As we walked by this big barge of a Polara wagon listing to the right, I had to stop and check out to make sure it wasn’t in danger of rolling over. What’s the problem, big guy?
A jack, obviously. This is on the premises of Joe’s garage, so that’s not an unreasonable thing to happen there.
I didn’t raise the hood, so we can presume it’s most likely the standard two-barrel 383 V8. Somewhat curiously, there was a “Polara 318” model that came with the new LA 318, and no other engine were available, not surprisingly. The brochure does not clarify whether that was available as a wagon too, but this is a very basic Polara, without brightwork on the window surrounds.
The ’67 Polara’s front end came to mind a week or so ago, when T87 shared this 1978 Nissan Gloria with us. It came out in 1975, eight years after the ’67 Polara .Not exactly a dead ringer, but there’s definitely some similarities.
This one has been spending a bit of time in the fresh air. And now its owner took it to Joe’s to presumably get it sorted out again.
Chrysler’s Split-O-Matic vinyl seats are on full display, and its innards too. The dash on these has lost most of its brightwork, thanks to new safety regulations that mandated a reduction in glare-inducing elements there. That and soft touch buttons.
More of the same on the back seat. These big wagons were the domain of those decreasing numbers of families that still numbered on the larger than average side. There’s room here for at least half a dozen.
I failed to look in the way back, to see whether it sported a third seat or not. Seems a bit of a waste of all that endless area to not have one.
Related reading:
Cohort Classic: 1967 Dodge Polara – Substance Over Style
Wow what a barge all right. Fix the seats, wash off the biology and you’re ready for a cross country road trip!
Somehow the Polara angry taillights look a little less angry on a wagon.
You mean this? For some reason I have always thought they looked so cool and different.
A nice old barge, excellent for hauling or crossing America .
I owned a 1968 Chrysler station wagon and it ate up the miles easily .
-Nate
Probably ate up gas easily too!
@ ravenuer :
It had a 383 and 4V carby, ran well on regular and back then regular was under 50 cents the gallon so I didn’t care too terribly much .
-Nate
This looks quite familiar to me, as a 1966 Polara wagon was our family truckster when I was growing up, before it became the car that transported my older brothers to college (they still lived at home) and occasionally me and my friends to various places. By then it was on its second engine (my older bro didn’t know to shut down the engine if the “oil pressure” light comes on). My dad had it towed to the junkyard with the intent of disposing it, but they had a decent replacement engine so instead that was installed and the car lived on until 1982 when a piece of the flywheel broke off. 1967 brought a mid-cycle refresh to the Polara and some extra length and girth, which added weight and worsened its appearance inside and out IMO. Ours still had the original dash with lots of brightwork (which I don’t recall being problematic) and two huge round nacelles for the speedometer and other gauges. I don’t know what engine it had – I didn’t pay attention to such things back then – but given it was the low-end model and lightly optioned, I’m assuming the 383 which was standard on wagons that year, along with the TorqueFlite. It used “1/4 premium” gasoline from Sears, but I doubt it had the optional 4bbl carb.
I have some pics of this car when it was new, with my mom proudly showing off the new car. I would have been a few months old at the time. It looks odd to me seeing the car shiny and new, because I can only remember it being an old car with faded paint and a bit of rust. Here it is in our driveway with my neighbor/friend Geoff jumping off the roof circa 1973 – hey, we didn’t have video games or Netflix to keep us entertained, had to make our own fun. Somehow my parents didn’t complain; probably because the car already felt run down by then (although it drove fine). As is often the case with old photos for me, I invariably notice background items I had forgotten about, like that old round A/C unit and round, avocado, wheel-less trash bins. Why did it take so long before someone thought to fit outdoor trash cans with wheels and a bar so they could be automatically lifted into garbage trucks? I moved out of that house when I went off to university, but my parents lived there until the mid-’00s when they moved to a care home. The house is still there, the car long gone, and I’ve been unable to track down Geoff who is all over my Super 8 home movies from that era.
I recall my young days, in the mid ‘60s, when our edge-of-town neighborhood trash haulers would pick up our heavy steel trash cans, hoist them up, over their shoulders, climb up the welded-on ladder on the side of the truck, and dump them “over the top”, into the bed. Then the open-topped truck would drive on, spewing Kleenexes and other light items out the open top as it drove along. The truck leaked all sorts of unidentifiable liquid out in small amounts, around the lower edges, and the truck itself stunk of trash, to High Heaven.
Things have gotten a lot better since then.
This reminds me of the ’67 Plymouth Fury III wagon my dad bought brand new. Our family piled in and took many road trips up to Chicago and Wisconsin in the trusty 318 powered hauler. from what I recall, it was very reliable and did the highway traveling well.
Ah, back in the days when the Chrysler divisions not only had exclusive bodywork, but their own individual instrument clusters and dashes, too.
That aside, what is most intriguing of this CC is the poor condition of the ‘rear’ seat. Typically, the rear seats of any car gets much less use than the front and are almost always in very good (if not pristine) shape. But not on this old Polara wagon.
There is a lot to like with this vehicle. Those seats however, have taken one too many farts to have survived. My little brother could have ripped the vinyl in our 1970 Chrysler with one of his.
Large, in-charge, land barge. You have to experience its wide float, and 7 MPG goodness to really appreciate it. Our four-man raft had better handling than our Dodge wagon.
This just reminds me of a car featured in an episode of The Wonder Years. That particular car stuck in my mind because a Polara very similar to this one was used as the family’s old car that was supposedly on its last legs, in an episode set in 1969!
Yeah, I remember that episode. They advertised it as a “1963”, which it clearly and obviously was not. Crap like that bothers me.
Count me as a fan!
The worst brightwork removal for the interiors on these big Mopars was 1968. This one should have a better looking dash than this one – see below. However, I think the chrome around those instruments might have been on plastic, which often lost its shine over time.
I worked for a guy who had one of these. He bragged he never changed the oil, just the filter and added oil as required. He had 100k miles on the thing, same color too.
I grew up in a ’67 Fury III wagon; 383 badges on the hood ornament. Light blue with a blue interior. I remember many a road trip in that beast “over the hills and through the woods to Grandmother house” we went.
I was in middle school when it happened. My brother and dad changed the oil before our latest trip. When they changed the filter, they left the old o-ring from the filter behind. And — you guessed it. Barely made it 200 miles when the engine siezed outside the small town of Ennis, Texas. We spent Christmas in that small town. But, they got the car back on the road.
Now, I own a ’68 Polara 500 convertible. Same color combo. It should have NEVER been saved from the salvage yard. But, that’s what high school kids did back then. Anyway, it’s been in my possession of > 40 years now.
Thanks for the memories!
I remember tooling around the Wyoming and Colorado Rockies in a burnt orange two door coupe version of this car. It was smooth sailing!
…but swap in a ’70-’72 Duster 340 grille and the ringing gets a lot deader:
Not quite regulations yet; not until the 1968-’69 phase-in of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. But the GSA (General Services Administration) drew up a list of requirements for vehicles to be purchased and used by the U.S. Government starting with the 1966 models, and one item on the list was nonglare surfaces within the driver’s visual field.
I like wagons that feature the taillights from the parent car. Some wagons (Pontiac?) had very bland taillights that would have looked at home on a pickup truck.
Did the Chrysler sales brochure list the interior material as
Split-o-Matic vinyl?
This is a beautiful old wagon, the worn paint and lack of brightwork does not hide what looks to me as a well built and high quality car.
I love the thin C pillars and lack of a fixed glass pane in the rear doors.
Chrome trim would look great on the door frames and C pillar, like the one la673 posted above, but this still looks more than ok without it, as the rear side windows don’t seem to be set in an ugly black rubber seal.
With a 383 and Torqueflite this would be perfect and I’m not a wagon guy, but I keep coming back to admire this glorious old Mopar.
My 2nd cousin tells me of his father ordering a ’67 Polara wagon in gold with a black interior, 383 (guessing the standard 2 bbl) a column mounted 3 speed manual transmission and no power steering or power brakes or A/C. I remember that car as a child. They later added a (Sears?) under dash A/C to it.
My 2nd cousin drove it when he got his license. He said for a big beast it would really move, but his mom truly hated that car. When it came time to trade it in the dealer gave them almost nothing for the car because of the manual transmission.
With no rack ,up top, that roof does photo as “excessively long”. The car isn’t nearly as bad (condition wise) as it could be.
Really like the battery terminal peeking out from under the hood.
The tail lights on these remind me of those on the ’82 Toyota Celica Coupe