget to hand crank the engine while you’re at it too!

 Transfer case shift lever. That finned thing is part of a hub cap. Rear view mirror glue available at Auto Barn.

In the early 90s Ford came out with the Explorer, Jeep came out with their nifty Grand Cherokee, Chevrolet renamed the K-5 Blazer “Tahoe” in 1996 and just like that trucks, or SUVs became acceptable in Metropolitan New York. These new "trucks" were much less "trucky" than they had been and it was all but official; Long Island, the last bastion in America of “no truckland” became inundated with these things. Just like the rest of the country we became enarmored with them due to their size, power, and utility. Eventually even Cadillac and Lincoln came out with them. What?? Yup. The recession and insane spike in gas prices have strangled SUV sales to a great degree pushing people into “cross-overs” (car based, ummmm, trucks??). Auto makers keep popping more and more different versions of SUVs to keep truck crazy America happy. “Trucks” are here to stay.

I'd buy this thing just for the hood ornament.

Really? Haha. I'll never own one although there is one in our garage. My name is on the title but I consider it my wife’s, errr, “car”. Sorry, I can’t call it a “truck” without breaking into a laugh remembering us crazy Long Island kids hoot 'n hollerin’ in that F-100 years ago.

Keep on truckin'. Y'all.    

Dodge Challenger RT - Merry Christmas

Since I’m a “car guy” I get asked a lot as to what my favorite car is. I hem and haw and come up with some nonsense that for me to have a favorite car is like me telling you which one of my son’s I love more or which of my fingers I like more than another.

However, we’re not talking about my children or my hands so if push was to come to shove and you were going to ask me to buy me whatever I wanted, and I could actually do that without risking divorce,  I would tell you that I would want the loverly hunk of machinery pictured here, a 2011 Dodge Challenger RT.  

The Dodge Challenger RT is the flat out, coolest car in the world. I love it.  

Please note, I specified the RT model. There’s a SE model that comes with a V-6 engine which is just fine but the RT is the big, bad boy with a honkin’ 372 horsepower HEMI V8. Just thing for making those getaways from Dead Man’s Curve even more exciting!

Life is short. Get a HEMI!

Dodge makes a model of the Challenger that’s even more powerful (the SRT-8) but  this one is just fine for me. This current Challenger has been around since 2008 and shares a lot with the Dodge Charger which is a four door sedan. The Challenger is  Chrysler’s entry into the retro style car universe along with the Ford Mustang and the Chevrolet Camaro. Ford’s had their retro Mustang out in one form or another since 1994 and Chevrolet came out with their “retro” Camaro back in 2010. The Camaro and the Mustang are cool but they are not a Challenger. This, THIS is love.

This Challenger harkens back to the 1970-74 Challenger which when you take a look at one of those you can see the familial resemblance. The Challenger is a modern day muscle car which means it does one thing better than perhaps anything else aside from just looking oh so cool. It’s fast. Very fast. Despite weighing more TWO TONS that HEMI makes the Challenger really move. The Challenger is a cool looking, big daddy pro smoothie and that would look so perfect parked in my drive way Christmas morning with a big bow on top of it. Is the wife reading this? 

Merry Christmas!

Nice Wheels, Zen Master

Have you seen that TV commercial for the new Audi A8 with Phil Jackson, the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers coaching great?

I love the car (c'mon, what's not to love about it?) although I question how any commercial can be effective selling a product that costs as much as a modest home in the midwest.

What I really love about the commercial is Mr. Jackson and his eloquent line to the chef of the restaurant,  "...anger is the enemy of instruction".

Anyone can be a parent and anyone can be "a boss". Few do it well. There are exceptions but where there are great children you will usually find great parents. Where there are great teams ususally you will find great coaches. Same for business. Sadly, the oppososite, with exceptions, is usually true as well.

Leadership is hard.Whether you're a sports coach, a CEO, a restaurant chef, cub scout pack leader, middle manager or parent, being "in charge" is hard work. To be effective at it requires a level of tact, skill and patience that few people realize they are going to need when they first venture into it.

Good leaders understand that being effective is not a popularity contest. They understand their job is to get results by leading.

You could argue that Jackson was as successful as he was because he coached two teams loaded with  talent. One could argue that only someone like Jackson could lead teams with talent like that.

I'll take the latter.

Nice wheels, Zen Master.

Lincoln Continental Town Car - Life is short. Get a Cadillac.

Growing up on Overlook Place in the wilderness of suburban Manhattan there were two families that mother referred to as "The Rich People". They didn't live in homes that were any better than our drafty colonial but those families did have one thing that was arguably better than what we had; they had nice cars.

One family had a Cadillac, the other a Lincoln. That's what rich people drove so therefore they were rich. Right, mom?

The father of the Cadillac family was a delivery truck driver for the Daily News.

The Lincoln family man worked at Kennedy Airport for the "Flying Tigers", a commercial freight company.

My father, who was some sort of an executive for a large textile company based in Raleigh, North Carolina, drove, oh dear...a Rambler. Acck!

Either father wasn't doing as well as a truck driver or a cargo handler or my parents were being modest seeing that they were children of the Great Depression. I think it the latter although I'll never know for sure. I did find out years later that the Cadillac and Lincoln families bought their iron used. And very used too lending further proof to that age old axiom that reality is perception. If you look and act rich, you are!

I loved our neighbor's Cadillac. It was a 1969 Coupe deVille. Black on black, sinister as all get out and cooler than the Batmobile.

 

The Lincoln not so much. Odd proportions, boxy but not good. Silly.

Quick, get Liberace on the  phone!

Ever find your brother George?

Now, there is something to be said for "acting as if", particularly if you choose to keep up with the Joneses, but in the end you gotta have the goods. And the Lincoln Continental Town Car just doesn't bring it.

That luke warm reception to Lincoln went for most of America too for with the exception of a time in the late nineties and into the early 00's, Cadillac has owned the lofty perch as "America's luxury leader" for over 80 years. That's based on raw, hard, dry sales figures. The only time that Cadillac did not drink from that sales trophy bowl was when Lincoln owned the absurd luxury SUV lane with their Navigator. Yuck.

Cadillac reacted with the debatably superior Escalade putting an end to the Ford threat. On the strictly car front, Lincoln has never been able to put a dent in Cadillac's door.

Even when they had the funky four door convertible Continental, most hipsters would opt for a Cadillac over the Link.

Back to Overlook Place, in the late seventies it was time to finally trade in the freakin' Rambler and mother insisted we get a Cadillac. I was delighted! Even though I knew that a much less expensive Chevrolet was very much the same car as a Caddy (see Caprice, Chevrolet). Mother would have none of that talk. She believed Cadillac to be special cars. Hoo-kay, mom. Let's just get one and enjoy it for what it is because we're buying it because we like the car, right, mom? No other agenda?

We found a used 1972 Sedan deVille, blue with black interior. Understated and cool. I loved it.

Driving home from the used car lot where we got it, mother, who up to that point had never been one to try to keep up the Joneses, insisted we tell everyone on the block that it was a 1975 and not a 1972. Whatever.

Life is short. We got a Cadillac.

The Car That Built Me - 1957 Chevrolet

Miranda Lambert sings about her childhood home in her Grammy winning single, “The House That Built Me.” The song has inspired many to knock on the front door of their childhood home in the hope of experiencing the kind of evangelical moment that Miranda hopes she’ll have if she can step inside that old house and “take nothing but a memory.” 

 

I did that years ago and found the experience to be less than divine. The House That Built Me, a drafty, musty Dutch Colonial built in 1922 on a postage stamp lot at the entrance to a public park in Baldwin, Long Island (New York) had been totally redone. So much so, that I didn't recognize much of the interior. You can't go home again, son. 

Find an old car, much like you remember, and it's a time machine taking you back in a way you would hope a traipse through your old home would.    

My mother didn't drive and hated taking the bus so she had my cousin, who owned a light blue, 1957 Chevrolet, would taxi her all over town. That meant I saw a lot of her and her Chevy. My brother and I would stumble into the back pushing the front seat forward and "complain" about how hard it was to get back there. Honestly, I loved it. I thought it added to the excitement and specialness of the car. Sure beat Dad's Rambler. Sometimes I'd get to ride in the front seat. The burbling V8 engine hummed through the car making the most wonderful sounds.

In Miranda Lambert's song she doesn't sing about loving The House so much as she loves the memories it holds for her. I don't want a 1957 Chevrolet. I can think of a dozen if not more cars I want instead. Although I wouldn't mind taking a ride in one and take nothing more than a memory. Tail fins and all.

1987 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS - Primordial Ooze

I've never been fans of General Motor's downsized intermediate "A-bodies" that debuted in 1978. That would be, in no particular order of contempt, the Oldsmobile Cutlass and Cutlass Salon, Buick Regal and Century, Pontiac Grand Prix, LeMans and later Bonneville and the Chevrolet Malibu and Monte Carlo. Cadillac, for reasons that escape me, didn't get one although you'd think, in retrospect, that an updated Seville would have looked better as one of those little "A-bodies" versus what they did with the nameplate starting in 1980. Too small, too weird, too awkward and just too much of generally too little, of all of the truncated "A-bodies", that that looked smaller than they actually were, the Monte Carlo was my least favorite.

Swoopy, silly and just as ridiculous if not more so than the hideous Cutlass and Century "slant roofs" or whatever they called them, it was amazing that nobody upstairs ordered development stopped on this bomb and demanded that they start over, but no one did.  The 1978 Monte Carlo had the interesting or dubious distinction of being an emulation of an emulation. For the record, the above Monte Carlo is a 1980.

  

Things got much better when GM cleaned up the design for 1981 but by then the market had already begun to shift away from personal luxury cars. Was it because GM, who did not invent the personal luxury car but is singularly responsible for propelling the segment to stratospheric heights that defied reason, sold a series of horrible looking cars? Well, if the brake shoe fits you gotta wear it. There was still a sizable body of fans for these "types" of cars but for forward-thinking fashion-conscious buyers, the personal luxury car's goose was cooked.

For 1983, in the midst of a semi "muscle car renaissance" at GM and Ford, Chevrolet "reintroduced" the Monte Carlo SS. Sharing nothing except the same name from the Monte Carlo SS of 1970 and 1971 fame, make that lore since it never sold that well, the 1983 Monte Carlo SS featured a high output version of the 305 cubic inch Chevrolet small block that was optional on Monte Carlo's. Using a Camaro-derived aluminum intake and the same cam as an L-81 Corvette, the "big" 305 made 25 more horsepower than the "regular" 305; pretty heady stuff back then.  Monte Carlo SS' also got an exclusive new nose and grille, sport suspension, 15x7 Rally wheels and white-letter Goodyear Eagle GT's. In my humble opinion, the performance bits and pieces made the car actually what it should have been as a base model. An "SS" model should have performed like our 1987 subject here powered by a, get this, carbureted LT-1 from a 1994 Buick Roadmaster. 

Remarkable what an appearance dress-up package and a fair to middling increase in performance can do for an automobile. All of a sudden, what was once a benign, dare we say inert little car like this plain-jane 1986 Monte Carlo was transformed into something that we'd portend to be...a legend. Amazing what horsepower and styling starved car wonks will gravitate towards when they'd been deprived of such as long as we'd been. The personal luxury car was dying and replaced by, a muscle car? Not really but the inversion was interesting - back to the primordial ooze we went. At least for a little while. 

1974 Mercury Comet - My First Car

The great life lesson I learned from the purchase of my first car was that you shouldn't settle for something you know deep down inside that you're not happy with. Lucky for me that lesson came from the purchase of a junky car rather than find myself in a junky marriage. That car was this 1974 Mercury Comet and the circumstances behind my purchasing it came down to compromises I made with my parents and most importantly, myself. I owned it for only about 16 months between February 1982 and June of 1983. 

Allegedly an upscale version of the Ford Maverick, the 1974 Mercury Comet I had was Mercury's compact sedan slotted below their "mid-size" Montego. I say "allegedly upscale" since aside from some very minor styling details the Comet I had and the Maverick of the same vintage were all but identical. The best that could be said of them was that their underpinnings were direct descendants of the 1960 Ford Falcon which shared it's very modest chassis with the 1964 1/2 Ford Mustang. Therefore, I actually had a Mustang in drag, right? Oh, the lies we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night.  

I don't have many regrets in life and if I can honestly say I "regret" buying this car, I'd say at my ripened age I've done alright. That said, though, I quickly came to look at that sad little car with the disdain and disgust a terrible father looks upon their son or daughter who's not good at sports. To this day I'm so embarrassed to say that this was my first car that most times when the topic of "first car" comes up in conversation, "Car Guy" here skips over it claiming the car he replaced this with was his first car. As if a 1975 Chrysler Cordoba was anything to brag about but it underscores how much I hated my Comet. 

Had my Comet been a coupe would it have made me feel differently towards it? Had it been a Comet GT like this? Well of course it would have but only to a point. I had so many problems with my Comet that even something as good looking as this could not have ultimately deterred my eventual overwhelming loathing for it. 

More than likely had my Comet been a coupe it would have been something like this and not the sporty looking GT. Coupes were hard to come by back then because everyone wanted them. And with my budget being what it was, beggars couldn't be choosers. Pull the cladding and those horrible wheel covers off, throw on some Cragers, white letter tires and a matte finish rattle can paint job and you may have something here. Might. 

Further compounding my problems finding a suitable first car were inherent challenges back then in car shopping in general. Outside of word of mouth the only way to shop for an inexpensive car was to sift through the classified section of the newspaper or luck out and find something posted on the "community bulletin board" in a super market or library. An arduous, time sucking process that 99 times out of a 100 ended in disappointment. It certainly dissolved any joy of shopping for that "first car". Not unlike marrying someone for all-the-wrong reasons, I settled on the Comet to simply end the searching.