Photos from the Cohort by Hyperpack.
Can you recall the last time you saw a Celebrity out in the real world? This once commonest of common cars? Actually, I do. It was about a year and a half ago, a couple of blocks away from an early Starlet I already posted. It was a late 80s one, in a gold color gone dull. That one, however, had its 4 wheels stuck in the asphalt. One could tell it had been a long while since it had last provided service.
This one, on the other hand, is still on active duty. An old veteran, having weathered many seasons.
I would dare to say that regardless of its moniker, the Celebrity was rather un-Celebrated most of its life. Not exciting in any particular way, dressed in a rather anonymous hand-me-down sheer look, and easy to get lost in a mid-80s parking lot.
Still, even if average, hasn’t this old veteran earned some respect after so many seasons in the field? To my eye, it certainly has.
Those with sharp eyes may make out the Combat Wounded Veteran license plates. This old Celebrity may not be wounded, but it has certainly aged and has some minor scars. And while most of its peers have fallen, this one seems poised to keep at it for some time to come.
Related CC reading:
Curbside Classic: 1982-90 Chevrolet Celebrity – Beating The Bull To The Rodeo
Cohort Capsule: 1985 Chevrolet Celebrity Eurosport Wagon – A Lesson In Popularity
We sold probably hundreds of these GM 2.8 Celeb’s back at Dad’s used car lot in the Late 1980s- the early 2000s when I was aged 9 -21. He might still have one there that I have yet to document and Mom has not sent to the scrapper.
In the neighborhoods near where I live, there are lots of -40-year-old GM Iron Still prowling the streets. Look at the collection of GM B Bodies that Rich posted a few days ago on CC. – That driveway is within walking distance of this Celebrity. !
What part a “PA”?
The Westmoreland County part, western PA
Ah ok. From “Butler county” . t/y
The license plate on this car is actually a World War II veteran plate – which is exceedingly rare these days, given the age of WWII veterans. I’d say the plate is even rarer than the Celebrity!
The “Combat Wounded Veteran” label is actually part of the license plate frame. Pennsylvania does issue Combat Wounded plates, but they have the PH prefix and an image of the Purple Heart medal. This plate’s “WW” prefix denotes it as a WWII plate, and the insignia to the left is from the Honorable Service pin that was given to WWII veterans – a bigger version of the design is below.
There was a gray, late ’80s Celebrity in my neighborhood until a few years ago. I believe it belonged to an older couple, who had given it to their daughter. I haven’t seen it for a few years, though.
Your extra levels of exploration and investigation is really appreciated. Adds a whole new layer of interest to the articles you research! This is remarkable, given its association to WW2.
Wow, that is also something to appreciate that I overlooked. A worthwhile point! Thank you for bringing it up!
You’re welcome!
As a teen in 1982, found the Motor Trend Car of the Year field solidly bland then.
Ironic that it says “Best field ever!” in the upper left. Hardly, though I like some of these car, for nostalgia or otherwise.
You’re right. We were departing some lean malaise years. As these cars represented some emerging hope at the time.
Just for the color palette alone it’s less bland than I’m used to now
Take out the gold/brown two-tone on the Dodge 400, and the colour choices seem significantly more limited.
Bright red, black/silver two tone, brown, gold/brown two tone, light blue, bright red, medium blue, black/silver two tone, two boring silvers and bright red
And you actually saw these colors and more in person, not just the token few colors supplied to the magazine while nearly every model sold is white or some degree of grey. Performance may have sucked in the malaise era but there was variety
Choice of body types as well.
Unfortunately, a wider colour palette wouldn’t do enough to help define definitive cookie-cutter cars like the K-Cars and their derivatives, the A-Body sedans, or the J-Cars. These are some of the blandest cars of the ’80s.
Well to each their own, but as jonco43 pointed out there was a celebrity 2 door, sedan and wagon, there was a J car coupe, liftback, sedan and wagon, there were various bodies of K car variants ranging from the humble Aries to the minivans to the New Yorker limousine, the Daytonas to Lancers and Lebaron convertibles.
You might find them bland because maybe you find the boxy styling tropes of the era disagreeable(I’m not crazy about it either) but the variety is absolutely there. Yes the various versions of As and Js looked alike from division to division, but if you just stick to the one division it’s easy to tell a J body from an A body from a G body from a B body and the various available bodystyles available for each. what does the broad GM lineup look like now? A bunch of breadroll shaped crossovers that look alike in spite of not even badge engineering Chevys to Buicks to Cadillacs anymore so there’s no excuse.
Last time I saw one was in my driveway this morning. Been driving an 89 since 2003. Only drive it in the summer, otherwise it would have been long since rusted away. Still has some rust though. 311k, runs great, still gets over 30 mpg on the highway. Barely have to do anything to it, and when I do it’s cheap and easy to work on. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
I don’t remember the last time I saw another one outside of a show. Especially the 86 and down, they were scarce when I bought my 89.
That’s a good car. Diligent owner, too. Props to you, Troy.
Shortly before getting married, my wife and I bought a $1,500 ‘86 Celebrity wagon in white with wood grain. The interior was red velour with no 3rd row seat. The 2.5 L Tech4 ran great, rarely giving any problems. The main thing that went wrong was a leaking power steering rack in the first month or so. Her dad had a nicely equipped and heated garage so he and I replaced it. Late in its service, the head gasket developed an external coolant leak, but it was fine after a new upper gasket set and new head bolts. We kept it until 2001 but sold it ito my in-laws. They got a year or two more out of it until the rust monster finally caught up with it. I sometimes miss that car and the simpler life that it represented.
To my surprise, a Celebrity lives in my neighborhood. I photographed it a couple years ago in a parking lot nearby.
attached
Nice to see a few still roaming the roads .
We had an entire fleet of these in basic white, they only lasted 5 years before going to salvage .
-Nate
Here’s a rather unusual Celebrity sighting – this man had an image of his late-1980s Celebrity engraved onto his gravestone. I have no idea what the backstory behind this is, but it’s undoubtedly the only gravestone of its kind:
This is the first time that I have ever seen a Chevy Celebrity with handicapped license plates etched into a gravestone on February 29th ever. Wow! If it wasn’t so late I’d buy a lottery ticket.
“Que” the “Twilight Zone”, tune!
The Celebrity was basically a scaled down replica 1977 Caprice/Impala B body on a refined Citation platform. And as such it was a great car.
Nice find. I didn’t know until fairly recently how safe these were, especially for their time. They scored five stars for both the driver and passenger in the NHTSA test – something many 1990s cars had trouble doing. Of course, they’d fare miserably in an IIHS-style overlap test or a side-impact test, but those were well over a decade away in 1982.
Wonder if any show-biz types thought of launching a suit against GM for damages to their celebrity status? 🙂
Saw a blue wagon in traffic; roughly eighteen/twenty months back. Was a brief sighting so can’t really say how “weathered” it did/did not appear to be.
Did see the front. think it was an “88/89” model.
Although, by “89”, wasn’t the wagon a goner? H’mm.
I have a soft spot for the Celebrity since it was the car one of the parents who took us to our first day of kindergarten had and through much of the school year. Theirs was a gold eurosport(I remember the red accents) post-facelift. Not that I find any of the A body lookalikes particularly lookers but I kind of like the early Celeb the best, cleanest and most honest, has some styling continuity with the B body with its concave rear end as well as some resemblance to the 4 headlight Malibu/El Caminos.
The name is awful. Chevy certainly liked to evoke tinsel town glamour with names like Bel Air and Malibuin their past but Celebrity just seems trashy, like its appealing to the same customer who buys National Inquirer “ooh a Celebrity!!!”
But Chevy had a bad run of names all through the 80s, who on earth wants a Citation in the context of an automobile? Or the act of being Cavalier for that matter? Chevy doesn’t get enough flack for renaming models to deliberately start with C, Ford deservedly got roasted for trying that in the 2000s.
@JT Actually the wagon was the last one left. For 89 they dropped the coupe, and for 90 they dropped the sedan, then after 90 they dropped the wagon.
The 87-89 models looked identical on the outside. The 90 model looked nearly the same too, but all the ones I’ve seen had a body color grille. I think all chrome was painted black for 90 as well, even on base models.
GM made some good advances for 1987 on these. The morning sickness steering rack was cured. Composite headlights, better than the 6000s or Ciera I’ve had. New dash. And finally the horrific carbureted V6 was gone and the 2.8/3.1 MPFI that followed was way better.
H’mm. Ok. Knew about the “tudor” going away. Don’t recall seeing many wagons come “90ish”.
The “Olds” and “Buick”, wagons I recall seeing more often.
I wonder if that tag is current?? Or if the son, grandson, or great grandson of the war vet is now piloting the Celeberity?? My grandpa was one of the younger war vets. Said the day after he graduated high school in 1943 he went down to the Navy recruitment office and enlisted at age 17. He didnt turn 18 for another month.
The tag appears to be current, since the car’s inspection stickers expire in Nov. 2024 (blown-up image below). The registration sticker on the license plate itself shows a 2017 expiration date, but that’s because Pennsylvania eliminated registration stickers around that time, and most people just kept the old ones on their plates.
I don’t know about Pennsylvania’s rules about transferability of military license plates, but in several states, such plates are transferrable to surviving spouses, although that’s it (i.e., not to children or others).
I bet Grandson is not running the celebrity around. Especially due to the parking tag properly removed from the rearview mirror and set below the inspection stickers.
I remember working on the prototypes at the GM Technical Center in Warren MI. I was 27 at the time.
Wow! I still (rarely) see Buick Centurys and Cutlass Cieras, but have not seen a Celeb in a long, long time
If the guy was born in 1926-27 its possible he is still driving locally. Obviously the likelihood falls off with every year but we are now in an era where some high 90ers are still fairly independent. For this to still be a daily driver it must have had fairly low mileage.
I think the freshened 6000 and the later Centuries/Cieras are the best looking of this chassis. Of course, in hindsight we know that GM should have just redesigned these more extensively for 1987-88 rather than the whole GM10/W Body debacle which created huge losses for them in the early 90s. These also should have been called Malibu.
Memories of Chevrolet Celebrity’s … State Farm Insurance’s regional office in Fort Worth had MANY Celebrity Eurosport sedans in its fleet for the employees who needed them (claim adjusters, etc.). Another memory was my attending a Government auction (GSA) in Fort Worth in ’91 or so. One auction item was a Celebrity with all of 300 miles on it–but the car had been rolled over in an accident! There wasn’t a straight body panel on the car, and all of the window glass except one of the rear door windows was cracked or damaged. Four -cylinder engine attached to an automatic under the hood. Gold colored paint with a tan cloth interior. Car sold for $3000.
I literally just drive home in my 85 carbed 2.8l sedan and saw this article LOL! I actually have a few of these, including an 86 Eurosport coupe Ive had since 1998. Even the most average car has its fans and these were sorta the X-Bodies vindication as they were literally the same car.