(Photo: Brad Hansen) If you are truly afflicted with the sickness of being obsessed with automobiles, not just as a gearhead but in general, then your strongest influence and most certainly your first influences are from your family. Mine are, no question: my father, who loved trucks, Jeeps, and drove long-distance for several companies while I was growing up. My stepfather, who taught me how to drive like a bat out of hell and who taught me how to spin wrenches. My cousin, who had no trouble pushing the limits of “legal speeds” with a young kid in the car just for that brat’s amusement. And then there was Grandpa Ken. So far, he’s the only person I’ve ever been with when they bought a new car, back in 1989 when he purchased a dark blue Chrysler New Yorker with the Mark Cross leather package and the digital dash. I didn’t know that it was a K-car, or that it’s transaxle was more like a fuse than anything else…I just knew that I was intoxicated on real-deal New Car Smell and that he was proud as a peacock over the new car. Over the next few years I got to see plenty of miles from that car’s seats, from Colorado to Missouri, Illinois to Washington State, wherever I went with Grandpa, the New Yorker went along.
The New Yorker didn’t stay, but the memories of Ken letting me at the wheel around the block, or taking a very unwise trip through mountain roads, or just long hours cruising across America never left me. They influenced a lot of my ways of thinking when it comes to cars. The best way I can explain that feeling is that “comfort matters and when the road calls, you simply go.” Ken’s been gone since 2007, the New Yorker gone since 1994. But it takes just the right trigger and it all rushes back to me…seeing an old New Yorker plodding along, the smell of a brand new car’s interior…all of those things will do it.
It’s not often that a random story crosses my desk and my first intention is to share it. But Brad Hansen’s piece on his grandfather and the 1999 Oldsmobile Intrigue, his last brand-new car purchase, struck a chord for me and I hope it does the same for you. Click the link below to read his reflections after taking one of the last Oldsmobiles out on a road trip:
My daughters first car was an Olds Intrigue. Nice car.
I have always liked Oldsmobiles, from my 1979 Toronado 350 never get stuck in anything front wheel drive luxo cruiser, to my 1990 Eighty Eight, 3.8 V6, to the 1992 or 1993 – 3.8 Supercharger Touring Sedan with the retro console U shaped shifter that I never did get my hands on …
They just don’t make ’em like they used to, or at all – R.I.P. Oldsmobile
The BEST THING to come out of the Olds/Caddy family was of course the OVERHEAD VALVE V8 and the MUCH LOVED 4SPEED HYDROMATIC TRANSMISSION !! Those Trannys were Indistructable . Every BIG TIME GASSER BUILDER changed Stick/Clutch to HYDRAMATIC for all the right reasons.It made B & M of Van Nuys Calif.a HOUSEHOLD NAME which LIVES ON to this day !!! and I had one it Never Failed.