Did your Dad own a cool car?

If car interest was a pool, dad wasn't interested in a swim, cars were simply appliances to him. On the other hand, his brother-in-law loved cars. One picture we have is him in a really sharp suit posing next to his freshly waxed sedan - looks like he's right out of Mad Men. Of course dad didn't care for him. In spite of that, two of dad's cars are memorable:

1. A Dodge Polara station wagon, made special because at the time dad kept bees as a hobby and spilled this horrid-smelling stuff (used to repel bees from their hive) onto the carpet. Got to smell that for years, but the good news was that no bees bothered us.
2. A 1969 Dodge Dart in "appliance white." A very effective substitute for birth control, with its slant-6 engine keeping all girls away. Actually that last part isn't true since I hardly ever got to drive it. The repelling part was all me, but I digress.

My formative family cars consisted of TWO bitchin Oldsmobile 442s (like, at the same time)...then the 80's happened and there was a whole series of General Motors Disappointments, culminating around 1986 with a hella-E36 M3ty brand new Grand Am and Chevy Celebrity Eurosport.

Quietly in the background, our Datsun 720 pickups served dutifully and I loved them. And THIS, GM, is why you lost a whole generation of buyers. Hope all the blow was worth it.

He wasn't really a car guy. He did own a '32 Ford Tudor when he was in college, but that was in the mid-1930s when it was just an old used car.

My Dad is currently on car #70, at least according to spotty memories and worse record keeping. Mostly any cheap POS that he could keep running well enough for us to make it day to day.

He will always, ALWAYS talk at length about the '70 Cuda with the 440 / 6-pack in Plum Crazy. He has some good stories about it that I can recite by memory myself.

The most interesting aspect of it all to me is that in true GRM fashion he could always find something cool about ANY car that he owned. Option packages, color combo, production revisions... just taking about every car had some endearing quality to him somehow; even the way a seat reclined in his '63 (?) New Yorker has a story attached to it. The choke on his old Fiat gets him all nostalgic. Pretty cool point of view; Everything is cool, somehow...

As they prepare for retirement and downsizing to a little house in FL we are (slowly) going through all of his old junk to try to find at least one picture of each one to pin on a board in chronological order. There are lots of gaps for now and the project isn't even started in earnest yet but I see a family heirloom in the making.

Hot damn, working with your Dad has its perks, these were in his briefcase!

My dad is a total car guy. He was a drag racer, hot rod and muscle car guy most of my youth. I grew up in the back seat of Challengers and Chargers, by my teens he had gotten deep into the (much cheaper at the time) aircooled VW scene and by the time I moved out on my own he was back into Chargers and 50's Fords.

Photo of the driveway from around 86

These days he is retired and thinking about building another VW bug.

This was his final VW project

That car is currently for sale with about 100 miles put on it since he sold it in 92. I would love to get it back for him but don't see that happening.

Pops had a 60's Polara. Not this car, but similar. He said it was a piece of junk, I think its pretty neat.

My dad had a few interesting cars. The first car he ever bought was one of these: A Blue Camaro RS with a 327. I was in it when my mother backed it into a cement staircase trying to learn how to drive a manual.

He didn't have any on the road when I was growing up, but he still owned his first car (A 1967 Galaxie 500 convertible), a 1969 Pontiac LeMans Sport Coupe and a '52 Ford F-1. He still owns all those, although they need a restoration. He did have a '48 Ford F-4 duallie dump truck that he still used routinely as a truck though (and this was in the '90s). I can still remember the flathead exhaust note, whine of the straight cut gears, bouncy ride, springy seat (with no seat belts) and that old vehicle interior smell. We still own that as well, and though it's not in awful shape it needs a thorough going through.

Gone before I was born was the '77 Buick Century that he jammed a high-compression '69 Olds 455 in that was apparently a real terror and did gnarly burnouts.

He also tells stories of tearing around the lake in his buddy's Buccaneer Red 1975 Trans Am 400/4-speed and the street racing they did with a particularly stout 1971 Pontiac Catalina 455/TH400 that the same friend owned. (The '69 Lemans also belonged to that friend before my father got it. Hardcore Pontiac family)

My isn't really a car guy. He did own a few (now interesting cars) but they wouldn't have been interesting when he owned them.

In the UK he owned a Ford Anglia. Apparently abandoned in Scotland in the 1970s.

rwd Escort

In Canada a 510 but not the cool one. Was red with the wood panels.

First cool car I remember was a GLHS that my dad had; my mom had a '77 Trailduster for ever when I was a kid. She traded it for a St. Regis (boo) when I was five or so. Dad had a stretch of turbo Lancers after the GLHS.

Yup. This was his first car when he was 16. Sold in in 1977 when my mom was pregnant with my brother. He was able to buy it back last spring.

No one in my family was really into cars (I think I was adopted). My parents brought me home from the hospital in my dad's 1969 Grand Prix SJ. My earliest memories were of standing up in the backseat. When I was 3 or 4 I tried to open the lever door handles. I was not strong enough so I just left it. When my mom got in to drive it the passenger door swung open on the first left hand turn. She was not happy. I always thought they had the best cockpits. I am always checking CL or one.

My dad is not a car guy by any stretch of the imagination.

At this point the only cool car he has owned was an 80's AMC Spirit, and even that was really only cool for the retro factor. If my memory serves me correctly it looked like this.

He just got a preowned ford fusion hybrid and he is well on his way to becoming a hypermiling nerd. Its funny to see him geek out so much over his MPG and other analysis the car offers.

I have a picture of my dad with a slightly ratty Studebaker Hawk convertible (example below)

Long gone by the time I came along I suspect, but he did have a 49 Bonanza, which was cool (again, representative):

(his was painted, not natural metal, but still cool)

He also liked to race small displacement flat bottom boats (similar to this, not sure what they are officially called).

Wow, you guys had some cool Dads!

Mine owned an early 60's Falcon and a '68 Mercury Marauder with the 429. After that was a Mercury Bobcat and the Mercury Zephyr wagon, several Panthers after that.

It was a Bule Oval upbringing to be sure.

i have no pics of it, but my dad had a 1930 Model A 5 window street rod when i was a kid. he built it while he was in high school in the 60's.

it had a Buick nailhead for power by the time i came around- but i guess at one point it had a tri power 389 out of a wrecked GTO in it- no hood, '32 grille, Mustang tail lights, reversed steelie bigs and littles, side pipes, and a couple of boat seats that weren't bolted down.. i got to drive that thing many, many miles while sitting on my dad's lap when i was like 5 years old and my grandpa taught me how to do donuts in it in a hay field when i was 11 or 12 years old..

he also had a brand new 69 Z/28 that he bought when he got out of the army in 69.. he kept blowing up engines because they were defective and couldn't take 8000+ rpm powershifts so GM bought it back as a lemon a couple of months after he got it.. my grandpas said the car actually kind of sucked: it was fast and fun and all, but they couldn't get it to idle right and turning on the headlights almost killed it..

while in spain, my father bought a 1968 Opel Kadett Rallye.. YES, a REAL rallye, not the tape special we got here in the states. He brought that back with us to the US in 72. When it went away in 1980 (if only he had known what he had) there came a procession of MGBs and MGBGTS, spitfires, GTV6s and a 1971 Formula Firebird, and finally a 260Z.

There was also a Sammy in there somewhere.

Yep, my father is a total car guy, and his father before him. He's owned several dozen Alfa GT Juniors, GTVs, Alfettas; pretty much all of them except a GTA and a Montreal. He's had the same 1955 Chevy Panel Delivery since he got out of HS in 1973. There was a '58 (I think) UK import bug in the family for a long time, which he sold when he inherited his father's 356A. I know there was at least one tri-five Nomad when him and my mother first got together.

Long Beach, 1984ish.

Lots of motorcycles in the family, too. Both of these '66 Suzuki X6 Hustlers are still in the family.

I'll see if I can find more in a bit.

Hudson Hornet...I think I was conceived in this.

1957 chevy with 283 fuelie...copper metallic with cream color trim

1959 impala 2 door with 327

1960 porsche 356 coupe when we were stationed in Germany. ..rode shotgun a number of laps at the 'ring

1965 Ford Galaxie 2 door with 390

1969 chevy nova...SS 396, 4 SPEED no option car

1970 SS 427 El Camino

Yeah, this whole car obsession I'm afflicted with can be blamed on him! Thanks Dad!

Early memories were of his '57 Corvette and my mom's Javelin. Then there were small Bronco's (wagon and pick-up) for family camping and trips off-roading, Super Beetle, Fox bodies (GT convertible and SVO's) back to a Corvette he's restoring now. He also provided mini-bikes and snow mobiles along with a 460 jet boat that looks just like Aussie's.

I'm currently ruining my boys with karts (SCCA autocross) and time in my '69 Cougar convertible mixed with trips to Silver Lake sand dunes in my Jeep. It's inherited I keep reminding my wife.

My father liked cars, but wasn't much of a car enthusiast as we know it today. (Incidentally, I'm a tad older than most of you, a thoroughbred geezer who's probably older than your own dads, so maybe your dads called their father "their father." I addressed my father as dad, but called him "my father" in conversation with others. No criticism of the use of the term ... I suppose that's just the way times and language arts change). Anyway, after that inane digression, my father graduated from high school in 1928, and bought his first car in the thirties. That was a '33 Chevy 2-door sedan. That gave way to the next Chevy, the one I wouldn't mind owning today: a '38, another 2-door sedan. That would make a helluva replica Paris-Peking Fangio thirties Chevy rally car, which are mostly coupes, and all replicas these days themselves. But that car went to the crusher in the fifties.

Fangio replica rally cars

No

Not old enough, or maybe it's a regional thing

My father isn't really a "car guy" so he didn't really have much in the way of cool cars. He didn't even have a driver's license or a car of his own for the first 8 years of my life. He likes cars well enough, but has zero mechanical aptitude (he can barely put gas in them), so working on them was out of the question. His only claim to an "interesting" car would be the '78 Datsun F10 (although it was a 5 spd manual) he bought when he got a teaching job in 1978. He drove that into the ground until my parents split in 1988 and finally replaced it around 1990.

From '72 through '85 our "family car" was my mother's '71 Dodge Demon. I wish I still had that car.