Curbside Classic: 1967 Cadillac Sedan DeVille – Be Careful What You Wish For

1967 Cadillac. Roscoe Village, Chicago, Illinois. Saturday, December 31, 2022. New Year's Eve.

This past New Year’s Eve found me at a small gathering with other people for the first time in three years.  It ended up being sort of a last-minute thing, and though I had already contentedly settled into the idea of getting to bed before the ball dropped, I was glad to receive the invitation.  There was a part of me that felt like I needed to go simply out of principle, given that many such gatherings simply couldn’t and didn’t take place for the past few years due to COVID.  I had even taken a nap that Saturday afternoon in the hope of ensuring I wouldn’t tire out before midnight.  Second-guessing myself is a behavior I’m in the process of unlearning, and in my gut and before I had received that invite, I had looked forward to a quiet night in, reflecting on what had felt like a really fruitful, fulfilling 2022 for which I give thanks.

1967 Cadillac Sedan DeVille brochure pages, as sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.

1967 Cadillac Sedan DeVille.

My ultimate compromise was to arrive and spend time with my gracious host and the other guests, and then cut out to be back in the comfort of my own home well before midnight.  I succeeded in executing those plans.  I always seem to forget from year to year that the Syfy cable channel will feature a The Twilight Zone marathon of the original 1959 – ’64 shows starting on New Year’s Eve.  I need to be clear that I didn’t leave the party just to binge-watch Twilight Zone, but if I was going to split early to spend the rest of NYE cozily at home on the couch in my pajamas instead of being festive and social with others, there couldn’t have been a better show to watch while I reflected on the passage of time as the year rolled over, so to speak.

“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.  A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.  That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”

1967 Cadillac. Roscoe Village, Chicago, Illinois. Saturday, December 31, 2022. New Year's Eve.

Rod Serling’s introductory narrative still makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.  He may have been the creator, writer, producer, and narrator of this great program, but that theme music at the beginning seems even more iconic and recognizable than his own name.  I associated those repetitious, staccato, dissonant chords with Twilight Zone long before I knew who Serling was.  This is A-grade Halloween stuff without an ounce of gore, and even more effective in scaring me because its plots were almost purely psychological.  Before I made my way back to the CTA “L” station on New Year’s Eve, I spotted a car in the distance on a side street a few blocks away that ultimately turned out to be this ’67 Cadillac.  Lit in the garish, orange glow of the street lamps above, the car seemed to be daring me to approach it.

1967 Cadillac Sedan DeVille brochure pages, as sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.

1967 Cadillac Sedan DeVille.

There’s a creepy lull outdoors in some Chicago neighborhoods on a winter’s night, even without a blanket of snow to act as sound insulation, as was the case that Saturday.  Even though I had just left a small party, I was already in kind of a noir-ish mental place, simply thinking about the finality and decisiveness of time’s march in only one direction.  Some of the other guests at the party seemed to be literally half my age, and I remembered what it was like to be at parties in my mid-20s and encountering individuals my current age, who seemed cool, but old.  Some revelers seemed only a handful of years older than the nephew with whom I had just spent time this past Thanksgiving, someone I had watched go from the cradle into young adulthood.

The forward-thrusting, stacked headlight housings of these ’67 Cadillacs make them look angry.  The slightly damaged grille of this one made it look almost like a once-distinguished gentleman in a nice suit who had gotten into a row at the local bar and was limping home with a busted lip.  Maybe I’ve watched too many car-themed horror movies, but I could almost smell this car’s motor oil and hear its engine hum, though no such scents or sounds were present near this stationary automobile.

1967 Cadillac. Roscoe Village, Chicago, Illinois. Saturday, December 31, 2022. New Year's Eve.

The ’67 Cadillacs are frustrating to me in that the Calais and DeVilles are virtually undistinguishable unless one can get a good look at the interior, which I was not about to attempt on a night when maybe 90% of Chicago seems drunk.  The Calais, being the entry level Cadillac, had an interior that wasn’t quite as flossy as the DeVille’s, but was still very nice.  That was pretty much it for their differences, according to everything I’ve read.  A nicer interior and a few other, minor trim bits are what you got with the four-door hardtop DeVille over the Calais in the same body style for an extra ~8% premium.

1967 Cadillac Calaise brochure pages, as sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.

1967 Cadillac Calais.

This example was devoid of the rear quarter panel badging that would have given me a more decisive clue as to which model it was.  This might have been a Calais, but removing the label indicating this was a DeVille, the nicer car, would be like buying a pair of Levi’s and removing the red label and pocket stitching.  I do know that the factory Pinecrest Green of our featured car was offered in the Calais line as one of eight available colors, but that factoid doesn’t help me narrow anything down with certainty.

1967 Cadillac. Roscoe Village, Chicago, Illinois. Saturday, December 31, 2022. New Year's Eve.

All ’67 Cadillacs were powered by a 340-horsepower, 429-cubic inch V8, which was then in its last year, to be replaced by a 375-horse 472-c.i. V8 for ’68.  Curiously, there was no price difference in each respective line between the pillared and hardtop versions: $5,215 for the Calais, and $5,625 for the DeVille.  The sales race wasn’t even close: Only about 21,800 Calaises found buyers, versus 139,800 DeVilles.  Go big or go home, as they say.  Even if 18,200 DeVille convertibles were factored out, the closed-roof ’67 DeVille outsold the Calais by a ratio of about 5.5-to-1.  Cadillac Division production of around 200,000 units that year was good for eleventh place in the industry.

1967 Cadillac Calaise brochure pages, as sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.

1967 Cadillac Calais.

Getting back to The Twilight Zone, what I came to realize a few weeks ago was that the moral of many, if not most, episodes was that the protagonist should simply have chosen to be content with his or her life the way it was before some major event or superpower changed things irreversibly for the worse.  This holds true as I flip through my mental Rolodex of episodes I can remember.  I know I’ve leveled complaints at the outgoing year in some of my essays (2020, I’m looking at you), but even with some of the major challenges that emerged in 2020, a lot of significant good also came about, including getting many aspects of my life in order.

Some of my friends have opined to me, and not necessarily as a criticism, that I seem so relentlessly positive all the time.  This is certainly not because my life is or has been perfect, by any stretch of the imagination.  I suppose that part of this apparent optimism involves choice, thankfulness, and perspective.  I have down days, too.  I’m a human being.

1967 Cadillac. Roscoe Village, Chicago, Illinois. Saturday, December 31, 2022. New Year's Eve.

There’s one particularly haunting Twilight Zone episode titled “A Short Drink From A Certain Fountain” that originally aired in December of 1963, in which an older husband, married to a much younger wife, wished to become younger again to make himself more attractive to her and enable him to keep up with her.  (She was physically beautiful, but bratty, entitled, superficial, and just plain gross.)  Without giving away too much of the plot, I’ll just say that a certain plan worked initially, then backfired spectacularly with the typically eerie, mind-wrecking consequences this series served up regularly.  This ’67 Cadillac was new three years after the last new episode of the original Twilight Zone series had aired, but going back to my earlier “brawling businessman” metaphor for this car, imagine that this Cadillac had wished to become newer, made some deal, and woke up the next morning as an ’82 Cimarron.

Roscoe Village, Chicago, Illinois.
Saturday, December 31, 2022.
New Year’s Eve.

Brochure pages were sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.