I have mixed feelings about the years I drove this car, between age seventeen and age twenty, and the stunted and backfiring progress of my life at that time.
That I have a single photograph of this car is a miracle. The car disappeared from my life in 1996, long before the advent of ubiquitous consumer digital imaging. Not that we lacked cameras! I owned a camera from the age of seven – a Kodak Instamatic using 110 cartridge film and a fixed focus with a telephoto slide, and I used it to take pictures of buildings and family on vacation. I had a Polaroid 600 for my ninth birthday, and one of the first ten fiercely expensive exposures was my father pale and drawn with walking pneumonia sitting on the redwood outdoor furniture on the deck outside the kitchen. Ron Pollack, who had the camera store in Monticello on Rte. 42 near the Monticello High School, gave me a Kodak fixed focus 35mm point-and-shoot for my bar mitzvah in 1988, and from that camera, which shot dozens of rolls of film until it melted in 1997 on the package shelf of my Oldsmobile, I have a single exposure, from 1995, of the Pontiac.
We hardly ever took pictures of our cars, because cars were substrate, tools, essential mobility, the source of heartache and irritation, but not not admiration as objects in themselves. They were central to our lives but they were not at the centers of our imaginations.
In 1987, the service station in Parksville was owned by Moishe Kleinberger, the Baron of Parksville, who also owned five other businesses on the four corners of the only stoplight on the Quickway between Harriman and Jamestown. Moishe deputized his younger brother to run the repair shop. The 1980 Caprice Classic wagon my parents had purchased at Malcolm Konner in Paramus was pushing closed to 130,000 miles, and I remember the problem was “the lifters”. What were lifters? I had no idea about the anatomy of the pushrod 305 Chevrolet engine in that Caprice, let alone what lifters were, and the younger Kleinberger quoted a engine overhaul price to my mother for fixing the problem that put the kibosh on the idea of keeping the car.
A hunt for a new wagon began. It would not be a minivan, because my mother, five foot two and a 110 pounds soaking wet, was extremely suspicious of the structural integrity of “vans” and was much more confident in sedans. She had a subscription to Consumers Reports and there was a bidding war between a blue 87 Caprice in Montgomery and the Safari, which was being sold at the Colandrea Pontiac in Newburgh, NY. I remember sitting in the back seat of the ‘80 Caprice with my two younger sisters, in the Colandrea parking lot, windows rolled down on a warm late summer night, while my parents finished bargaining. I think it was thirteen thousand cash? To celebrate, Dad took the five of us out for Italian at Guida’s in Newburgh. I remember the tartufo for dessert – the little candied cherry inside the chocolate ice cream bombe.
Purple, wood stream, mauve interior. Cruise control. Four speed automatic transmission with overdrive. Six-way adjustable driver’s seat, never high enough for Mom. Air-conditioning. The AC Delco stereo radio without cassette deck. Full-size spare tire, secret compartment next to the rear gate. Seats eight. EIGHT.
I first drove the car on my sixteenth birthday in 1991, without having a learners permit. Dad encouraged me to take the wheel on a birthday visit at my boarding school (five days, home on weekends), and I drove the car about a hundred feet from one of the lots behind the Upper School towards the Quad. I was unfamiliar with everything about steering, braking, or accelerating, and drove the car one hundred feet forward and twenty feet off of the road uphill onto the fancy landscaping and shrubbery. Driver’s Education with Mr. Clarke would not come until the spring of my junior year in high school, and time was not found for a weekday visit to the Sullivan County DMV for the learners’ permit for weeks to come.
Thanksgiving came, no permit. December crawled into Christmas break and a trip to Italy and Switzerland, no permit, and then, January 5, 1992, came the great American History paper catastrophe. I was two days late handing in a paper – on abolitionism before the Civil War – because it was due the day we came from break, and I had spent the last two weeks in Europe not doing schoolwork. We arrived from the airport back to school at 7pm on a Sunday night. I was planning to stretch my two page draft, to full length in a marathon overnight session, but Dad realized as I was unpacking that I had not finished all of my school work before the trip, as promise, and flipped out. I was banned from driving until my senior year. No learners permit until the summer.
The punishment backfired. I could have had my license in the spring and driven myself to summer jobs, but instead, my parents had to continue driving me. I worked at Camp Kennebrook, a chi-chi sleepaway camp in Bethel the next summer, and Dad had to drive me to work every single day sometimes an hour out of his way. Of course I waited hours after work to be picked up. Later that summer, I started picking up volunteer shifts at the public radio station in Jeffersonville, another thirty mile round trip to nowhere for Dad, and the obligation only got more onerous. By late August 1992, on Sunday mornings alternating with Tom and Carol Foresta, I started hosting The Morning Muse, which was two hours of unprogrammed classical music from station sign-on at 5:55am until Weekend Edition Sunday began downlinking. Glenn Woodell would spell me at ten am with his show tunes and film music all queued up on 33’s and 45’s.
By then, I had my learners permit and was taking drivers ed, and driving to my Sullivan County appointments with Mom in the Pontiac or Dad in the Oldsmobile, and all through the fall, every other Sunday morning at 5am, I would wake up, use the touch-tone to call the computer at the radio tower to turn on the transmitter and record the power levels, wake Dad, and we would head out to Jeffersonville. Sometimes Dad would take me to the empty parking lot at Apollo Plaza for parallel parking lessons, and that’s where I learned about wet brakes and drum brake fade.
When my grandmother moved back to Florida for her last winter, my mother joined her for weeks on end, and the Pontiac sat unused in front of the house. My driver’s test was scheduled for the middle of February. The first try, I took the wagon, and the examiner directed me to parallel park in a too small space between Judge Hanofee’s Cadillac and a snowbank on Court Street in Monticello, and I backed into the snowbank. The retest was three weeks later, and I passed, parking in the same space. That time, I was driving the new ‘93 Lincoln Continental dad had as his second lifetime professional corporation lease, from Marty Braunstein’s Ford-Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Liberty. Marty’s wife Marsha was my first grade secular studies teacher in Hebrew Day School.
Finally, wheels!
There were some cold days in the Catskills after Pinatubo blew. I remember one Sunday predawn subzero morning trying to start the carbureted wagon, and thinking to rush the warm-up by racing the cold engine, as the freezing air from the vents stank of unburned gasoline. Mom screamed and I learned something new about car ownership.
I started driving myself in the Pontiac to the radio station and to work in the preseason at the camp on weekends. I wasn’t allowed to have a car in the boarding program, although the day students all did, and the first time I drove myself to my high school was graduation day. Two weeks after graduation, I lugged my friends Ritesh, Joe, and Tom, along with their double bass, a Rhodes piano, and fretless twelve string guitar, out to the radio station for a Studio B jam session with Dave Dann.
I noticed that I could not floor the engine going uphill. The accelerator could be pressed to the floor, and the engine would not notice. The maximum speed I could accelerate to uphill was about forty-five miles per hour, and I would open up the speed on the preceding downhill stretch to preserve momentum. This was a metaphor for life.
My job was running the food concession at Kennebrook that summer, and there was a hot English blonde on a temporary work visa helping me, and I tried to take her out several times – always getting shut down. By the time the concession shut for the night and all the teen campers were asleep, it could be close to midnight, and I would drive home, smelling like vanilla ice cream and chlorine bleach, down the country roads.
Late in the summer, my friends’ and I had a two hour block from ten to midnight on a Saturday, for freeform radio, which we called Jeff Horse. Halfway through the Annihilator, the Monty Python, and the Spalding Gray, another friend prank called the station and said he had received an FCC official complaint. Oh, how Dana laughed after I shat my pants. We had a midnight drag race, me in my mom’s Safari and Jason’s in his dad’s Firebird, and I almost overtook him on the blind curve outside of White Sulphur Springs..
The Pontiac was still Mom’s and she was recovering from mourning her mother’s death in May, and I would go to college without a car. But I drove myself there, the wagon loaded with my computer, clothes, boxes of books, bookshelves, carpets, while Dad took my sisters and mother in the Lincoln.
I did not drive for most of a year, and I came home from a catastrophic freshman year (dual major Biology PreMed/Communications, the fall was twenty-one credits and a 2.4 GPA, the spring was eighteen credits and a 1.8 GPA, and I pulled a C and an F in the summer marathon inorganic chemistry double course)., I started using the car to work at the radio station again, then, I picked up work stringing for the Times Herald Record in Monticello from Dave Figura, who liked that I was a Cornell kid from the Communications program in the Ag school, and he sent me out to cover town meetings and little news items outside the crime and politics beat.
First tire change – a flat in the Record parking lot in mid-November 1994. Tris Korten, who was doing the crime beat, helped me change it before I drove out to the Town of Eldred monthly meeting.
First skid off the road into a ditch, outside of Livingston Manor as I was driving in a snow storm to a Livingston Manor school board meeting. I hit the brakes to avoid a deer and oh, dear, lost friction at fifteen miles an hour, and ended up in a ditch. I walked to a nearby house and called Mom, who called Sam The Thief, who had the AAA franchise in Liberty, and I was moving again, without damage in an hour and a half. Lesson: Don’t hit the brakes suddenly in a rear-wheel drive car with rear drum brakes.
First uncontrolled skid – Route 17B heading north to Bethel from Monticello past the Raceway “I forgot something at the office” and I jerked the wheel over for a quick U-turn, only I was doing thirty, not five. Ooops. SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Ended up facing one hundred eighty degrees around – the direction I had planned to be heading in, but I was in the Bernie’s parking lot. Okay, I needed to be a much better driver.
I bought the car from Mom in November of 1994 with money I had earned from the newspaper, and took it back to school that summer, when I retried the honors chemistry class I’d bombed the year before. I kept the car parked next to Dickson Hall and drove it seven times that summer. Once to Hamilton to pick up my friend James for a visit to Ithaca, when the radiator blew on the Thruway in the high summer heat. The car had actually overheated several years before and fried a wiring harness, and had been the subject of a telephone call to Bob and Ray Magliozzi on CarTalk in 1990. Click and Clack recommended selling the car after the first overheating. I managed to get the car to a garage, quickly returned to service with new radiator, and we finished the roundtrip to Hamilton.
I moved back into my old ecology dorm, the only dorm with private bathrooms and ensuite air-conditioning. I remember driving the 140 miles from Ithaca to Loch Sheldrake on October Sunday morning, to a defensive driving class at the Sullivan County Community College, in one hundred minutes. Defensive driving! I was such a stupid twenty year old.
First (and second to last to today) speeding ticket: on the downhill in heading into Mountaindale in front of Glick’s Chevrolet Thanksgiving weekend 1995, I hit 73 in a 55 on the Quickway, and a state trooper gave me a ticket which I ignored. Ignoring the ticket bit me back the next summer when the car was murdered.
I moved from the dorms to a summer apartment on the first floor of a house next to the Hillside Inn – a notoriously seedy motel on Stewart Avenue right next to West Campus. The There were five coeds staying upstairs. I worked as a “night rambler” for the Cornell high school summer college experience program. After curfew, I changed the cores of the locks on the entry doors to the now demolished Class of ’18 and Class of ’21, and then I would hide in the bushes and stalk high school students trying to sneak out in the middle of the night. It paid five dollars an hour, and I slept until noon. I had the hots for one of the coeds – a woman named Melissa who was also a rising junior, like me.
The first weekend in July was a board-gaming convention in Columbus, Ohio. I offered to drive, but my friend Ken had a much more fuel efficient minivan. But there was a much more dangerous complication – the State of New York had suspended my license because I had ignored the speeding ticket! (Twenty.) I could not drive the car until Mike Keiser answered the ticket for me in Town of Thompson Court, and that would be after the weekend. So I had a brainwave – what if there was an emergency and the car needed to be moved? I gave the keys to Melissa. “To Move In Case of an Emergency. As we left town, I admitted to misgivings, and my friend Peter said, “What’s she gonna do, crash it?”
I returned from Columbus and the car was twelve inches shorter.
Peter ate a bee in penance in my kitchen.
Melissa had taken the car joyriding, gotten drunk, had the keys taken from her by a Chinese student named Tai Tan, and the next morning, Tai Tan was returning the car to the apartment house when she lost control of the car and broadsided a Cornell F-250, doing $20,000 in damage. The front end was destroyed, except for one headlight pod. The hood would not open. State Farm totalled the car for $2700, and I bought it back for salvage for $250. The frame was bent – I remember keeping the steering wheel at a ninety degree angle to compensate, and drove it back to Liberty at the end of the summer and parked it behind my father’s office, where it waited for a scooper to come save and rehabilitate it.
The first buyer returned it because the title had been burned for salvage, but the second buyer whisked it away for $750 dollars. I was now an assigned risk, and I had $3500 for a new car. That car would smell of cigars.
My 1985 Parisienne Safari Wagon is identical to this wagon. It is a beautiful wagon. Pontiac designed and built some of the best GM cars. The Parisienne Brougham model is beautiful also and my favorite years are 1985 and 1986. I would replace the 4 barrel carburetor on the 305 cu. in, V8 with the fuel injection system that Chevrolet introduced in 1955-1957 or install a 1984-1986 LT1 with tuned port fuel injection.
Hi,
I meant to say install a 1994-1996 LT1 tuned port fuel injected V8 with the 4 speed automatic transmission. My 1996 Roadmaster LTD Wagon has this drive train.
Gary
It is really awkward wrecking someone else’s car. I did a number on my college roommate’s 72 Duster in a university parking lot, and he got the same experience wrecking a boss’s 78 Country Squire by backing it into a light pole. I feel sorry for the poor girl who tried to do a solid for her friend and ended up killing your wagon.
I usually love wagons, but for some reason are only lukewarm on these. I have no idea if these used the Chevy 305 or the Olds 307 as so many of the B bodies did in those years.
The Safari had the Oldsmobile 307 engine with overdrive. It wasn’t very fuel efficient but then again I had no idea how to drive a V8 efficiently because I was a 19-year-old with a lead foot. I remember calculating trips in increments of eighths of a tank.
Liberty to Ithaca was three eighths. Round-trip Liberty to Monticello was one eighth. School board meeting in Narrowsburg was a fourth, and so on. I’d file a $35 Action-in-brief with $8 in gas for expenses, and file the story on the VAX 300 baud dialup.
The furthest I ever drove the car was into the Adirondacks for a September campout went I had the great good fortune to have a gas griddle explode in my face and burn off half my hair and beard.
Haven’t had a beard since.
I’m belatedly realizing that I forgot to tell the story about the mtbe plume in my hometown and how it came about to ruin the town water supply. It involves a fist fight between the president of the Congregation Ahavath Israel and the rabbi.
JP, the Pontiac wagons used Chevrolet 305s exclusively from 1983 to 1985 in the US market. The 1986 model year began with the Chevrolet 305 but partway through the model year they switched to 307 Oldsmobile engines. This change also occurred concurrently with the Chevrolet wagons, resulting in all B-body wagons using the 307 Oldsmobile V8 exclusively until 1990. It also marked on of the only times that Chevrolet used a V8 made by another division.
David, that was a good story. I had a similar experience to you in terms of the two wagons back to back. Our family had a Pontiac Parisienne wagon with a 305, and it was later replaced with an Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser with a 307. However, between my parents and me, these two cars were owned over a nearly 25 year span (I owned a third B-body wagon in there for a brief period too). Both our cars were good vehicles, although the Pontiac was the better of our two wagons. FWIW, as much as I still have disdain for the underpowered 307, but driven properly it got excellent fuel mileage. Of course, being carbureted meant it had to be in good tune, but I could easily get mid 20’s on the highway with my Custom Cruiser cruising at 75 mph. Around town with a heavy foot though, you could easily cut that in half.
Ahh, the poor 307, the motor that don’t get no respect.
Except from me, that is. In all the years I used Oldsmobile Delta 88 for taxis I never once did a repair on one. That’s millions of km of use.
One of the main reasons it was bulletproof what the fact it only made 140 hp. The torque of the V-8 meant it never felt slow.
I agree the 307 was pretty durable, although I did have some blow-by issues with one of mine at relatively low mileage despite impecable maintenance. I also agree it was torquey at low RPM. But I disagree that it never felt slow. It always felt slow to me. Despite the torque they struggled in the hills. Compared to my 305 or Ford 302 cars from the same era , the 307 was the worst performer overall.
That MTBE plume story sounds highly readable in detail; how ’bout it?
Until I was going through my clippings book, I hadn’t thought about MTBE since environmental law in law School, when I did a paper on mass tort liability for petroleum distributors and harm to water quality. Has anyone here done an essay on fuel oxygenates that were mandated by the 1992 EPA clean air oxygenation fuel rule? We can do p-chem and combustion stoichiometry and kinematics along with the synagogue fistfight.
As far as I know there’s never been a CC piece on oxygenated and reformulated fuels. Could certainly spur a great deal of spirited discussion in the comments, I’ll wager.
Denver-metro was an early trialler—maybe the first—of oxygenated gasoline to combat severe winter air quality problems provoked by high altitude making open-loop engines run rich, and aggravated by bowl-shaped topography preventing dissipation of pollution trapped by temperature inversions. I lived there at the time, and we saw the full parade of oxygenates: MTBE, ethanol, and TAME. MTBE seemed least deleterious to driveability and fuel economy, and at first nobody (publicly) knew from any water-contamination issues, but then those came to light—probably with eager amplification by the ethanol lobby *Koff*ArcherDanielsMidland*Koff* and ethanol very quickly became all but universal.
Unfortunately I wasn’t yet in a position to be doing much of any research; I was in high school and my efforts at participation in public consultation on related matters were, ah, crimped.
Hi,
The Parisienne wagon had the 305 until the 1986 model year when the Olds Y Series 307 was installed.These wagons were lighter than the seventies’ wagons to meet new fuel efficiency standards.
Perhaps they will become more appreciated as the current car designs are either very boring boxes or bubbles or thrones with computer brains.
Gary
Dave, you were lucky…..you might have been sent somewhere else, like Kiryas Joel (just kidding, of course….we have too much in common, but I’m quite older)
In 1995, KJ would have been covered out of the main editorial offices in Middletown, and the city editor Doug Cunningham would have been rewriting those stories. As I recall those were the years that KJ was fighting for its bespoke school district. And lo all these years later East Ramapo is dying.
Doug Cunningham lost out to Barry Lewis to become Record editor in chief in 2007, just before the News Corp buyout of Dow Jones. Doug left for political life working to elect Nan Hayworth when she ran against incumbent John Hall (who founded Orleans, “Still The One”). Then in 2011, Roger Ailes hired him at the Putnam Courier and the Putnam County News & Recorder in Mahopac, when Roger bought it from Taconic Corporation and needed an ink monkey to run it.
Yeah. *Roger Ailes*
Wow! I was aware of KJ, and some of its issues. Never heard about East Ramapo. Thanks for throwing the line, I’ll sit down to read. Thanks a lot!
Thank you for a very entertaining article – your wagon and my 88 Brougham have the same engine…and yes…even floored it doesn’t want to do much of anything up a steep grade.
As a radio guy, I also loved the fond memories of having to actually dial up the transmitter remote control to take readings and turn it on or off…ahhh the days before automation and Burk AutoPilot!
Looking forward to the next installment, and Happy Hanukkah! May your latkies be crisp and your matzo balls be floaters…
30 years later I still have my FCC non-commercial radio telephone operators permit in my wallet, a classification of licensure that was rendered obsolete by the 1996 Telecommunications reform act.
It was hydroelectrically powered public radio. Malcolm Brown, who passed away several weeks ago at the age of 89, refurbished the turbines at the dam on lake Jefferson, and built a house above the turbogenerators. There was a 50 kilowatt generator and a 200 KW generator as I recall, depending on the head. Almost entirely volunteer run, with one salaried station manager.
During the years on and off when I volunteered there, I met interesting people like Debra Winger, who still lives in Callicoon, Jay Unger and Molly Mason, and Duke Devlin. The station was equipped under a PTFE grant that bought equipment straddling the analog and new digital field, and I cut my teeth on quarter inch mag tape. I never worked in radio anywhere else, but I keep the tools for decent audio production handy just in case.
Thanks for the Hanukkah wishes! Tonight’s the last night, and it’s my four-year-olds Hebrew calendar’s birthday.
Ahh, the poor 307, the motor that don’t get no respect.
Except from me, that is. In all the years I used Oldsmobile Delta 88 for taxis I never once did a repair on one. That’s millions of km of use.
One of the main reasons it was bulletproof what the fact it only made 140 hp. The torque of the V-8 meant it never felt slow.
“We hardly ever took pictures of our cars…They were central to our lives but they were not at the center of our imaginations.”
They were at the center of my imagination, yet as a kid I didn’t think to document the myriad Buicks my father bought- from a 1949 Special fastback to his last Buick- a ’96 Park Avenue. I could have thoroughly photographed each and every new model with his Yashica- A. Never did. Instead, I’ll have to settle for the cars appearing incidentally in Kodak photos of various and sundry family events.
Another great read with fascinating backstory .
I too would like to hear the MTBE plume story along with the promised yellow headlight story .
-Nate
I had a teacher in middle school with one of these, one time she took us on a field trip to the New Bedford airport in it.
An old ecology dorm with airconditioned ensuites? That’s very old ecology, in fact, seems even pre-ecology as a matter of principle – but hey, who wouldn’t mind an aircooled ass when gaining relief on a hot day? – though I can’t help wondering if they didn’t aircondition the rooms too. Also, it’s possible, as a foreigner, I have misconstrued your words here. (In truth, that’s highly possible, as I do here as well).
I am continuing to enjoy your habit of naming people we don’t know, as it gives the reader some work, although to have Sam The Thief towing away one’s car does raise more curiosity than my feeble imagination can fill: I mean, were his AAA trips to the stranded more one way than return?
Actually, I do ask you to elaborate with sensible brevity on how Peter ate a bee (or, frankly, to explain if that’s a saying, possibly even a euphemism), because that line made me laugh more than the headline statement he’d made.
Apart from which, I say as Oliver said to that stingy master. (No, not Cromwell, the kid in that musical, “More Please”, I think).
The hurlburt house for environmental living was a converted motel that had been taken over by the University in 1965 for use as a dorm, suffered a fire which caused the deaths of seven undergraduates, and became a program house with the Advent of program houses in the 1970s. The University retrofitted the bedrooms, which were each equipped with full bathrooms including tub toilet sink and shower, with stand alone natural gas heating and air conditioning units since the building HVAC was woefully outdated from early 1960s.
So yes every dorm room had heat and air conditioning. In the ecology house. This would be that sharp contrast to the actual practice of ecological living but it only cost $100 more per year than living in the regular dorms, because they were doubles.
With regards to the bee. It was a dead bee, that had been sitting in the window of the kitchen of the house in which I’ve been living in the summer of 1996 and when we arrived back from Columbus at 11:30 p.m. Sunday night after Origins, I energetically upbraided Peter for his nonchalance he was mortified at his error and took the bee from the windowsill and bit down. I don’t know whether to elaborate on the later remonstration with Melissa, but the phrase ” go read some Martin Buber” came out of my mouth and probably goes long way to explain why I had no physical nocturnal companionship during those summer months.
Sam the thief. He had the Getty station on the corner of old 17 and route 52 in front of the entrance to the grossingers resort hotel. When my father went to his medical school externship in Elmira in 1968, he drove through Liberty with his roommate to be and stopped at Sam the thief for a repair he never quite described and said I’ll never stay in this s******* town ever and moved there 7 years later. As far as I know we took no cars to be repaired at Sam’s shop.
I’m going to attach some screenshots of recent Yelp reviews of Sam’s service station in Liberty because it appears they have held up the tradition.
Ah that’s the stuff.