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.