For all you Oldsmobile fans, here’s a nice ’69 Delta 88 Custom Town Sedan I found parked behind a garage. All the other cars in the back were about the same vintage – looks like this photo could have been taken in 1975!
CC Outtake: 1969 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Town Sedan
– Posted on April 2, 2012
I hereby change Curbside Classic to Oldsmobile Town.
Somebody didn’t get a certain memo.
Which means this has officially become an old farts gathering place?
Yeah, and this one doesn’t even have giant severed chicken head on the roof! WTF??
My Great Aunt had one of these. Basic brown, no tilt, no cruise, super basic. Air, Automatic, A/C. It had a light one the dash that told you when the motor was cold. I loved that Aunt like no other. She was a retired teacher from Florida and North Carolina, never married.
She was the “cool” Aunt. She drove the wheels off that Oldsmobile. I can remember as a little kid riding the back roads of North Carolina in that thing. No seat belts worn of course. That shiny brown cloth had no grip. How she kept that car wheels down I’ll never know. Great woman, I really loved her. God rest her soul.
As a side note, the gas pedal in that thing was like a size 15 shoe!
I never noticed how droopy the butt was on these.
My parents’ first nice car was a new 1969 Delta 88 convertible. We were little kids, and everyone else had sedans and station wagons, but my mom wouldn’t go for that. It was brown with a tan top and interior. Two tears later, I guess the two doors were a pain in the ass, because they got a Buick Electra. But they kept that olds for many years, and I was sad to see it go.
You can never go wrong with an 88!
About the time my dad downsized to mid-sized Mercurys, my best friends folks had enough bucks to upgrade to a Delta 88 of this vintage. Their family (also immigrants) took meticulous care of all of their possessions, the Delta was no exception. It was just like the feature car, except it was green inside and out, and no vinyl roof. 455 and a THM 400, dual exhausts, that thing could HAUL! My buddy’s parents kept that car well into the 80’s, he drove it when home from school.
One night, after considerable consumption of ethanol, we decided to line up my ’72 442 against his ’69 88. The Delta took me off the line, but by the time I was at redline in 2nd gear, I had the Delta and blew by him. Fortunately, we didn’t encounter law enforcement of any kind, as we were quite extralegal. You could do that in small town Ohio in the 1980’s. So long as you didn’t hurt anything or make too much noise, you were golden…
I think they finally took that thing to the boneyard in the late 1980’s; the drivetrain was actually in great condition but the body was awful. His dad even called me and asked me if there was any way to install the Olds blunderbuss in his 1970’s era small block Chevy pickup, I told him not without a lot of effort and money. It probably would have had a few weird issues going in, but it would have worked. How cool would it have been to have a 1978 C10 with a 455 Olds/THM400?
There’s a younger guy in my neighborhood that has the two door coupe version of this car, but it sits in his driveway now. I don’t think it has moved in two years and I’m surprised that no one has called the city about it. For the midwest, the body and trim are in great condition, obviously there’s something wrong with the drivetrain. More than once I’ve considered asking about the car, but two things stop me. One, I have nowhere to put yet another car (I’m already stashing cars at my wife’s workplace-they have a huge parking lot for semis) and two, another guy, further down the street has a 1995-ish Z28 sitting in his garage, just waiting for a new owner…
We’ll see…
You know, that 455/T400 combo would have been awesome in a pickup! I considered doing that exact thing after my grandfather’s car bit it (see below), but I was right in the middle of engineering school and couldn’t work out the logistics (and the car was already at a junkyard by the time I found out about it).
It was not uncommon at all, from what I understand, to find Cadillac/Olds/Pontiac big blocks stuffed into 1970s Chevy tow trucks that originally had a small block in them. That stump-pulling low-end torque is just the ticket for a heavy vehicle.
In my area it is very common to see Olds engines in Chevy pickups. The pickups actually came with the infamously awful Olds 350 diesel for a number of years so the swap is not quite as labor intensive as you would think.
It’s too bad…your friend’s dad’s truck would’ve really flown! Most of the ones around here are used to haul horse and construction trailers…
Hey – that IS my father’s Oldsmobile! (sorry, couldn’t resist)
My grandfather did have a 1970 98 sedan with the 455 – what a tank that thing was! I loved the single-wipe “mist” button cleverly concealed within the end of the shift lever.
That car was still running just fine in 1987, until it burst into flames at a highway rest area just south of Olympia WA (best guess is that the exhaust had a leak directed upwards near the back of the car, which caught the tar-based soundproofing material underneath the back seat cushion on fire).
Geo-
Get the Olds! Better than a ’95 Camaro ANY day.