My Grandad had ONE vice that he allowed himself-He drove Cadillacs. I can BARELY remember a 'blue '56 Sedan De Ville, I LOVED the tan '60 SdV, didn't care for the avocado '68 SdV, & I still have his Pride 'n' Joy, a '73 Fleetwood Brougham. He bought it In Louisville,Ky, WITHOUT consulting my Granmaw...Who was a VERY suspicious, TIGHT woman. She squeezed every dime she got. If you DIDN'T save a dollar & a dime outta every dollar you made, you WERE Going to Go To Hell, no doubt about it. Well, they were in Louisville, Fritz comes tootlin' up in that big Brougham, that kinda set the War Clouds up...Then, she saw the Window Sticker...$10,243, & some odd cents...THAT did it. "FRITZ !! Are you out of your MIND ?!? Ten Thousand DOLLARS for a CAR ?!?" She was Fuzzed Up, as we say down here, for about a month over that..But Grandaddy LOVED that car, even tho we took his keys away about 2 years later...That car was simply too big for him to handle.

OK, here's one of my station wagon stories. We had a '66 Plymouth Fury 3. (It got totaled in '69 when someone turned in front of us on a red light.) I remember like it was yesterday; Dad gassed it up on the way home from the dealer, and it cost $7 to fill it. Mom was so horrified that it cost so much that she almost made my Dad take it back. As we all know, these days 7 bucks barely fills the lawn mower

Wow...Yeah,I can sorta remember those days...Gas wars...Full service-they'd come out, pump yr gas, wash yr windshield, etc..Bet that Fury had a 383 in it...MAYBE a 318, but I'd gone for the 383...

I don't remember which engine that one had. The '69 Custom Suburban that replaced it had a 318 with a 2 barrel Carter BBD and 727 Torqueflight behind it. They sold that one in the early 90s, still going strong, which is amazing considering the way we abused it. We would put as much as 10k miles on it in a single summer trip. Think San Diego to Miami via Seattle and New York. 500-600 miles in a day was nuthin' for us. Often used as a pickup truck, hauling drywall, cement, lumber, and anything else we could cram into it. I learned a lot of the mechanic stuff I know by practicing on that car.

Oh yeah....Remember when they would give you dishes with every fillup? And trading stamps too

Found a sales flyer for the '69. Even the same shade of blue!
http://www.fuselage.de/ply69/69ply11b.jpg
http://www.fuselage.de/ply69/69ply10b.jpg

My parents never owned a station wagon, but when I was a kid I always wished we had one. So much room in the back to play! I did get a short taste of one - sometime in 1981 a truck driver had a heart attack at the wheel and took out an entire line of company cars parked in front of Dad's office - his '79 Malibu had the honors of first hit. The company borrowed or leased an '81 Caprice Estate that Dad drove for 3-4 months until they bought a fleet of Chevy Citations.

My Grandmother never pumped her own gas. I remember reading with horror a receipt in the coinholder from Driftwood Texaco: $1.61 per gallon for full service (this was probably in the mid 90's.) The last few years she drove the furthest she went was two miles for her yearly fillup at that station.

My Father owned two station wagons - well, tecnically only one, the other I would barely catagorize as a car.

The first was a '61 Peugeot 403 wagon. It was tan. If it was 25 degrees F outside it wouldn't turn over. He wondered what the 2" hole in the front of the car was, low towards the bumper, and a crank in a trunk. That's what Peugeot provided to start the car under those conditions. You cranked it like a Model T Ford.

To jack the car up to change a flat, you had to insert the Peugeot-provided metal bars in the front door openings so the car wouldn't fold like a jackknife when you jacked it up.

Once underway, the car had the acceleration of a Trabant, with the torque charateristics of a sewing machine. At 55 mph it sounded like a tortured lawn mower.

He traded it in on a big, white '62 Chevrolet Bel-Air wagon, with a 283 and THM trans. He loved that car. We loved it, too. Roomy! Compared to the Peugeot, that Chevy was a muscle car.

He wouldn't buy another "foreign car" until 2002, when he got a Lexus.:smoke:

Ze French, they follow No One Else's lead on car design..

For a short period of time, I actually owned a Citroen DS 21 because I loved the way it looked. It was just too odd and was leaking stuff (mostly hydraulic fluid for the suspension I think) in about 12 spots so I sold it to another brave soul. A few years later, I had an ID 19 for a while that wasn't quite so complicated, looked the same though. French, very weird, but really cool looking.

I figured we have gone at least 6 posts on the same topic, might as well change it again..........:D

Not just car design, Sandy. Isn't SECAM alleged to actually mean "System Essentially Contrary to the American Method"? :D

Uhh, yeah, I think so...Reading between the lines in several histories, both PAL & SECAM were developed out of spite to keep from having to use the hated Yankee system...

The 383 in the Yellow submarine pinged like a marble fact'ry if you dint run hi-test, a whole 3 cents more in those days. Dad could always tell when Mom bought gas, she would just say fill-it so she always got reg'lar. We traded that beast on a 75 Fury (R- line Satellite, not Gran Fury) that had a 318, which also had a short piston stroke and seemed to climb the mountain roads upstate, heavily loaded with camping gear, without much protest. The rear quarters rusted bad and were fixed twice. Mom got an 83 Reliant and my brother then ran the Fury another few years then traded on a low-miles 78 LeMans (malibu, 305 V8 with the bad camshaft) That 75 Fury was MoPars last good one before the Aspen-Volare debacles. They continued buying Mopars until their tiny Gas & Garage dealer lost the franchise a few years ago.:tears:

BTW - Despite all the other issues, the French did make comfortable cars. This is just too fun:D

Oh yeah...A frat brother in college had a Renault, the one AFTER the Dauphin, but NOT the R16, & it had INSANELY comfortable seats...I've even heard that the 2CV Citroen was pretty comfy for what it was-The original design spec sposedly was to be able to be driven across a plowed field at 40 Km/H w/a basketful of eggs on the front seat, & have none of 'em break..

Yeah, the French cars had long suspension travel for their size. And remember the Citroen "shark" with its load-leveling system coming to a stop: instead of a dive it performed some sort of gravity-defying floating antics to stay level. I've driven modern Citroens, Renaults and Peugeots in Europe over the past few years and they seem solid like most any other car today.

I've only seen a "Goddess" one time, it was in Knoxville in '66 or '67 at a car show. Think the one they had was the wagon version. Other than I remember it as being kinda ODD looking, I don't remember much else.

Talking about cars, we had my grandma's '57 Ford Fairlane 500. Two tone yellow and purple. With fins, though not as tall as in the pictures earlier this thread. V8, and it got around 10 MPG. No radio. Thing is, we had it around 1968 or so, and it was too new to be a classic, but old enough to look outdated. It got in a few mild accidents, and I think we ended up selling it to a car collector who probably parted it out.