The old man's Oldsmobile

By mlumadue on April 26, 2020

Some men are Baptists. Others Catholics. My father was an Oldsmobile man.

That's one thing I guess Jean Shepherd and I have in common: We both grew up with fathers who owned and loved Oldsmobiles, and I honestly can't imagine their build quality got any better between the 1940s and the 1980s. My father must have owned 7 or 8 of them from the time I was born to the time I went to college. He always had a Cutlass Supreme or a Delta 88 Royale for himself and a Custom Cruiser station wagon for my mother (who hated them), but the end finally came with the 1986 Delta 88 Royale sedan. I was dark gray (charcoal, maybe) and he had spent the extra money for an after-market replacement vinyl top that was meant to look like a carriage top convertible (which wasn't really a convertible because "who would want the trouble of a convertible").

As for this Oldsmobile, it was horrible. My father was the kind of man who had to have a new car every 5 to 7 years, and it was his one luxury in a world of 60 hour weeks at his business. So when the time came to buy a car, he went up Route 130 to Lubik Oldsmobile in Bordentown, and I swear they saw him coming. It was this one car, this one time, that he had to have, and the got him with a balloon payment and the full price dealer added top. (I went with him the first time he went to look at the car, and I almost talked him into a used Jaguar XJ6 which would have been about the same amount of money but "Jaguars were unreliable".)

Needless to say, this car was a lemon. It was in and out of the shop throughout the warranty period, and even more afterwards, but my father never gave up on the car. Unable to get out of this rear-wheeled disaster, he ended up paying the balloon payment, and had to have the top removed and the original roof repaired due to rusting caused by moisture trapped under that after-market top. Still, he would never say anything bad about the car, and loved it through trial and tribulation. He would never admit fault with the car, or the mistake that it was. Since he had bought it (not a lease) and ended up paying the full loan, he smiled through it for 10 whole years.

I went to college, got out, and at some point decided it was time for my first new car. It was 1997, and I had purchased a green hard top Jeep Wrangler. When the time came I went to pick up the Jeep and took my father along for the ride. The following week, he owned a Grand Cherokee. He never looked back. He owned two more before he passed away, and I drove his last one (a 2007 tan Limited) for a year or so before it gave up the ghost at 130,000 miles.

Why am I going on about this? Well, I think of my father as more or less the average American idiot (no insult - I loved my father). He was a small business owner, went to church every Sunday, contributed to the local volunteer fire department, joined the Rotarians, loved low taxes and Ronald Reagan, voted Republican his whole life (except for Kennedy), and broke himself sending his dumb kid to college so they could end up a liberal. To me, he is like many a Trump voter, and his Oldsmobile like Trump.

They love this car. They have a lot invested in this car, even if the price was too high, and damn it you better not say anything bad about this car, because no matter how bad the car gets, no matter how many times it has to go to the shop, they will love it to spite themselves. They would rather piss off their wife and break their bank than admit that this isn't the best car out there. But once you show them an alternative, a real one, that they can touch and feel and drive a little bit, then that car is gone. It is just a matter of getting them to a different dealership.

As for myself, I now have a 2013 Volvo S60 T6 AWD Premier Plus with only about 25,000 miles on it. Jeep jumped the shark when the dropped the 4.0L straight-six.