Try as I might and as vast and glorious as the internet is, I have yet to find a facsimile of the automotive scourge of my woe-begotten wonder years, a blue on black, black vinyl topped, 1972 Cadillac Sedan deVille. There are plenty of 1972 Sedan deVille's out there, but nothing that resembles exactly what my parents bought that long ago summer of 1978.
That probably has as much to do with the wide variety of color scheme options available on domestic cars in general and Cadillac's in particular back then. That and the fact that a 1972 anything is now forty-six going on forty-seven years old and no doubt the vast majority of them have met the business end of a hydraulic press. This shot from a brochure for 1972 Cadillac's is the exact color scheme of my parent's '72 but it's a Fleetwood 75 and not a Sedan deVille. Close but no cigar.
This is the closest I've ever come to finding one but it lacks the vinyl top and black dungeon leather interior; it'll have to do for this traipse down my memory lane of adolescent misery. To summarize, out of the literal blue, in the summer of 1977, my mother wanted my father to ditch the Ford Ranch Wagon we had for, of all things, a Cadillac. Used, of course. Not that there's anything wrong with buying a used car but the buying process was so arduous, that it took my painfully indecisive parents two full summers to find one that fit their needs. Or fancy or who knows. It got so bad that even car loving me would often times beg off going car shopping with them knowing full well nothing was ever going to get done.
Once they found something, though, the pride of ownership my father had for it was a sight to behold. I wasn't a fan of that car, more on that in a second or two, but I was happy that my father was happy. Which, sadly, wasn't very often. What's more, it was unnerving how dangerously he drove that hulk. He didn't drive it through the oh-so-narrow streets of Baldwin, Long Island as much as barreled through them fully expecting drivers of what he deemed lesser cars to give him the right of way. And, imagine this, more often than not, they didn't. Nothing short of a miracle he never had a head-on collision driving that impossibly wide, long, under-powered, gas guzzling, shuddering mess of an automobile.
I was not a fan of that car for two reasons. First, I found the overall "mood" of the car depressing. A black leather interior similar to this doing nothing to offset or compliment the dreary exterior shade of midnight blueness. The seats were hard like church pews and were slippery, joyless, austere...foreboding. This was a luxury car? Might as well have been a hearse. In many ways, though, the car was a microcosm of my parents; make some attempt to put up a good front even though you know you're nothing that you're pretending to be. And when you get tired of trying, just give up. No one cares anyway. Well, at least they got that right.
What I disliked most about that car was how pretentious I felt riding in it. Who the hell did my parents think they were kidding? My mother, who didn't drive but was the literal driver of anything and everything my father did, didn't want a Cadillac because she liked them, she wanted a status symbol. Please. We were far from well-off and buying an overwrought, worn out relic didn't make us look wealthy; I felt it made us look trashy. Well, trashier.
Furthermore, going from a stripper station wagon to a Cadillac must have looked like my father got the mother of promotions or someone in the family kicked the bucket and they blew the inheritance on a car. Again, as if anyone cared. Perhaps if it had a flashier color combination and was a Coupe deVille I would have at least liked the car for what it was and saw past the image it portended. Seeing that it was a four-door with that dour color combination, I couldn't help but feel like a phony. I wasn't proud that my parents drove a Cadillac; I felt embarrassed.
Image problems aside, the car itself was a total bitch. Wildly over-boosted, "variable assist power steering" doing nothing to help the soggy springs, shocks and mushy brakes make whomever got stuck behind the wheel a better driver. The car had a disconnected floatiness to it that made it the very essence of "land yacht". Oh, and how it shook. I always felt it had been in an accident and was thrown back together on the cheap. However, apparently that was endemic of that generation of hard-top Cadillac's. In the summer of '81, I took "Driver's Ed" in my high school's 1976 Plymouth Volare which I found to be vastly superior in every which way to Daddy's oafish Caddy. Imagine that, me finding a Plymouth Volare to be a far more compelling transportation conveyance than "The Standard of the World".
That car was also incredibly unreliable too. It seemed like everything broke on the damn thing in the four short years my parents owned it. Of all the problems my father had with it, from the transmission blowing up to the AC constantly failing to who the hell remembers what else, the biggest problem was gas mileage. Or lack thereof. Cars in general back then, even six-cylinder economy cars like my piece of junk '74 Mercury Comet, were not good on gas but "Dad's Cad" took poor gas mileage to another sub-basement of awful. Not quite sure what "NOT 4 MPG" means here but it's an obvious reference to how bad on gas this car is. 4 miles per gallon, by the way, slightly better than the, I kid you not, 3 miles per gallon our car got.
The combination of an emissions choked, supposedly 215-horsepower, 472 cubic-inch V-8, a Rochester QuadraJet in need of a rebuild, 4700 pounds of curb weight, the aerodynamics of a barn, non electronic ignition and a stump pulling 2.94:1 final drive ratio (everything is relative) and we blew through 27 "usable gallons" of gas in well under 100 miles. Incredible. Highway mileage, of course, was better but not by much. With gas prices climbing over a dollar a gallon in the early '80's, that car was very expensive to operate. And when it became readily apparent that my father had trouble footing the gas bill, in the winter of '82, off it went for a supposedly gas sipping, V-6 powered, 1980 Buick Century. The hits just kept on coming.
Through it all, though, the first couple of years we had that car were some of the more pleasant times in my life growing up if for no other reason than my parents seemed happy, somewhat stable. Both suffered from depression and they self-medicated; my father with the bottle, my mother with diet and sleeping pills. They handled their misery differently too; my father was reclusive and was happy being alone while my mother craved constant attention and was combative, mean spirited and verbally abusive. Something changed, though in 1980 - did my father change jobs or was my mother cut her off from her pills? My usually razor sharp memory about that time in my life is a little foggy but all I know is things went downhill rapidly for them around that time. My mother's state of mind , which was always questionable, spiraled downward; she rarely got out of bed for the last 13 years of her life (just as well) and my father became ever more distant, solemn and unreachable. I'd find vodka and whisky pints everywhere. Including inside that ugly Cadillac.
It's ironic, then, that if I had my druthers and my wife was on board with it, I'd jump at the chance to own a 1972 Cadillac; Coupe deVille of course. And not blue on black. Something a bit more bold like the '71 I lusted after several years ago when we first moved to north east Ohio. And hell no, I don't want one for sentimental reasons - I want one because I really like the looks of them and I think they're cool. Imagine that. Even if having one in my garage would be a constant reminder of those strange days when my parents bought what was nothing more than costume jewelry to make themselves appear, if only to themselves, that they were more than they were.
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