1973 Lincoln Continental - The Good Doctor

The young pediatrician who lived down the street from my family and I back on Long Island drove a brand-new Lincoln Continental like this '73. It stuck out on that very narrow block of Chevrolets and Fords not unlike the way he stood out amongst the electricians, plumbers, surveyors, newspaper delivery truck drivers and steam fitters who also lived on the block. I can't say I thought much of it other than I thought it looked expensive. Very expensive. 

He and his wife had two sons, one my age, the other maybe two or three years younger and we were good enough friends that my younger brother and I were in the carpool rotation when it was their mother's turn to drive. And she would drive that huge Lincoln. 

Every short ride to school in their whisper quiet, oh-so-plush, softly sprung, living room on wheels was like stepping into another dimension; at that young age I could tell that the other half were really different from the rest of us. Their big Lincoln underscoring how industrial my father's Ford station wagon was and highlighted more so than how much nicer their house was than ours that their plight in life was on a completely different footing than ours.  

Such was the neighborhood I grew up in. The haves rubbing elbows with the have-nots', their postage stamped sized piece of property separated from "us" only by a narrow sliver of grass, a fence, hedge or driveway. Didn't matter. Whatever the dividing line, it was as different "over there" as night is from day. Here in the sub-division crazy west side of Cleveland, where the haves and have nots live is clearly defined by the amount of your semi-annual dues to the H.O.A. Ten minutes west of Kennedy airport in the 1970's, the lines were blurry. Very blurry. 

Just before The Good Doctor moved his family out of our blue collar, working-class neighborhood into a mansion on a multi-acre plot way out on the Island, he replaced the big Lincoln with a not-carpool-friendly, diminutive Mercedes-Benz sedan. Again, I wasn't enamored of the slab-sided Continental, but I was even less enthralled with the odd, tiny, strangely styled four-door MB that to me looked like a dumpy 1950 Plymouth. Little did I know at the time I had a front row seat to the sea change in the well-heeled's shift away from domestic luxury automobiles. 

Following a trend that began roughly a decade earlier, by the early 1970's, cars like this all but museum quality Continental were being passed over by the well-heeled for smaller, impeccably built wares from Germany. Everything being relative, those cars rode, handled and braked with the prowess of sports cars. They were vastly superior automobiles and those who really "had it", were willing to fork over the stiff tariff to have them.

This '73 is for sale up near Detroit and it's $18,900 asking price is as vexing to me as the car itself was. And still is. Holy smokes. Who would not only buy this, but pay anywhere near the asking price for it? I'd think that taking twenty-grand and burning it in a back yard firepit during a key party would have as much of an impact on the Jones. Come to think of it, more so. Then again, someone might look at my 1977 Corvette and say I've wasted my money too. To that degree I "get this" or got what it was some may have wanted it to be. But still, wow, twenty-grand for a 1973 Lincoln Continental four-door sedan? And one that doesn't even have a leather interior? 

Compatred to the funky 1961-1969 Continentals with their funky "suicide doors", 1970-1979 Continental were conventional to the point they might as well have been invisible. They're really nothing more than the Ford Motor Company's version of a Cadillac. And then they were literally nothing more than a Mercury Marquis; the Marquis just a gussied-up Ford Galaxie. I think of these as a triple serving of the cheap, generic, supermarket ice cream my father would devour in droves. More is often times not better. My father wouldn't be caught dead with a pint of Haagen Daaz but a slab of Pathmark ice cream? Hog heaven. 

This most certainly isn't for me - even in two-door guise although 1970-1972 Continental two-door hard tops have a certain sinister quality to them I appreciate. The tread started to come off the design with the '73's and their front safety-bumpers, starting in 1974 Lincoln jumped the shark with the Continental and I think they should be used as artificial reefs. Your opinion may vary, see dealer for details.  

Coincidentally or not, not long after that family moved away my mother insisted my father get rid of his appliance like Ford station wagon and replace it with that tried-and-true if not cliched staple of trying to impress the Jones, a five- to six-year-old Cadillac. At least it was a Cadillac and not a Lincoln.