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.