All pictures from Google
Ah… This brings back memories. Some good, some bad, and all because of a teal Cavalier Coupe.
My Great Grandmother was born in 1931. She came to live in Albuquerque New Mexico at a very young age, having been driven there along with her mother and father on the rumble seat of a 1926 Ford Model T roadster driven by her grandfather.
Growing up in the Great Depression, she and her brother learned to make due with what they had. They made toys from scrap, like soap box derby cars from discarded fruit crates, and kites using old bed sheets and infamously- her father’s good ties!
I remember her telling me when she found out the second World War had ended. She was coming out of a diner with a friend when suddenly the streets were flooded with people celebrating. There was music, laughter, and people passing around the Albuquerque Journal with the headline:
She went to college in the 1950’s and fought against the stigma of women in science based courses. Her father insisted she be allowed in the men’s only math classes and excelled, having a great mind for numbers. This would open the door to her future career, but first, she got a job with a company you may be familiar with if you’ve seen this box,
She worked in Colorado for the Celestial Seasonings company for six years starting in 1969, and during that time collected many tea tins. I still have a Sleepytime tin from her collection on display in my break room.
Her college education and sheer willpower landed her a job as a programmer working for the National Cash Register Company back when computer code was stored on massive reels of tape, and a single computer could take up an entire room. She worked there for twenty five years until her retirement, for which she was given a special model of the company’s first cash register for all her years of service to the company.
This is an example of what she was given. My family and I still have it to this day!
I know this was quite the build up to the subject of today’s article, but it was necessary to understand the life my Grandmother before really delving in. She purchased a 1996 Cavalier shortly after I was born, and that’s the car I most associate her with.
Grandma always said it was her Scottish blood that made her so frugal, and it’s that frugality that I believe led her to purchase a base model Cavalier two door with a manual transmission. It had wind up windows, cloth seats, and a cassette player radio, with which could be heard the big band music she almost always listened too. I used to ride in the back seat, playing with the toys I was allowed to bring along and reaching my little hand underneath the passenger seat to see what I could find. Most often, I’d find a small leather box filled with cassette tapes, and would have no idea what they were.
One time, I remember finding a box of bullets that looked very similar to the one she kept her tapes in. I was too young to know what they were, but I found out when I was older that she kept a loaded .38 revolver in the center console, wrapped in a little knitted blanket.
Sadly, this was the last car she owned. Seeing one like it makes me remember when she came to live with us, after it was discovered she was a very heavy drinker and could no longer take care of herself. My mother and I used to have to check her tire position in the driveway to see if she had left the house whenever we were away. One night, I remember sitting on the couch reading when grandma came stumbling down the hallway. She had fallen in the shower and hit her head. She was acting very erratically and the paramedics were called. When it was discovered she owned a gun, it became a “suicide call” and the police came to the house along with the medical team. The police took the gun from her car and Mom (understandably) didn’t want it back.
After Grandma was put in a care home, her car was sold with permission to a family friend trying to get back on her feet and it gave many more years of faithful service. That is until it stolen by her delinquent son (whom I was friends with when we were younger) and sold to a gang member for a gun and drugs. That same gang member came to her home and demanded the title at gun point. That is the last time anyone heard of the Cavalier again. It was an ignoble end to a noble little car that had served my Grandma for many years and I’ll always love her dearly, despite her many flaws. I’ll always have her stories and the things she left behind. No one is perfect, and while the GM J body cars were widely panned, they too have their merits. The happy times with my Grandma shine all the brighter when held against the darkness of her later years. In a sea of variables, the Cavalier was a constant knight in shining armor to those that needed it most.
I can understand why you would have warm feelings for this modest little car. Our loved ones can imprint on we car guys through the cars they drove. It is a shame that her flaws got the better of her and cut short her time with the Cavalier.
Wow, I suddenly feel quite old as it is my mother who was born in the early 1930s and not my great grandmother. 🙂 And this story reminds me of my Uncle Bob, a contemporary of your grandma, who was in on the ground floor of computers at GM in the mid 1960s.
LOL – all my grandparents were born in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Quite an age divide on this site, all knitted together by our love for rolling iron.
My maternal Gran would’ve been first in line for a strippo 2 door Cavalier had she lived that long, though. It definitely would’ve appealed to her frugal Scottish nature.
I was wondering how long it would take before another story about a Cavalier appeared here. That’s because I was surprised to see a Cavalier sedan just yesterday as it passed me on a well traveled highway in central Florida. That one was a late 80s/early 90s example.
BTW, interesting how a gun figured through out the story.
You have succeeded in the impossible and made me feel sympathy for a Cavalier. Perhaps it is because my brother grew up to be that delinquent son who would take things that meant so much to so many and ruin them. I’ve seen many good cars go from reliable and serviceable to chopped up for scrap, or sold off to one of his less savory friends for less than legal consideration.
On a side note, just as a callback to your grandmother’s upbringing in Albuquerque, I suspect those vehicles often ended up in the Albuquerque Police Department’s Impound lot.
This is an excellent article.
My Mom’s last car was a new ’95 Cavalier coupe. So when I see one of these I think of her; however, she doesn’t even remember it now. Though suffering from dementia, the ’70 Nova coupe before it still evokes fond memories for her even now.
This Cavalier couple is attractively styled, but that’s about all the good news there is. It could. and should, have been much, much better in so many ways. What a shame.
I had to watch my grandma die of the same complication. I remember walking into the care facility room and not recognizing the frail shadow of the women I had known for most of my life. It was heartbreaking to watch. You have my condolences.
This was the same women who in the mid sixties used to race and worked in a garage owned by her husband at the time.
My condolences to you as well. It’s sobering to see a loved one decline in slow motion like this, isn’t it? At least we still get to enjoy looking at old photos and a few movies uploaded to Google.
You must be very young to have a Great Grandmother that was born in 1931, or is it really your Grandmother?
Great Grandmother. I’m 22 at time of writing.
Thanks for the clarification, I wasn’t too sure as she is called by both in the story. Great woman, you should be proud.
The Cavalier advertisement about the feature of having a low oil level warning light made me think, “So, the Cavalier burns so much oil that they had to put in a warning light for it?”.
OTOH, they are certainly Cockroaches Of The Road (COTR). GM spit out hundreds of thousands of them, so based on sheer volume, alone, you’ll still occasionally see one (and it’s equally depressing successor, the Cobalt) chugging down the highway. It reminds me of that great adage, “GM cars continue to run badly when other cars stop running, at all”.
I remember my friend referring to his Cavalier as “the official car of Domino’s Pizza”. I always pictured a Cavalier as the kind of car you would someday find in a blister pack hanging on a rack at the check out counter along with the Bic lighters.
Absolutely loved this read, and the telling of this story about your grandma. She surely would appreciate this homage. It’s great that the sight of this modest (but worthy) Cavalier would bring back great memories of her.
Two more thoughts:
– I miss crank windows; and
– This teal may be the most ’90s color in the world.
“– This teal may be the most ’90s color in the world.”
Haha, you are absolutely right! With the dark emerald green/champagne beige colors of my Ford Club Wagon being the runners-up. 🙂
P_F, this is not the first time I’ve read one of your pieces and admired the writing style and the frankness with which you can tell a story. Your stuff can really connect with people. This one in particular struck me.
While I’ve been generally quiet here lately, I’ve mentioned in the past that my last car was the final in a long series of Chryslers bought by my grandfather since before I was born. It had been my grandmother’s last car and she was particularly fond of her candy apple red 300M. She passed away in August of ’17 just shy of her 94th birthday, having been forced to give up driving a few years prior. I drove the Chrysler from her house to her care facility the morning she died, stopping to pick up a case of wine for the ladies on the staff who cared for her during her final months. She suffered from dementia as well. Being the daughter of a prohibition era rum runner who became a liquor distributor when the hooch was legal again, she too liked her cocktails. A lot, it turned out in her later years (well, she had dementia, so I guess she probably forgot how many she had?).
Anyway, to bring the story around full circle, that car was ultimately lost a year or so back to a similar fate to your granny’s Cavalier. My former partner, who battled some pretty intense substance abuse issues that took him (and anyone involved with him) to hell and back on multiple occasions, left it parked on a street in Jersey City for a few days too long while on a bender in God-knows-where. I only found out months later when he finally fessed up to the fact that he couldn’t come up with the impound fees to get it back after irresponsibly not bothering to worry about it for several weeks. This of course only came out after I’d booked a flight from Florida to New Jersey to fetch it. I let that ticket go unused, because if I’d gotten on that plane I’d be in prison today.
My grandmother was a very special person to me too. I feel blessed to have had her in my life until I was 50 years old. And I don’t begrudge her any of the craziness of her later years. Not one bit.
Self-imposed dementia, on the other hand? Unforgivable. Ironically after riding out 9 years of bumpy roads with “The Other One”, that final careless act of give-no-fuck-ness was the last straw. It’s only a car, but there’s still something important about the way they can stir your emotions.
Though we are separated by generations I totally identify with your story about a lowly but important little car that belonged to a very impressive woman.
My paternal grandparents were two of the most important people in my life. When my grandfather died suddenly in 1962, my grandmother and I became even closer. She was my best friend during my teen years. Shortly after my grandfather died, my grandmother traded in their 1960 Chevrolet Kingswood wagon for the all-new Chevy II. Even though she was financially OK at that point, she too had some Scottish blood and bought the most basic model 100 with the four-cylinder engine, stick shift, and no radio. I, who lusted after powerful and well-optioned luxury cars (though we would not have one for several years), loved that little Chevy II. It was Grandma’s car and by the time I got my learner’s permit at age 15, she and I and the car were inseparable.
My grandmother had gotten a driver’s license at a very early age for a woman of her time. She was an excellent driver and showing her trust in my driving skills by letting me drive the Chevy every time we went out together gave my fragile teen ego an enormous boost of confidence . My grandmother was a very intelligent woman who at one point worked three jobs to take care of her family because my grandfather, who thankfully quit drinking before I was born, was an alcoholic who had trouble maintaining a job during the bad years. Grandma also was involved in local politics and she and her fellow activists got to tour the White House and briefly meet the First Lady in 1964. My grandmother has been gone for a very long time but I think of her every day.
Thank you for writing this story. Sharing the memory of special people in our lives is among the most important things we can do for them and one another.
A moving tribute to her and a great article. Like the others here, this makes me think about my paternal grandmother who also had a big part in my life. She passed several years ago after a long, mostly happy life. When left to her own devices, the bought small, modest and some times iconoclastic cars. A Maverick, a Gremlin and, later, a Dodge Lancer (K-Car variant). She used to be teased a bit within the family for her odd, small cars since we were a Michigan family used to full size cars until the 1980’s. She was non-apologetic about them being all she needed, easier to handle and fun.
When I looked at the advertisement, I noticed the URL so I perused the Wayback Machine to see what the website looked in 1996. It could only go back to 1998.
Ah, memories of 56kbps dial-up modems, low resolution graphic images and designs for low speed downloading, text links at bottom, etc…
https://web.archive.org/web/19971013033014/http://www.chevrolet.com/cavalier/index.htm
I’ve known many people who owned Cavaliers of this vintage, and their story is generally the same: we drove it for years and was a great car, never gave us problems, was super reliable, cheap, drove it past 250k, etc, etc.
Cavaliers deserve a slightly better place in history. I said slightly.