Grandma’s Car

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).

The Catalina Convertible

Since work on the LeMans is at a standstill until the GTI clutch is replaced (kit arrives Wednesday), I thought I’d share the story of the Catalina convertible I owned back in the nineties.

At some point in early ‘97, as I looked out my kitchen window and gazed upon a Pontiac convertible (the LeMans) under a blue tarp and parked at the end of my driveway, I got it in my head that I needed another Pontiac convertible; a running, driving one that I could enjoy immediately, rather than one that was still many, many hours of effort from being roadworthy.

Twenty-one years have passed since I made the decision to bring a second Pontiac into the stable, so the details of how I discovered that someone in Arlington, VA was selling a 1966 Catalina droptop are blurry. I don’t believe it was Craigslist, even though the internet says CL was around then. How I was able to peruse the classifieds of the Washington Post is unknown, but I think that’s where I found it. I had a nice phone call with the seller, where he swore the car ran well and the power top worked, but there were some rust issues. After a conversation with the lovely, and supportive, Loriann and another phone call to the seller, and we were set for a mid-day Saturday meet-up.

After I loaded a jack, jackstand, and some cardboard to facilitate the upcoming inspection, we made the three hour drive up from Lynchburg, where we found the car parked on a residential street. The seller came out and I pored over the car inside and out. Yes, there was definitely some Bondo behind the maroon paint, but it seemed to be holding. The floors were intact, albeit with crude patches. The frame did have some rust through, however, but I quickly convinced myself it wasn’t terminal. The seller joined me on the test-drive where he shared how he didn’t have a place to keep the car, and, while he loved driving it, he wanted to move it on to someone who could take better care of it. During the drive the car ran fine - decent acceleration, smooth idling, and everything important worked as he’d promised. One event occurred during the drive that should’ve have warned me off the purchase – while driving over some railroad tracks I felt some flexing in the body. Not enough to cause a door to pop open, but certainly significantly more than normal. Since the test drive was made with the top down, spring was right around the corner, and the price was only $750, I was sold and bought the car.


The drive back home went off without a hitch, and, after transferring the title and getting antique tags, I had myself a wonderful daily-driver. My commute was less than six miles a day, so the ten miles to the gallon the car was giving me wasn’t a big deal. Sliding behind the wheel on the big bench seat, turning the key to fire up the 389 V8, and pressing a switch to drop the top is a wonderful way to start one’s daily drive.

There were many features of that car I loved beyond the droptop including the bench seat (room for our family of six), the slim, delicate shifter, the torquey engine, and the color scheme. I still remember family outings to the local ice cream parlor and being thankful for the easy-cleaning Morrokide upholstery.

A few weeks after I got the car, I visited a local body shop to get an estimate on patching the frame. The guy took a quick look at the underside, and told he wouldn’t touch the job. In fact he recommended I not drive the car. Something about, “one good bump and it’s going to break in two.” Well, I’d already put the car over far more than one good bump, so I didn’t heed his warning and kept driving the car. I did, however, make plans for replacing the frame. I’d found a wrecking yard down in North Carolina that specialized in older cars, and a phone call confirmed they had a ’66 Catalina convertible chassis he’d sell me for a couple hundred dollars. I rented a tow dolly, and my car-buddy, Bill, and I spent a Saturday fetching it. That adventure will be a blog post in itself someday.

The next step in re-framing the car was to look at what it would take to pull the body off the current, swiss-cheesed frame. I put the car up on jackstands and went looking for the body bolts. What I found instead was a whole lot of fiberglass. The forward portion of the trunk wasn’t metal anymore – it was now fiberglass. Much of the metal under the back seat was gone – it was now fiberglass. I was now afraid the body wouldn’t hold together if I tried taking it off what was left of the chassis. The whole “breaking in two” thing was a real risk.

So, what was I to do now? Keep driving the car every day of course. I enjoyed it for a second driving season before another ’66 Catalina – a low-mileage, only-drove-it-on-Sundays, our-door hardtop – joined the stable (a story for another blog post). At that point, I had to get rid of some cars, and, sadly, the flexible car as well as my previous daily-driver, an ’84 Mazd with well over two hundred thousand miles, had to go. If memory serves me I put the convertible up for sale on “Smoke Signals” (the Pontiac-Oakland Club’s monthly magazine). I listed it for $750 and threw in the replacement chassis for free. A couple months later, I got a phone call from a guy in Nashville, TN. I was very up front with him regarding the condition of the car, but all he seemed to care about was whether it would make the five hundred mile drive back to his home. I told him that, mechanically, the car was very reliable. That convinced him to buy a one-way plane ticket, and make plans for the next weekend when I picked him at the local airport, drove him to my house, accepted his pile of fifties, gave him the keys and the signed title, and watched as he drove the car heading east. I never heard from him again, so I guess everything worked out.

He did not want the chassis, so I changed my Smoke Signals’ ad to sell just the chassis for $100. No takers. After a couple months, I called the wrecking yard where I’d purchased it, and asked if he’d take it back and give me some credit towards other parts. He told me he wasn’t in the business of taking back parts, but he understood my situation and grudgingly agreed to give me one hundred dollars credit.

The following Saturday was cloudy and cold, but Bill and loaded the front of the chassis on a tow-dolly, Hitched it up to the family mini-van and drug it back to North Carolina. Once we arrive and unloaded the chassis, we went hunting for LeMans parts – specifically a bench seat and a steering column with the shifter. We found the former in a ’64 Tempest and the latter in a ’67 Skylark. Those and couple other little items were loaded into the MPV, and Bill and I drove back to Lynchburg.

Now I’m trying to get rid of the bench seat and steering column since I’ve made the decision to keep the LeMans as it came from the factory (bucket seats and console shift) rather than turn it into a six-passenger vehicle.

In my next post I’ll share the story of the aforementioned 4-door.