BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - GM loses big-time

Larry

(Richard Casady) wrote in
:

We bought a Lincoln Navigator,

I always drove European cars, mostly British like Morris Minors....

My father always hounded me to "buy American" as he was always a Chevy
man.

When I moved to Iran in 1976 to work for the Shah's air force, I sold my
car and most of my possessions as I had no place to leave them. The
rest I just gave away to anyone who wanted it.

I came home 28 days before the Shah fell in '79 and needed a car. I had
plenty of cash from my nice Iranian job and the 10.8% interest my
Iranian bank paid on savings accounts, so started immediately looking
for a nice car, but not new. I ended up with a 1973 Lincoln Mark IV
Cartier addition that was a light buckskin brown inside on the leather
and out...loaded, with about 80K on it from a local used car dealer.

You didn't have to worry about a front end collision because YOU were
1/4 mile back from the accident...(c; It had the longest hood I'd ever
seen! The front bumper was 3 feet in front of the radiator! She was a
cruising machine and I got her at a real bargain.

I tried to get my father to drive her around to see how nice she was to
drive but he wanted nothing to do with a car "THAT LONG"....(c; A local
mobile home dealer had traded it in on a new Mark VI, I think was the
current model and the used car dealer had bought it from the auction.
It was in first class condition, it's 460 cu in fire-breathing, top-
fuel-eliminator engine hardly broken in.

I kept it about 12 years until it finally got so hard to keep running it
just wasn't worth the effort any more. I worked for government
contractors, so most of my driving was covered for mileage or actual
cost....I always chose actual cost because the Lincoln drank like a fish
and mileage would never had covered it. Ever see a car with a 4-
cylinder FUEL PUMP?!... When you stomped the pedal it shot off into the
next country hardly breathing hard....but it sounded like someone
flushed a toilet under the trunk!...hee hee.

My first Lincoln experience was when I was a teen. My grandfather owned
a 1957 Lincoln Landau 4-door hard top, black inside and out, loaded as
they came, but without AC as we lived in New York where there's only 1
day of Summer before it snows again...well, it did then. It was a great
car for dates with the girls....IT HAD A SEPARATE REAR SEAT HOT WATER
HEATER that kept naked girls toasty warm in any weather....(c;

I have a friend who had a Navigator to tow his Grady-White runabout
around with after he sold his Hatteras 56 and moved into a big house.
He's a big department head at the Medical University of SC, a medical
scientist who is well paid. I tried to get him to pimp it out like the
drug dealers did, but he didn't have it long enough because it was too
tall to drive into the MUSC parking garage his private parking place was
in....poor planning on his part. Fun to drive but hard to back up the
boat with. You had to leave the back doors open to even see the boat
when you are that high off the ground...(c;