Funny how you can look at certain cars and instantly be reminded of a particular person.
My late buddy Phil had a white 1978 Dodge Omni when we attended Nassau Community College and worked together at the campus radio station in the early 1980s. This one, which recently popped up on Facebook Marketplace, is a 1986 model with an asking price of $1,300.
Phil and I became close friends, although we couldn't have been more different. Phil was leather-jacket-wearing cool and seemingly streetwise. He could have passed for George Michael's doppelgänger and worked at the radio station because he genuinely loved music—all kinds of music. If we had anything in common, it was that we were both rabid New York Yankees fans.
I had stumbled into radio after a professor teaching a radio and television production course I took on a whim to fill out my schedule thought I had, in his words, "a broadcast-quality voice" and recommended I join the radio station. I had a passing interest in music, like most people I guess, and was about as cool as Ralph Malph from Happy Days, whereas Phil was more like Fonzie.
Our taste in cars underscored just how different we were. When we met, I was driving my oafish 1975 Chrysler Cordoba while Phil was behind the wheel of his zippy little Omni, a car that seemed to contradict his motorcycle-biker aura. As it turned out, Phil wasn't really a motorcycle guy at all. He had simply grown up around those types and, through osmosis, looked the part.
Unpretentious as he was, Phil's Omni suited him perfectly. While my Chrysler Cordoba wasn't exactly the sort of car a dyed-in-the-wool car enthusiast would be drive, for someone who wanted for literally everything growing up, it was the most wonderful thing in the world. I also found it hard to believe anyone would actually want to drive a Dodge Omni.
Oh, how wrong I was.
The handful of times I drove Phil's car, I came away impressed by its ride, handling, and surprisingly peppy performance. Phil also loved to point out that it got around 30 miles per gallon. My Cordoba, by comparison, was none of those things and was, subjectively at least, only the better-looking car. As practical transportation for a college student, Phil's Omni was clearly the smarter choice.
The Dodge Omni and its Plymouth sibling, the Horizon, were Chrysler's first mass-produced front-wheel-drive cars in the compact/subcompact segment and the first such cars offered by one of Detroit's Big Three automakers. Developed from Chrysler Europe's Simca Horizon, they were very much in the mold of the Volkswagen Rabbit and helped usher Chrysler into the front-wheel-drive era. Built through 1990, Chrysler sold well over two million Omnis and Horizons combined.
The engineering philosophy behind these cars—and much of their front-wheel-drive technology—also helped pave the way for the Chrysler K-cars, which debuted in 1981 and, depending on your point of view, either saved the Chrysler Corporation or marked the beginning of an era of relentlessly ordinary transportation.
Our Marketplace gem appears to need a fair amount of work before it could cruise the roads around Nassau Community College again. The fact that a head gasket is included in the proverbial box o' parts accompanying the sale is more than a little disconcerting. The seller also notes that the buyer will need to tow it home.
Sadly, we lost Phil in January 1997 to ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. When he told me about his diagnosis roughly a year and a half before he died, he said with unmistakable pride, "Well, I get to die like a Yankee."
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