Better Beaters - Building Cars and Daily Drivers

Thinking about old Cadillacs, a little bit more.

My car looked just like this one.

It's hard to believe now, but twenty year old Caddys were once commonly found on used car lots. I had my eye on a particularly nice '58 Coupe de Ville, but it was sold just before I unloaded, ahem, sold the Pontiac.  I was disappointed, but I just kept cruising by the used car lots that lined E. 14th. St. from San Leandro to Hayward.  As luck would have it I found a very clean Sedan De Ville hardtop. Yes, I would have preferred a coupe, but four door hard tops are pretty cool, and I'd lusted after that '56. 

Again it was a straight, tidy, good running car. I broke out the rubbing compound, wax, chrome polish, and cleaned it all up. It was a light beige with a white top. This was the oldest Cadillac that I had owned so far. I believe that this was back in 1977 because I bought the XLCR that year, and I used to make a big thing about how the OHV Sportster came out in 1957 as if the two vehicles were somehow related and I had bought the Caddy to commemorate this.  That doesn't really make any sense, but it was a good story.

I drove this car through the last two years of college, while I attended San Jose State. I drove it all the time that I wasn't riding my XLCR which I had converted into a road style bike. It never gave me a lot of problems but I did have to pull the heads once and do a valve job. I found that it only had compression in four cylinders! I got a chance to find out what burned valves looked like.  Another time the windshield wipers broke while I was visiting my Grandmother up in Richmond on a rainy weekend. I left the car at her house and took BART home. I returned on Bart the next weekend to retrieve the car. The cable had snapped on the wiper motor. I fixed that and I was back in business.

I was quite happy with the car and drove it those three years. In 1980 I was finally going to graduate, and I decided to buy myself a graduation present.

Not my car, but the same color.

I was out looking at various car lots and found my next car, a '77 Coupe de Ville at a consignment car lot in Santa Clara.  Actually the lot owner wanted my '57 and told me that he could make me a deal on any car on the lot. There was an Alfa Romeo coupe which caught my eye initially. I made another visit and found my '77 on the lot. The owner had been using it as his own car. The trade was made and this was the first car that I ever made payments on.

I kept the '77 after I got married and moved to Los Angeles for my new job. The '77 gave me good service but I decided that I could benefit from having a new car for the next phase of my life. It was traded in on my first new car, an '84 Mercury Cougar. 

The Cougar eventually gave way to a new Dodge Caravan. The time for a real family car had finally arrived.

It was then that I bought my first old car as a hobby car. A '75 Honda Civic coupe. Of course, the story doesn't end here.

Ten years passed and I finally got my '56 hardtop Sedan de Ville. White over Aqua. 

Again, not my car but identical color. 

It seems that time had marched on. While I delighted in the 1950's design, I just couldn't get into the driving. It felt like piloting a small bus, such a change from my Rivieras. As much as I liked the idea of owning the '56, the reality was a bit of a disappointment. I'd even managed to fit it into my garage, which didn't leave much room for anything else. So it was sold. Do I miss it? Sometimes, but it was time to move on.