Time once again for The Monday Substack Thang: “In praise of…wait, WHAT again, now?” Wherein we lament the loss of…of…well, after working on this post a good chunk of yesterday and today, I can’t even bring myself to type it again. The springboard for all this grief and mourning is another characteristically excellent (if UNEXPECTED!) outing from our compatriot Eric Peters, who successfully unearths the Devil in the details, then re-plants it good, deep, and HARD. A taste:
The dealer was familiar with my dad’s habit of cruising around various car dealerships of a Sunday afternoon with the fam in tow, just doing a casual looky-loo type thing without any serious intent at all of allowing himself to be talked into a purchase. Additionally, he’d never been in the least susceptible to the impulse-buying phenomenon, particularly not when the “buy” in question was an exorbitantly-expensive 4-5 thousand dollar (!!!) luxury automobile.
What with all that, plus the dealer’s foreknowledge of my pop’s devotion to the Blue Ovals, this [EXPLETIVE DELETED] was no way no how gonna sell itself. So the proprietor went straight for the jugular with the ol’ hard-sell:
Y’all just take this low-mileage, well-cared-for beauty on home for an extended test drive; bring it back in, say, no sooner than three weeks or so. Here’s the keys.
And we did that thing.
Read on for the gripping—if not exactly so UNEXPECTED! as all that—denouement.
Update! Eyrie post has now been updated with some Bonus Content you’ll almost certainly find…dare I say it…UNEXPECTED!
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Being a car guy, I liked it, even if it was about a Cordoba 🙂
I never could get enthused about any Chrysler product. Or AMC’s. I was hung up on the Bowtie, but I did appreciate the GT40 beating the snot out of the europeans.
For some bizarre reason, I’ve always had something of a soft spot for the Mopars, dunno why. They did things much differently than everybody else back in the Golden Age of the automobile, even down to the old manual window-cranks turning backwards.
Oh, and as I’ve mentioned here before, AMC’s Javelin got a YUUUGE thumbs up from me when I was just a callow youth.
The Javelin was decent, I’ll give you that. Mark Donahue driving the Penske Javelins put them on the map in the Trans Am series (SCCA). Trans Am and the Can Am were the two best racing series we’ve ever had IMO.
Good looking cars.
Nothing wrong with the Mopars, they just never did much for me. Don’t know why.
My favorite Chrysler product – the slant six, and I have no idea why. Guess just because it was different.
OH YEAH, damned good motors those were. Reminiscent of Ford’s inline straight-six: they made unexpectedly good power, and like my beloved 289s (had a 289 in my last 56 Fairlane, actually, a very common mod amongst 54-55-56 Fairlane people), you just couldn’t kill the things.
I had a ’78 Magnum, the slope nosed Dodge relative of the Cordoba. Had a 360 in it. Kinda wish I still had it. That was one hell of a good car.