My Hobby Car of a Lifetime #9: 1966 Buick Riviera Redux – A Crisis Of Faith!

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– Posted on July 17, 2024

Photo from the web. But mine was still another white Riviera.

 

I got an itch to get back in the Riviera game and found one that was in better shape than my previous ’66. Maybe I should have invested in a tube of Cortizone creme instead!

This installment will be brief, as was my ownership of this car. I have no photos of my actual car.

It was a good, straight, complete car. The white paint was faded, but there was no visible rust around the windshield or back window. It also ran fine and was better optioned, with a black vinyl bucket seat and console and custom-level interior. This car could have been a good long-term ownership project. It was still a ’66, which meant that it had the desirable to me, nailhead engine. The first model of the second generation design, combined with the final and best version of the nailhead, all 425 cubes. This is my favorite year of Riviera, and as I recall it was still a 2,500 dollar car. Oh how I miss those days!

I ended up spray-bombing the car with white primer, which really cleaned up the looks. I had bought the car in Fremont and was keeping it at my folk’s house in Newark.

Initially I was pretty excited about the car, but for some reason, my enthusiasm began to wane. Again I experienced “a crisis of faith”, at least in my old car hobby.

It was almost a repeat of the internal conversation that I’d had about my Honda Shadow.

Hey, I thought that it looked pretty cool!

 

I suppose that the reader might wonder how a guy who claims to love old cars, devotes a lot of time and thought to them, works on them and drives them, can be so fickle when it comes to any particular car. It is a puzzle, but I’ve come to accept my nature. I realize that it hasn’t been the most fiscally responsible way to have a hobby, and certainly not the smartest. Because I’ve let a lot of desirable cars pass through my fingers. But that’s just the way that I am. As I told my wife: “One wife, many cars!”

One day I had taken the Riviera home from Newark to San Jose. Then I decided to take a cruise down the old Monterey Highway to Gilroy. I stopped for a burger at the McDonalds at the Outlet stores. While I was eating, I sat there thinking.

I asked myself the question, “Why am I doing this?”

Do I even enjoy driving the car? Did I think that it was something cool, special, or even worthwhile?

Unfortunately, I could not come up with a convincing counterargument. I was in the middle of my Datsun period, and running my swap meet business. I had been moving away from my American Old Car roots, heading in a new direction. Therefore I decided that the Riviera had to go. I still had both of my Datsuns at the time.

Why is this a conversation that I always seem to be having?

I know that I lack loyalty to cars. I will be excited at first, and over time I will be distracted by something else. One of my buddies gave me a hard time about this. He said that I never stick with, or finish anything. While I agreed with him. I told him that this was JUST a car; it was different from the other things that were important to me. My wife, family, and my job, these were ONLY cars.

Perhaps there are some questions that are better left unasked.

I had passed through my long-term Sportster ownership, as well as my prior ’66 Buick Riviera experience. This occurred around 2008 and old cars were not selling very well and had lost a lot of value. I suppose that I was kind of down on old cars, so why did I buy this one? Probably for the same reason that I currently find myself thinking about these cars. Nostalgia?

The smart thing would have been to set the car aside and move on to something else for a while. That would have been a good choice, however fate intervened.

I was on my way back to Newark and I took a route that passed through a problematic merging situation. A small side street merged into an eight lane expressway. Traffic was usually heavy and moving fast, so it was important to merge rapidly. I was behind a car that had stopped completely, then started to move. I was looking back at the approaching traffic, so I didn’t realize that the car had accelerated, and then stopped abruptly. I hit the gas and collided with the rear of a Toyota Rav4.

It was my fault, no dispute, and I had seen this same thing happen at this merge point many times in the past. The right fender and bumper tip were pushed in a couple of inches. It appeared that that the damage could straightened out without requiring replacement parts.

The other car did not fare as well. This was the old style Rav4 that had no rear bumper, but had the spare mounted on the tailgate. It was going to need plenty of work and replacement parts to look like it originally did!

I let this incident decide the fate of the Riv. It would be sold, but now at a lower price point than I had anticipated!

I found a buyer that checked it out thoroughly. He was a younger guy who wanted a car that he could fix up and attend events with his entire family, his wife and three young boys. The Riv would fill the bill. So the car was sold.

Did I regret it? At the time no. But as it turns out I wasn’t done with Rivieras quite yet…

I thought that I was done with old cars, but there was still enough interest left for one or two more purchases.

Recently while I was looking at old photos while preparing this series. I felt a pang of regret. Or maybe it was just indigestion!