The second of the big-body Pontiacs that I’ve owned was a ’66 Catalina four-door hardtop. While living in Lynchburg, VA back in 1998, I was driving by an auto repair shop and, parked in their side lot, was a big, beige Pontiac with exactly the same front and rear ends as my Catalina convertible. There I was, thinking about replacing the rusty ‘vert with another big-body Pontiac. Here was a replacement basically in my backyard. I knocked on the door of the shop, and the proprietor answered. I got right to the point and asked him if the car was for sale. He replied that it was, and that he needed to get $750 for it. Coincidentally, that was exactly what I’d bought the convertible for, and was now what I was selling it for. The seller went on to tell me he’d been this car's mechanic for many years, as the previous owner was a local widow. He added that, once her husband had died, she rarely drove the car, hence the 85,000 original miles. I took the car out for a test drive and everything worked, although the engine was a little sluggish. A thorough body and frame inspection (I wasn't going to buy another flexible, rust-bucket) showed the body and chassis to be very solid. Figuring the stars had aligned, I told him I’d be back with cash the next afternoon.
At this time, I owned way too many vehicles. In addition to the Catalina and LeMans convertibles, I also had a daily-driver Mazda with a couple hundred thousand miles on it. With cars stacked up at the end of the driveway, there was a moratorium on adding any more vehicles to the stable. Being the optimist I was (and still am), I figured I'd be able to quickly sell either the Mazda or the rusty 'vert, so I went against better judgement and parked (read: hid) my new purchase at a friend’s house. Unfortunately, about a week later my friend needed the yard space for a new project of his own, so, tail between my legs, I fessed up to my lovely wife who was not happy about the situation. I told her that I was selling two cars since the 4-door would become my year-round daily-driver, but that didn’t really cool her down. I did sell both cars within a couple months, but Loriann was never a fan of the 4-door.
After registering the car, the next thing I did was buy a carburetor rebuild kit and deal with the 2-barrel Rochester. With the car running better, but still not good enough, I spent some of the money I got from selling the Mazda on a full tune-up kit. Then the engine was idling smoothly and pulling strongly.
About a year after getting the car, I was driving home from somewhere close by (fortunately) and pulling up to a stop sign, when the front end jerked accompanied with a bang. I got out of the car and discovered the right front wheel was now angled in severely at the top. I limped the car home where further investigation showed a broken (missing) upper control arm bushing. Kanter supplied the parts for the front-end rebuild which my buddy, Bill, and I did on the street in front of my house. Thank goodness I didn’t live in a neighborhood with a homeowner’s association.
I also fixed the clock. This was my first experience with an old car clock. I carefully disassembled it, figuring out how it all worked. Then I cleaned and oiled the pertinent parts, and put it all back together. Lo and behold, after grounding the housing and putting twelve volts to the lead, the electromagnet did its thing winding the spring, and the second hand started its rotation.
The car came with the fender skirts in the trunk – one of them rather mangled from some incident. After some beating and banging, I was able to get it to go on and stay on. To me that really completed the long, low look Pontiac designers intended for the car.
Some other features of this car I really liked included its size, the engine torque, the delicate shifter and blinker lever, and the color. I wouldn't have thought I'd like a boring light brown car, but when Pontiac's Mission Beige was cleaned and polished, I was a fan of tan.
A couple years after getting the car, I accepted a transfer to Long Island, NY. The company was paying to move our household goods, but I couldn’t get them to foot the bill for moving the convertibles. By that time, we’d traded our MPV for a Suburban, so I rented a trailer from U-Haul. The big Cat’ was such a wide-body, that when I tried to drive it up onto the trailer, its wheels overhung on each side. I ended up driving it the nearly five hundred miles to our new home. No issues, thankfully. Sadly, my commute to work from our home in Port Jefferson was much longer than it had been in Lynchburg, so I made the hard decision to trade it for something far more frugal – a ’63 Chevy Corvair (a story for another blog).
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