I felt no longer like just a visitor, but a proper resident once I brought the Valiant out to Oregon, and so I started to explore. I was happily astonished to find the mild climate and favourable registration fees made it easy to keep a car good shape and on the road, so people did, so there was robust infrastructural and commercial support for old cars.
There was just about every kind of repair shop. Across Franklin Boulevard from the main UO campus entrance, not far from Track Town pizza (which I still crave, after all these years) there was a BP service station with a friendly, good mechanic (Chet) who did my oil changes and other suchlike.
I easily got my speedometer calibration checked at a place just over the bridge in Springfield with a speedometer dyno out front of their shop. Could’ve got the speedo rebuilt, too, if it’d needed it, or the radiator re-cored, or the springs re-arched. I kept thinking it’d be cool to get a new battery built on site at Mac’s—still in business, as it seems—but never wound up needing one. When the vinyl’s seam let go, It wasn’t hard to find a shop to rebuild the front seat with new springs and foam and correct new vinyl perfectly fitted to the original cloth. The car (and I) flourished in this environment. It reached its peak condition, and it ran and drove really quite well.
Also in Springfield was Brooks Cut Rate Auto Parts, one of those family-owned parts stores in business since forever.
A little further afield were even bigger treasures. I found (in the White Pages!) a business called Elderly Auto parts in Jasper. The name caught my attention, and the friendly phone call made it official; I had to check the place out. The drive took about 20 minutes, but when I crossed the river into Jasper and passed the water tower, it seemed as though I’d zoomed back 30 or 40 years. The density and development was much less.
Jasper felt and looked like those kids’ town in Stephen King’s “The Body”, the story basis for the movie “Stand By Me”—some scenes in which were filmed elsewhere in Oregon. Elderly Auto Parts was like Svigel’s in Denver: a big warehouse full of goodies for old cars. Tin roof…rusted! I went there often and bought many parts, at least as often (probably more often) because they were nifty and I wanted them as because I needed them. The second-or-so time I came asking after Slant-6 and Dart/Valiant stuff, the easygoing owner Doug showed me a new-never-tossed Mopar frisbee that looked a lot more like a vintage item than a modern reproduction: “I want forty dollars for it now, but gimme some time to show it to people who’ll get a kick out of seeing it and then I’ll drop the price down where it should be.” I eventually bought it, don’t recall for how much, and kept it for 24 years before selling it on—still never tossed.
There was a Chry-Ply or Dodge dealer in Creswell, 20 minutes down I-5 from Eugene, with a goodly stash of old-stock parts up in the attic. Think I bought a never-filled windshield washer bag for dad’s Lancer there, for some small number of dollars. There were dozens of successful local treasure hunts like this.
The ’94-’95 school year ended, and I shoveled my half of the dorm room into the car, pointed it eastward, and left for Denver. It had been a long day, and I didn’t have it in me to go very far, but I didn’t have to: in the middle of the forest I was driving through, I saw a roadside sign advertising cabins to let. More than fifty cents, but the price was reasonable enough that I went for it, so the first night of my second road trip I was serenaded to sleep and the next morning awakened by river sounds. The cabins had obviously been there for many years, but they were sturdy, clean, and well-kept. I looked, but never again found them; perhaps they were in Brigadoon.
I stopped at Oñati in Boise for supper, and eventually wended my way back to Denver for the summer. A few months later, I packed up the car to go back to school. Timed the driving so I could have supper in Boise at Oñati again.
While my folks were on sabbatical in New Zealand, I plucked dad’s 1954 Norman bicycle out the garage in Denver and put it on a rack on the back of the Valiant, for Blue Heron bicycles to give it its first-ever overhaul in Eugene. I can’t work out exactly when this would’ve been; it wasn’t Spring Break, I know that, because I do remember how Spring Break went that year. I’ll tell that story, but not now.
Whenever it was, I stopped at Oñati for supper again. Don’t quite recall the details of how I stored the bike or how it was unveiled to dad—might’ve been they landed home from NZ somewhere on the West Coast, and took a detour to visit me at school. Yes, I think that’s about how it happened, and dad got to ride the freshly-overhauled bike and meet the Blue Heron crew. I brought the bike back to Denver on the back of the Valiant at the end of that school year (supper at Oñati again) and dad rode it quite a lot—happily until his health began to fail, then doggedly until the lymphatic cancer took bike riding out of the question.
But I’ve overtaken myself; there’s a lot more to tell about that school year. Having been to Wildcat Auto Wrecking up in Sandy on the road trip with Dad five years before, I was eager to go again. After days and weeks of putting off the trip in service to such noisome bothers as classwork, I decided it was finally time to go one afternoon around 2 o’clock. Now, Wildcat was 2½ hours northeast in clear traffic and good weather. I guess my impatience clouded my thinking; even if conditions had been good I would’ve had what, maybe an hour there before closing time would make me turn around. As it happened, conditions were very ungood: the rain turned into freezing rain, and then quickly deteriorated to an all-out ice storm; the highway became a slick, slow slide show. I kept throwing bad minutes after good, but eventually reason came up for air and I decided to cut my losses and head back home.
Getting turned around on an overpass demonstrated just how slick the roads had become, and the trip home was a matter of keeping the car moving and pointed straight ahead. As long as I did that, I was more or less okeh, but any lateral movement felt like tempting death, even just drifting out the ruts in the built-up ice. Traffic had slowed far down, and it took multiple hours to get back toward Eugene.
Now, I was studying linguistics because I liked words and my mother had suggested it. I still didn’t know linguists don’t really deal in words, and it hadn’t yet dawned on me mother damn well didn’t necessarily know best (that course of study ended one day when I walked into the department office and saw a poster advertising a lecture entitled “Four Centuries of the Umlaut”). There was to be a social event that night, a dinner or something at the home of the head of the UO Linguistics Department—another sturdy reason for a 5-hour round-trip drive bisected by an hour getting grimy in a wrecking yard, no? It had only been getting frozier as night fell, so I figured I had exactly one shot at reaching his house near the top of a hill. I made my way to the street, built up as much speed as I could at the bottom of the hill and headed on up. My traction, iffy at first, quickly deteriorated; I racked it into first gear and clawed my wheelspinning way up the hill by intermittently melting little patches through the freezing slush. I’d melt down to pavement, the car would jerk forward then lose momentum, then melt another patch and jerk forward, and so on and on slowly up the hill until I managed to reverse-jam the wheels against the curb.
I went in and schmoozed for the obligatory hours, unsure the whole time if I’d leave to find the Valiant at the top of a pile of cars at the bottom of the hill; no, it was right where I left it. I don’t remember how or when I got the car home, but I do remember my headlights revealing a couple of early A-bodies off in the distance. By and by the weather cleared up, and I went to have a closer, better-lit look. Yep, a ’61 Dodge Lancer for sale whole, and a ’66 Plymouth Valiant being parted out. The Lancer was tempting, for obvious reasons, but I wasn’t in a position to buy another car.
I was, however, increasingly sick to damn death of the FrankenTorqueflite transmission in my ’65. The car had an obnoxious droning vibration at high freeway speeds, strong enough to make the rearview mirror blurry. I’d taken it to a transmission shop in town where the guy diagnosed a faulty tailshaft bearing and put in a new one without changing the vibration at all. His next guess was a torque converter problem, but clearly he was grasping at random straws. I decided I’d had enough, so I made a deal with the ’61-Lancer-and-’66-Valiant guy: I paid him $30, had his ’66 towed to the BP station, Chet swapped its transmission into my ’65 and vice versa, and I had the ’66 towed back to the guy’s place. I don’t remember the whole dance costing very much; I had AAA and they were less stringent back then about investigating the reasons behind the tow.
With the ’66 transmission in my car, a lot of aggravations went away. First gear sounded correct again (sweet relief and music to my ears!), the car would once again shift 2-3 even if I had the accelerator on the floor, and most of the rest of the irritants of my badly-specced trans were history. There was one new issue, though: a weird fluttering/groaning/low creaking noise while stopped in Drive, which could be silenced by edging forward just slightly (but not too much, or it’d resume). I didn’t like it, for obviously something was the matter, but I was tired of messing with transmissions and it didn’t seem to affect the function of anything, so I just turned up the radio about it; overall this decades-old transmission worked better. Years later I learned what the noise was. The Torqueflites were extensively re-engineered for ’66; the governor was fed from the front pump (spun by the engine) rather than by the eliminated rear pump, which had been spun by the output shaft of ’65 and older transmissions. A minor flaw in the new system affected early-built ’66 transmissions. The noise sounded bad, but didn’t hurt anything and was easily fixed either as a standalone service operation or during a routine overhaul, neither of which had been done on this particular transmission.
Also, that high-speed freeway vibration was unaffected by the transmission swap. Dammit, but at least now I could eliminate the transmission as a cause, and I guessed that was progress. And I didn’t need to drive at high speeds to motor around town, like for dinner with the only girlfriend I ever had. I hadn’t—believe me, I hadn’t—gone looking for a girlfriend; she just sort of…happened. I met her in one of UO libraries while I was trying to scan that Mopar frisbee I’d found in Jasper. I had no experience with scanners, which in those days were as bulky, clunky, and temperamental as the computers they were hooked to.
So I was having trouble, and the young lady at the next computer gave me some help. We got to talking. Her name was Jessica. She worked at the library on work-study, but wasn’t on duty at the moment, just using the computers there. Looked like she was working on a “homepage”, somehing I’d just recently learnt to do myself, and the internet archive has preserved that first page of mine so it can still make your eyes hurt, a quarter-century later:
I took a look at what Jessica was working on. It was all about Pink Floyd, a band I’d heard of by name but didn’t know anything about. I don’t remember how it was that we came to hang out again, but we did. And again. And again, and yet again. We’d exchange e-mails over the course of the day, or spend some time ntalking or ytalking, and it got so we were spending time together and having dinner on a regular basis. Scarcely ever dinner out; she had very little money. Instead, I’d drive my Valiant over to her place, park next to the Saab 96 some other tenant in her building drove, and we’d walk a few blocks to the Albertson’s, or if it was raining hard we’d take the Valiant. Spaghetti. If it wasn’t actually almost always spaghetti, it’s the spaghetti I remember: A seasoning packet, a pound of hamburg, a handful of spaghetti, maybe some garlic bread. Maybe some green Gatorade. There was something about the combination of us and that particular Albertson’s that reliably caused hilarity. We cracked up every time at products and displays or whatever. I’m sure people thought we were high. We weren’t, and didn’t care. Back at her place, we’d fix dinner together. Maybe watch some TV while dinner simmered on the stove. Maybe play with the big, skittish black cat with the soulful green eyes. Talk about the day at school and work. One evening, a collection of Weird Al videos was on TV. It was the first time either of us had seen “Smells Like Nirvana”, and we were both incapacitated on the floor, rolling around and clutching our sides with laughter.
Dinner was always so damned good. And as the TV shows lapsed into banality and the daylight failed, we’d revise the answer to that question those other Albertsons-goers had about us, and then finish off the spaghetti. Sometimes we’d walk through the moonlight across the green space and over to the park with the playground. Swinging on the swings and staring at the sky. Grabbing the handworn galvanised pipeworks of the merry-go-round, running in circles and then hopping dizzily onto the diamondplate, staring up at the spinning sky.
Sometimes we’d just stay at her place, lying next to one another on the floor or on the couch, staring at the insides of our eyelids and babbling with each other. And listening to Pink Floyd, always Pink Floyd. “Learning to Fly”, “Us and Them”. It was one such mindbent night when I heard the latter song, those opening saxophone riffs, that it suddenly occurred to me that somehow I’d inadvertently got a girlfriend.
One afternoon I picked her up at her place in the Valiant and drove us out to Florence, a little town on the coast. We had dinner at ICM (International C-food Market), dessert at an ice cream place, and then we walked along the beach in the saltspray and the fog and the moonlight, under the impossibly swift clouds. I knew the script said I was supposed to be holding her hand, and she was right there next to me. But I couldn’t pick up her hand and hold it because I knew it would be dishonest and fraudulent. I knew why, too, but I’d been safe (if desperately miserable) inside my closet fortress since age 11, and wasn’t yet ready, able, or willing to open the door. I also wasn’t willing to drag anyone else into the darkness with me, though, so I kept my hands to myself as we walked.
I went to a hippie passover ceremony—as if there was some other kind at that time in that place. when I pulled up, one of the other attendees got all excited about my car and pointed me at semi-local (Corvallis) Neal Gladstone’s relevant ode. I called up Neal and enthused about the song, but I only ever went to just the one passover thing; I’m no sedermasochist.
I drove the nine hours from Eugene down to Sunnyvale, California, a pilgrimmage for Doug Dutra’s big Bay Area Slant-6 Club meet. That’s where the pic at the head of this post was taken. Those are ’60-’61 Valiant flying-saucer hubcaps—I’ve always liked them, and now I have a clock made of such a one. The rubber-ducky antenna was ugly, but it worked okeh. That was a fine and fun trip; the meet was far bigger than my dozen-car efforts in Denver had been, and I got to drive a ’67 or ’68 Dart GT 340 convertible belonging to the guy whose couch I was crashing on. I also got a ride in Dutra’s Barracuda race car with the lightweight, high-revving 210-cubic-inch Slant-6 he’d built. Fun ride, if a loud one; I hollered “I want one o’ these!” over the engine’s roar. Without missing a beat, Doug said “No, you don’t!”.
I never did make it back up to Wildcat, but I did go check out the Portland Swap Meet at PIR, the Portland International Raceway. More like the Portland Swamp Meet; it was pissing down good ol’ Oregon sunshine the day I woke early for the 2-hour drive. No ice storm this time, but a major traffic jam caused by swa(m)p meet attendees all trying to get off the highway and park at PIR. Eventually I made it. I can’t describe the event in detail; I only have general memories of it being enormous, and specific memories of what I bought: eight or nine new-in-box 1962 Valiant tail light lenses in very good Glo-Brite aftermarket quality (no, I didn’t have a car they’d fit, but that didn’t make any difference to me), and four slot mag wheels, 14″ × 6″, in the 5-on-4″ bolt circle that would fit my car. Not quite a set; they differed a little in detail, but close enough that one wouldn’t notice without picky inspection.
Somehow or other without drowning, I schlepslogged the wheels and my bag o’ boxed lenses however (very) far it was back to the car. I had the wheels polished at a place in Eugene, and bought a set of BF Goodrich Radial T/A tires, size 205/70R14. Compared to the 185/75R14 whitestripes on skinny 14″ × 4½” steel wheels I’d had before, the new rollers looked much stouter and filled the wheelwells better. Too much better, as it happened; I couldn’t steer all the way in either direction without a tire shoulder snagging the corner of the sheetmetal at the leading edge of the wheel arch. I checked out a tinsnips from the craft centre (or maybe it wasn’t meant to leave the premises and I snuck it out) and did a double fender cornerectomy. No more snagging, and the car felt much more surefooted, but the rear sidewalls still wanted to rub on the insides of the fenders. Sigh.
Christmas break came round, and I made that trip I mentioned to visit my sister who was working and living in London. While there, I visited a friend in Cambridge. He’d lived in South Africa and had brought cars to the UK with him: a green ’59 Chev, assembled in the RSA with green leather interior, and a 1973 Chrysler Valiant Charger 190 Sports Coupé—which is to say, an RSA-built ’71 Demon with right-hand drive, bilingual English/Afrikaans controls and displays, and a 2bbl Slant-6 rated at 190 BHP. This is me sitting behind the wheel of that car (the paint job was quite nice; this mottled appearance is caused by frost). He’d also imported a Pontiac Fiero from the States, for some strange reason. Dude had an Americana store in Cambridge town, with a taxi-yellow ’78 Caprice header panel with lit-up headlamps as the front window display. Inside were telephones shaped like ’57 Chevs, Elvis Presley on infinite repeat and suchlike. He did brisk business.
There was also a tea shop sharing the space, and eventually I grew peckish, so sat down for a bite and a cuppa. My friend came over and said he had a customer who was intrigued to learn there was an actual, real American on site and wanted to ask me some questions, if that was okeh. Sure, send ‘im over. I guess he might’ve been five or six years older than I, and he wanted to know about American television: did we get any British shows? Oh, yes, I assured him, we had PBS, which stood for the Public Broadcasting System, and they showed British comedies like “Are You Being Served”, which I enjoyed very much.
The guy was aghast “Oh, I can’t believe they’re showing that; it’s rubbish! Are You Being Served is completely crap! Oh, it’s bloody awful! ” After he’d got the bad taste of it out his mouth, he wanted to know about the American shows: “They’re still showing The Dukes of Hazzard, though, aren’t they?”, he asked in complete earnest; apparently he considered it high art.
Back in Oregon I took the Valiant to a show in Corvallis, where I got to sit in a General Lee (yes, there’s a picture; no, I’m not showing it to you). I saw a ’65 Dart GT with beautiful shiny deep metallic blue-green paint, and got the idea to have my car painted by the same guy, there in Corvallis. I wanted a metallic emerald green I’d seen on VWs during the European trip. The job was quoted at four kilodollars, and I put down a several-hundred-dollar deposit. Dates kept slippin’ (slippin’, slippin’) into the future, and explanations shifted and drifted towards excuses; eventually I had to insist on my deposit back. Bullet dodged, there; surely the job would’ve wound up costing much more than quoted, and taking much longer. The paint got left alone, Metallic Mudpuddle or whatever Chrysler Canada called it, fading and chalking and all, until some damn dillweed decided to drag a couple of keys down the driver’s side on the very last day of school. Insurance paid for the repair, which wound me up with shiny new paint above the side trim and faded/chalky still below. Better? Well…it gave me a glimpse of nice, glossy paint from the driving seat, I guess.
And there was still quite a lot of time I’d spend in that car’s driving seat, so…stay tuned!
I look forward to these A-Body stories every Saturday morning. Thank you from a Slant Six and Dart/Valiant lover in Maine!
You’re welcome—and thank you! 🤓
College life with an A body – I lived a version of that story too, and enjoy reading your version.
Although I differ in this from the general population, I probably have a lot of company hereabouts in that I H.A.T.E vibrations in my cars. My 71 Scamp was, for some reason, very picky about wheel balance – much more so than other cars I have owned. There was one guy at one repair shop who worked a bubble balancer like Les Paul worked a guitar. My Scamper was always smooth as glass after he was done with it.
I have to agree with you that those metallic dirt colors that were popular at that time may have been a nice 2 or 3 year experience for someone when they were new, but they aged badly and were so unappealing in the time of car color everywhere. I am fortunate that I managed to avoid them in the many cars of that era I owned.
I was allergic to abnormal noise, vibration, and harshness in my old cars, too—kind of silly, given the large amounts of normal NVH in my old cars relative to new ones, but I still went to great lengths about it. It can be hard to find someone (1) with the proper tools and machinery, (2) in good condition, and (3) the skill and (4) willingness to use it (5) correctly on a mainstream car, let alone (6) on an oldie. I tried very hard—sometimes I failed—to be a good customer for those people when I found them.
I have difficulty imagining those earth tones (I’m being unduly polite) being a nice experience even when brand new. I mean, sure, a shiny paint job looks nice in any colour, but I just can’t imagine deliberately choosing a drab beige or a dirty-snow off white or a greyish brownish used-chewing-gum “colour”, or fecal brown metallic, or industrial-floor grey…whether we’re talking about a ’65 Valiant, a ’74 Ford, or a current-model Audi. I just don’t get it. Blah blah resale value, etc, okeh, but still: echhk.
(That said, I am very glad Ford are no longer painting cars that godawful lipstick pink-red).
You really manage to pack a lot of emotion and memories into a very short piece. Thank you.
I don’t recall your having mentioned what your father passed from before, only briefly that he passed, but please accept my condolences. Cancer is a terrible thing and I’m sure lymphatic cancer is particularly ugly. I am so very sorry.
Thanks for the evocative college memories of spaghetti and staying up all night experiencing the wonder of the world. I’m almost exactly the same age you are and that was a wondrous time and perhaps that is one of the few things I really miss about my late teens and early twenties.
Daniel reminded me that I could did not know much about cooking in my college days and that although spaghetti out of a can was not acceptable, this was the gourmet alternative.
You’re welcome, and thanks kindly. Yes, dad’s decline and end was awful, and there’ll be more on the topic later on in the story of the ’62 Lancer.
I’m right onside with you about that age and time—almost all of it I wouldn’t want to do over again unless I could arrange to make a better go of it, but those parts: yes.
Ah, college life with an old car. My school experience improved once I brought the Matador to uni with me in third year. By that point I’d moved to a small residence college with reasonable parking fees.
Somehow it never occurred to me to explore the city and surrounding area, I just used it to drive home on the weekends. Well that and cross the border to go to Mexican Town in Detroit. 🙂
That was quite a lucky thing that your randomly swapped in Torqueflite turned out to be a winner.
The odds were pretty good; those A904 and A727 Torqueflites thrived on being left alone.
Shouldn’t that car be referred to as a Valiart or Daliant or something? I do know that the big ones are Plodges.
…as I was saying: stay tuned.
Eugene in the 1990s; I’m a bit nostalgic for that era here. After living in LA and the Bay Area, it was such a different reality. Everything was so cheap! Oregon was just coming out of a decade-long depression in the 1980s, during which time it lost population, house prices crashed, and folks were happy to work for peanuts. That’s all pretty much history, although it’s still pretty mellow, relatively speaking.
I didn’t spend any more time than necessary fixing my old F100 back then, as I was busy working it hard with my moved houses. But if something broke, I could find parts for very cheap at a junkyard in Springfield that had a bunch of them. All gone…
Fun read, with all those familiar places. I drive by that Albertson’s all te time, and the park at Amazon, and… Another great breakfast read. Thanks.
Eugene in the ’90s was a hell of a fine placetime, and I remember wishing I’d got to grow up there—though of course I can only guess at what that’d’ve been like, and it could probably have turned me out worse just as easily as better. Anyhow, it was just about an ideal break and change from suburban Denver where I came from.
Mellow’s a good adjective. Remember how it felt like the whole town took it personally when Jerry Garcia died?
The accelerated demise of junkyards and wrecking yards was just beginning to pick up some steam at the start of my old-car hobby. By the end, there weren’t many left.
Amazon park, thank you; I couldn’t remember the name. I also don’t recall if that’s also where I screwed up my knee long-term: I took to jogging through one of the parks that had a loop trail covered in bark mulch, which covered up a tree root. I didn’t trip over it, but came down on it just right (just wrong) and jammed my right knee—like jamming a finger by catching a baseball wrong. I can’t definitely claim causation, but that knee gave me years of trouble. That’ll teach me to go exercising!
Daniel, I am enjoying your Saturday morning posts.
Since you have mentioned both linguistics and Weird Al, this sprang to mind. It just seems appropriate.
Haha, that one is fabulous – had never heard it before. It hits home after living with a grammar and composition major in college for 4 years – one not shy about correcting his roomie’s verbal mistakes.
I concur! Lot’s of fun, as I’d never heard it either!! But it was also VERY informative as well, LOL!! 🙂
Thanks, Jason, both for the compliment and the video. Haven’t seen/heard that one in quite a few years.
Weird Al went to my college a few years before me, apparently he made his first few recordings in the KCPR studio…
Daniel, I’m becoming an A-body fan through your writings, very enjoyable reads and also dredging up my own spaghetti dinner and long overnights memories with a very good friend at college just a few years before your own…
A couple of years after graduation a few friends and I actually roadtripped up to Eugene for a weekend, we were there likely the same time you were (but I can’t recall seeing you 🙂 ). I did pick up an Oregon hoodie from the campus bookstore that I rediscovered recently and now my 14y.o. wears it about three days a week…
Good stuff, looking forward to next weekend already.
Thanks, Jim! I recall the UO bookstore being quite a fine one, with a terrific art supply department downstairs. And outside, on the corner of 13th and whateveritwas, there was a little falafel cart. Alexander’s Great Falafel. Guy was from somewhere in the middle east, and he wasn’t kidding around; it was truly excellent falafel.
During a long career that took me to most major cities in the U.S. for business travel, I am long overdue for a visit to Eugene, which alas, remains a void in my personal geography. Eugene seems like an idyllic college town of the sort that is truly additive to the undergraduate experience.
I am already a fan of the Chrysler A-bodies, but every time I see a picture of this Canadian Valiant, it throws a curve ball at me, what with its Dart face and longer wheelbase. Just the thing to stand out from the crowd!
Still, so many details of these cars are familiar to me, as I was very young when my parents owned 1964 and later 1966 Dart wagons and as a car-crazy kid, I absorbed my vinyl-lined surroundings with the same intensity described by so many Curbsiders. Given the popularity of the Dart/Valiant in the mid-60s, it may have been one of the few times in nearly 60 years of car ownership that my parents were actually in sync with the preferences of the overall market.
That is exactly what Eugene was at that time, and probably still is in today’s way.
My Valiant, being a ’65 (and like the ’66s) was Dart-shaped from front to back. The ’63-’64 Canadian Valiants were U.S. Valiant front clips (hood, fenders, bumper, valance) on U.S. Dart bodies, with Canada-specific badging and trim.
So, Daniel, I just saw a 65 Dart with something called the 273 Charger option. I also suspect the VIN isn’t a match and therefore there has been an engine transplant. Nonetheless, an interesting engine, for a small A body.
The Charger 273 V8 was a regular option on the ’65 Darts. 235 hp, 4 barrel. The base 273 was rated at 180 hp. These are not all that uncommon.
Anecdotal confirmation: A high-school friend’s family’s car was a ’67 Dart with the coveted 273 V8.
As well, my wife’s parents once owned a Plymouth Fury 9-passenger wagon with same. They told the story of driving in convoy with neighbours who had a similar car, but with a 440, which allegedly used almost twice as much fuel.
As they (my wife’s family) had recently moved from New Zealand, the small-V8-equipped wagon must have seemed like a drag racer in comparison to their previous Brit cars.
OK, initially when looking around it seemed that this was a little more special like a Shelby when they were built out in Los Angeles early on. Apparently some 1965 Darts were also special built in Los Angeles area in one certain color and so the impression was the engine was only in them. Seems like a pretty hot engine in a light weight car.
It’s easy to mistakenly overconflate the Charger 273 engine with the Dodge Dart Charger—which had the Charger 273 engine, but that engine was also available in any other Dart (or in any Valiant/barracuda, wearing a “Commando 273” air cleaner callout instead).
The Dart Charger was a special ’65 Dart model built at Los Angeles, only in light yellow exterior paint, and with either a black or a white-and-gold interior. To see a truly astounding nut-by-bolt-by-thread restoration of such a car by a detail-fixated Swede, read this 134-page thread (lots of pics!).
You could get the solid lifter engine as an option in any Dart and Valiant except maybe the station wagons but NEVER say never with Chrysler/Mopar. There are usually exceptions to every rule. It’s hard to imagine an automaker now making any kind of custom alteration from the norm to suit a particular customer.
They are special but unfortunately not on par with the Shelby Mustang. Believe me, A-body lovers have long dreamed of “What if?” What if Chrysler had devoted the kind of resources to Dart and Valiant performance and development that they devoted to the B-bodies, Nascar, the 426 Hemi, the 440 Six-Pack etc. There was the short lived D-Dart program which was quickly set up on a very low budget to create a Dart that would be competitive with in several racing categories including Trans-Am and D/Stock drag racing. This included the 283 small block Corvettes and the new 289 271HP K-code Mustangs. The D-Darts were modified to 275 HP.Dodge felt they would be competitive in class. Due to rules changes the D-Darts were moved into a faster class and struggled to be competitive in NHRA drag racing. At the same time the big block and Hemi B-bodies were cleaning up at the track. It was a simple decision to pull the plug on a program to which they hadn’t made much of a commitment. So what could have been? At the same time Chrysler was developing the awesome 340 and then reentered Trans-Am racing in 1970 with the E-bodies in the form of the AAR ‘Cuda and the T/A Challenger.
This thread from “For A-bodies only” is pretty good…
https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/threads/1966-dodge-and-the-d-dart-mistake.218677/
Every 273 CI engine through 1968 was a solid lifter engine. The 180 HP version produced max torque @ 1600 RPM. In ‘64 that was the only version available.
When I read the Motor Trend article on the new 1964 Dodge Dart with the 273 V8, I went straight to the Dodge Dealer I had worked at prior to enlisting in the USMC, and ordered my Dart GT with the Hurst shifter and 4 speed transmission. It arrived at the dealer just prior to the weekend I was at the 1964 Daytona 500 race where I received the phone call that it was in. The next possible weekend I had leave, I headed home. It was a great car, my first absolutely new car, though the ‘58 Fury I was currently driving was purchased with only a little over 2,000 miles on the odometer, but by 1964 it had many miles and a 383 replacing its original 290 HP 318.
I seem to have been carried away reminiscing, I was only going to mention the solid lifter cam in the 273, sorry, see ya.
I think all of the 1965 Dart GT Chargers were yellow with either black or white interiors and came with 13″ Cragar SS wheels with Charger center caps.
See my comment just above yours.
I wrote my comment after reading Paul’s but before I saw yours. By the way I have a yellow and black 1965 Dart GT convertible with the solid lifter 4 barrel engine. Built in Los Angeles. I have seen the Swede’s work and it is inspiring.
I can only find this older photo at the moment. My son is 27 years old now so that will give you some idea how long ago this was taken.
Wow, what a keen photo! Guess the statute of limitations has expired so I can’t scold you for those headlamp eyelids that make the car unsafe to drive at night, and anyway you seem to have survived 🤓
I recall British comedies such as Benny Hill and On the Buses.
Greatly wound stories about your Mopar adventures. You either have extraordinary powers of recall or you kept excellent diaries. No matter, the details in these paint a great picture in the mind’s eye.
I’m glad you like my stories! I’ll keep writing them until I run out. They run on a mix of recollection and archives.
(haven’t heard of On the Buses, but in my personal hell, the television plays Benny Hill nonstop and can’t be turned off.)
I love your recollection of Jessica. I can so relate. Sophomore year in high school I started taking French with an extremely out there teacher, Madame Sud-Rissou. This was also the first time I met Tammi, who went to a different junior high in our same district. We got sat next to each other, and immediately we were trying to one up one another over who will laugh harder at this crazy lady’s antics and suggestions. I distinctly remember being asked by Madame why I did not recognize the word nager in context (I did), and replied in Spanish “La piscina? No me digas.” which made Tammi explode into laughter. We were ruthlessly bad together. I also taught her to literally sit underneath our shared table so when Madame did attendance, we “weren’t there”, and therefore weren’t called on to respond to her vaguely informational French teachings (your ex husband wasn’t French, therefore shut up about him).
Well, long story short I get confronted at my locker about how much I love Tammi, buy my other completely platonic girlfriends (ladies, open your eyes!). I honestly was surprised by the jealousy, and Tammi wasn’t one to be played a fool, so duh… I also remember us skipping school together the next year to go to a movie, and her car got broken into and they stole her purse in the back seat. Tammi could swear, let me tell you…
I forgot a great part to this; Madame insisted upon a chosen French name. After experiencing a full year of her incompetent garbage, in my second year I did the appropriate thing; I chose Marcel Marceau to be referenced as. You do the logistical math with a woman expecting “authenticity”.
«Alors, il est interdit pour les framboises frivoles de nager ici, car les éléphants sont déjà dans la piscine!»
I had always suspected that was the case. Darn nanny-state bureaucracy, eh?
However, and fortunately for us, “les pomme de terre est dans le salle de bain”.
Non, non, non, non, NON, m’sieur! On dit que les pommes de terre sont dans la salle de bain! Alors, je te dénoncerai à l’académie francaise!
Aieee! The hunter has become the hunted! Grasshopper has snatched the pebble from my hand … I have met my match in randomness, and then some.
Daniel, moi chapeau is off to you.
I concur. It was much like with my yoga wife, Kelly. The sex thing didn’t get in the way (she was engaged; I had a live in gf who is now my wife), but we were intimate in other ways, since we always paired up together in two-person poses. Our yogi whom we adored threatened to separate us when we got snarky that didn’t relate to the class. She was a bit younger, but she had serious stones: paramedic, now a lab tech, expert equestrienne and into off-roading with her fiance. She found it funny and insulting to be mansplained in the outdoors from guys who didn’t take her seriously, only for her to winch them out of the mud with her 4×4. She once changed a flat tire in a dress when her then bf didn’t have a clue. I’d take her back to her car after dark and we’d talk for at least an hour (work and relationships mostly) and I’d see her off. This was great for 4 years and kept me motivated to go to 7 am yoga. When she got fed up with her supervisory chain and was recruited to another campus in faraway Ft Collins, CO, I told her to go, since she was an outdoorsy kind of Girl and it would be a great match. (She was having relationship problems, and the move actually saved their engagement, especially after she later messed up her knee skiing and he promptly flew out and catered to her needs and care.) That was 2015, and I haven’t seen her since, but we keep in touch via text, IM and FB. Going to CO was a great move for her and I’m happy that was an upgrade.
My mom had a ’65 Dodge Dart sedan (225 \6 + Torqueflite) which we had 10 years until my brother totaled it in 1979. (Mom replaced it with a 1978 Chevette, which truly was a rolling turd). Could not keep an alignment and leaked like a sieve, but never let mom down. Later in life when I described my 7 categories of smokers, I’d say that mom drove the world’s biggest ashtray. (There was always ash obscuring the gear indicator atop the steering column.) That was the car I learned to drive in. Periodically I’d dream that I found it intact and drove it home. It’s the only car of mom’s that I could wish that I could have inherited.
What building was the Chrysler dealer located in Cresswell? Thanks.
I’m afraid that detail is lost to time. I don’t recall its name or exact location.
Daniel, I’ve read every one of your COAL posts since stumbling on the first one a couple of months ago (involving your childhood synesthesia and the ’70 Dodge Dart), and have gone back and read most of your earlier posts.
You are a marvelous writer! I’ve enjoyed these immensely, and yet only left a comment after reading the first one.
So this is just to say that perhaps appreciative comments are like iceberg tips; for every positive comment, I suspect there are a dozen that never get written.
I love Dick Francis’s novels (though I have no interest in horse racing), and Stephen Hunter’s books even more (though I am not into guns), so imagine my delight when fine writing actually involves car and bicycles (and, bonus, is laden with strange anecdotal humour).
You are, of course, correct that rear turn-signal lenses should be amber.
So this is just to say that perhaps appreciative comments are like iceberg tips; for every positive comment, I suspect there are a dozen that never get written.
This is so true, and I tell this to my contributors regularly. The number of comments has gone down in recent years, presumably because folks are using phones more, or just less inclined to take the time to do so.
Thank you for your comments. It’s good to hear from those below the water line.
Paul, I should have mentioned that I stumbled on Daniel’s COAL after finding the CC site due to a post of yours being linked in a comment on BITOG, another mostly automotive site.
Your post was the one on how displacement per cylinder affects HP and torque. I am fascinated by engine tech, thought the article was absolutely brilliant, and have been an avid CC reader ever since. (And yes, that’s yet another post I should have commented on.)
Thank you, № 35!
Increasingly I find myself sick to damn death of my current career. I’m sticking with it for now because bills don’t pay themselves, but I don’t know how much longer I can carry on putting up with it. So maybe I’ll have a proper go at being a professional writer (because yeah, that’s a profession well known for being highly remunerative and practically burnout-proof, eh? X-( )
Anyway. I’m glad you like my writing, and I’ll keep at it.
(if I have an executive-strength magic wand so I can have every last little bit of what I want, then yes, the turn signal lenses are amber…but if the U.S. ever stops pretending the rest of the world is wrong and mandates rear turn signals that emit amber light, regardless of the lens colour, then I can die happy. I expect to live a long, cranky life.)
Daniel, my wife and I (for I regularly interrupt her to share nuggets of your brilliance) want to know what you do for paid work (past and present). I’d assumed you had gotten into something technical, perhaps related to automotive lighting or design or restoration, but no, eh?
But then again, how many of us actually wind up in doing our dream job?
Anyway, please keep them coming. I’ve gotten very fond of your father, though, and dread reading about his forthcoming illness. I wish my dad had been as supportive of my early automotive interests (and as tolerant of a son with offbeat interests and a weird sense of humour).
Yes, I wear half a dozen hats in the field of vehicle lighting; it’s all I’ve ever done, professionally.
My father was an unusually interesting man, in a wide variety of ways. He’s been gone over two decades, and I’m still figuring him out as best I can without a chunk of crucial conversations that never happened because he died before they were ripe. I attribute my narrative skill to his example, and that’s one of the reasons I like telling stories.
(speaking of stories, may I point you here and here?)
I read the story of the incompatible aluminum pan/muriatic acid and ensuing near-disaster when it was posted, and the story of lawnmower minutiae about a week ago. Enjoyed both thoroughly!
There’s a lawnmower story in my past, and many strange cars; perhaps I should submit a COAL of my own someday. My combination of unusual life experience and excessive brain sludge might (or might not) result in a readable effort.
I have good memories of Eugene. I dated someone who lived there and lived at her home for awhile, it was routine for us to drive to Florence when it suited us. Mo’s Restaurant has great seafood and Heceta Park is a nice place to walk the beach. I posted a CC about a Riley Elf I saw there once. https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-european/curbside-classic-when-is-a-mini-not-a-mini-when-its-a-1966-riley-elf-mk-iii/
Mo’s was certainly the big-name place everyone knew about. ICM was nearby (everything in Florence is nearby everything else in Florence) but much less flashy. If ever I went to Mo’s, it was only once. It’s not that the food was bad or anything—it was good—but I liked ICM’s food better, and I preferred ICM’s quieter, less selfgratulatory tone (and the “Buoys” and “Gulls” signs on their washroom doors).
Looks like ICM are still in business. I hope to eat there again one day!
As Time Goes By was my favorite British sitcom with sublime acting by the stars Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer.
Don’t think I’ve seen that one—I’ll hafta go looking!
Once again another “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” vibe to savor. The combination of automotive fixation with clear eyed reminiscence and a touch of irony works perfectly. Acceptance of inherent vehicular flaws is the first step.
Thank you, Jon. I’m aware of that book’s existence, but I’ve not read it. Maybe I should!
A genuine classic. The first time I read it in my early teens, I was rather annoyed that it didn’t focus on motorcycles enough. A decade or so later I was surprised at how much it had improved!
A very fine prof, (later Dr.) Fred Madryga at Cariboo College, recommended that we students in his Intro Psych class read Zen for what Robert Persig had to say about quality.
A couple of years later my friend Bruce was really into it, and passed his copy on to me. I read it, and found it profound, but remember little of it from 1978. Time reread it!
It’s still very popular, as it seems; here’s the result of my looking just now to see if I can check it out from the library (answer: not for the foreseeable future). So I will go about it in a manner less olde-tyme; one of the internet libraries has it available and I’ll read it onscreen.
Thanks to my Italian Grandmother and my Mother I learned to cook the family red spaghetti sauce recipe. When I was in college I used to feed my friends and roommates with fairly regular Spaghetti and Meatball Sunday dinners. For some of them it was the only real sit down meal they got all week.
I haven’t bought a packet of spaghetti sauce seasoning, or an off-the-shelf jar of sauce, in decades. Last weekend I made nine litres of bolognese; it’s nearly gone now, and it’s just the two of us here.
But you’ve got me wanting meatballs, so I reckon there’s more sugo in the offing.
You could get the solid lifter engine as an option in any Dart and Valiant except maybe the station wagons but NEVER say never with Chrysler/Mopar. There are usually exceptions to every rule. It’s hard to imagine an automaker now making any kind of custom alteration from the norm to suit a particular customer.
They are special but unfortunately not on par with the Shelby Mustang. Believe me, A-body lovers have long dreamed of “What if?” What if Chrysler had devoted the kind of resources to Dart and Valiant performance and development that they devoted to the B-bodies, Nascar, the 426 Hemi, the 440 Six-Pack etc. There was the short lived D-Dart program which was quickly set up on a very low budget to create a Dart that would be competitive with in several racing categories including Trans-Am and D/Stock drag racing. This included the 283 small block Corvettes and the new 289 271HP K-code Mustangs. The D-Darts were modified to 275 HP.Dodge felt they would be competitive in class. Due to rules changes the D-Darts were moved into a faster class and struggled to be competitive in NHRA drag racing. At the same time the big block and Hemi B-bodies were cleaning up at the track. It was a simple decision to pull the plug on a program to which they hadn’t made much of a commitment. So what could have been? At the same time Chrysler was developing the awesome 340 and then reentered Trans-Am racing in 1970 with the E-bodies in the form of the AAR ‘Cuda and the T/A Challenger.
This thread from “For A-bodies only” is pretty good…
https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/threads/1966-dodge-and-the-d-dart-mistake.218677/
It says a lot about your writing that I find these cars utterly bland, yet devour these stories whenever they’re uploaded. Brilliant stuff!
Thank you kindly! I’ll endeavour to keep it up.
Swapping a 1966 A904 in place of a 1965 is a lot tougher than it sounds. I think it’s just one of the reasons that there is big difference in parts interchangeability and availability between 1965 and 1966 even though the cars didn’t change much in appearance one year to the next.
I can really relate to your aluminum slot mag story. I’ve been trying to put together a decent set of 4 Shelby California 500 14″x7″, 5 on 4, slot mags. I have 4 but one has a little damage that might be fixable. I had just picked up the 4th wheel and also a similar but different brand in 14×6. Maybe that one is the one you are looking for?
You’re surely right about that; I described some(!) of the tribulations here.
“hippie Passover ceremony”: sounds like the sort of thing which used to take place in a kibbutz and would have been severely frowned upon by my grandpa (who ran our Passovers in the PROPER way). But that was in 60s-70s Israel, so…
We had a 57 Plodge (230 flathead and 3 on the tree) and a 71 US Dart (215 slant six and TorqueFlite) so I can relate to some of these stories.
When I was seven and Passover came round, I asked my mother “Can we skip past all the praying and go directly to the eating?” (No)
Oh yes, that question hahaha. We had enough matzos to go with the “appetizers” in the beginning so as to keep one alive until the real food arrived…
Another great bit of story telling and history mixed with good ideas a but life in general…
-Nate
OBTW : Weird Al Yankovic began his musical escapades when he was @ UCSB and his first (I think) song was “Belvedere Cruising” sent into the Doctor Demento radio show as a tape…
He claimed to have recorded it in the dorms bathroom .
-Nate
Cal Poly SLO actually. Architecture major.
Thank you ! .
-Nate