Have you ever looked at something and had it remind you of something else? Of course you have. Howabout this snow-capped Buick? It made me think of Currier & Ives.
Currier & Ives was a printing firm that provided America of the late nineteenth century with an endless supply of inexpensive lithographed prints. Even in my youth they remained popular with my elders for their nostalgia in the way they depicted a bygone era. Just listen to the words of the mid-century holiday tune Sleigh Ride – if you ever wondered what or who “Currier & Ives” was, now you know.
One of their go-to styles was the winter scene. A quick online search will turn up many examples, but most of them seemed to involve some combination of a rural homestead, a roadway and a vehicle (pulled by horses, of course.) A wagon, just a different sort of wagon – one with runners instead of wheels.
Who knows but that Currier & Ives may have predicted the Curbside Classic Outtake with some outdoor shots of early products of a well-known automobile manufacturer.
But back to our subject. This elderly Buick Century station wagon appears semi-frequently in the parking lot to my office building. I saw it outside in the light snow and for some reason my mind connected the scene with those Currier & Ives snow scenes I had seen on so many Christmas cards and calendars when I was a kid.
Instead of the homestead we have a suburban parking lot. Farmstead/Office Park – same difference. The transportation is of a different kind, but is of an obsolete kind that evokes nostalgia today given its shape that is unlike anything built for decades. It is all capped off by the light snow that finishes the scene. And now I can’t get the melody of Sleigh Ride out of my head.
All of JPS’s roads seem to lead to Studebaker, somehow, as here in four paragraphs or less 😉
It’s a nice scene you shot, made all the better since I’m indoors eating a warm bagel while imagining the cold, sleet-filled day of your office park.
The Buick looks nice, I am realizing that these are good-looking cars, especially in wagon form. My parents even had a Celebrity wagon some years back, which I wasn’t fond of at all, but the styling has held up. I never before noticed the optional vent window at the way back and had to look it up to see what it was not standard across the line/versions. Was it powered or did someone have to pop it open/closed when stopped?
I think I even see winter tires on this one, and was surprised to note that the wheels appear to be factory items, not ones I’m noticed before. Mudflaps on the rear, deer whistles on the front, this one seems equipped for the weather…
Those vent windows were (optionally) power-operated, at least according to the ‘85 brochure. Luxury!
For all of the A-body wagons, FWD or RWD, the presence of vent windows in the rear (generally) indicates the wagon has a 3rd row seat.
Or maybe I’m old and remember wrong.
No, you’re right. My ’90 Ciera wagon has neither.
You mentioning RWD A-body wagons – made me jog my mind a bit – and recalled that the 73-77 Colonnade wagons had optional vent windows in the back. Good one!
Always loved those illustrations, though I hadn’t thought about them in a while. Thanks for the memory. Nice scene you captured here, too. This is about the best time in a snowstorm, when things start looking pretty but the roads haven’t yet turned bad.
Great find Jim! I love A-body wagons, and had several acquaintances who drove them as hand-me-downs in high school. Nothing like listening to a raspy GM 60 deg OHV V6 when the 3 spd kicks down going up a steep hill, with the headliner fluttering against the top of your head.
I was thinking about how as common as these Centuries and Cutlass Cieras were, I cannot remember any significant interaction with one. I cannot remember ever driving one at all. Everyone I knew who was into American cars of those years was either moving to the Taurus, or buying one size up.
The rural areas around Ithaca NY were chock full of them, and they’re real cockroaches in the best sense of the GM tradition of abused old cars of theirs clinging on to life. I also always appreciated how much ground clearance they had, perfect to go bombing around seasonal access road in.
On the one level, I understand the respect for these cars. But these A-bodies are one of the prime examples of a vehicle sticking around for far too long. The Century and Ciera ended up inflicting serious damage on their parent brands by doing so.
By the early 1990s, they were almost the domestic equivalent of the old Plymouth Valiant and Dodge Dart. The problem was that Buick and Oldsmobile had not been the go-to brands for buyers who wanted frumpy but cheap and (relatively) reliable transportation.
My Mom had an 84 Celebrity Wagon with the 2.8, 60 degree V6…Loved the exhaust sound on that car. Only 112 hp ,but at the time that was pretty good. The car was reliable, roomy and efficient. The materials and and assembly weren’t quite up to Japanese standards, but the design was tasteful and straightforward….Two problems were the oversensitive rear brakes that would lock up prematurely and put the car into a spin on the icy Buffalo streets and the clunky lock up converter on the transmission that would clunk at about 40 mph when it would go into lock up mode.
They were fine for 1984. The problem is that the Oldsmobile and Buick versions were still around in the mid-1990s.
Well, maybe the problem was that they were sold as a Buick at all…but in my older age, I’ve become sympathetic to the “oldsters” of years ago who were able to buy a vehicle such as this…inexpensive to buy, pretty reliable, pretty simple controls, roomy (look at the size of the storage area on the wagon, though it won’t hold 4×8 foot sheets of plywood anymore it certainly holds more than anything but a truck, minivan or Suburban sold today…so you probably could haul lots of stuff without needing a trailer and the fuel economy was probably OK for what it was, and parts were super cheap (since they made them for so long).
So maybe Chevrolet could have sold these instead…even though they probably made minimum profits on these, so probably should have left them out of the Buick lineup …since Olds and Pontiac (and Saturn) are no more, no worries about those. Buick and Cadillac can concentrate on the luxury vehicles, which this really never was.
I think that manufacturers are all trying to sell the same thing…has to be #1 in consumer reports, have five star crash test ratings (even if you can’t see out of the windows…so you might need the five star rating for the crash that is more likely to happen)…and of course the big thing is the electronics…navigation, hotspots, video displays, etc. I guess I don’t fall into this target market…though bluetooth pairing to my phone is kind of required now so you can use it hands free, that’s about all the electronics I desire. I’d prefer a roomy car (maybe could even get a bench seat) that you can see out of with simple controls and OK fuel economy…kind of like what this is. As long as the interior materials and fabric are durable and the seats are reasonably comfortable it is OK with me…don’t really care about the touch and feel, don’t need leather, nor wood trim (simulated nor real) or precision panel gaps. For that matter, I don’t need a tachometer (maybe an oil pressure gauge instead?) since they all have had automatic transmissions for years now. Don’t even need the latest suspension design (I’m a codger, so I drive slowly)…just availability of cheap parts so I can restore it to “as new” ride as it ages. So something like this car fits my needs, even if it doesn’t fit the wants of consumers who seem to need a smorgasbord of options on their “loaded” vehicle to make them somehow “special”, and would help keep their transportation budget in check on their fixed income.
I think I’ll use this for our family’s holiday cars this year. I’m sure my wife will love it.
Haha, just tell her you want to celebrate the Christmas of the Century. 🙂
Because of course:
They probably made 12 pairs of those in 1983, had two left when the car was discontinued in 1996.
Joke aside, I think that one brand or another of A-bodies were de facto official cars of US embassy personnel for years. They might well have made thousands. I don’t remember the US version of any variant having those chrome bars across the lights. Probably the same T84 for any of them, any year.
I’d guess you’re about right, quantitywise, whichever of your two guesses we go with. 🙂
(T89, you mean: “Lamp, tail and stop: export”. T84 is “Headlamps, E-marked, RH rule of road”.)
You learn something everyday. I thought that T84 was the option code for “EC Export,” and covered all changes.
Oh, heck no, there are scads of export RPO codes—including many seemingly redundant ones. Here’s a partial(!) list. Search for terms like “export”, “Europe”, ” ECE ” (with space before and after to avoid catching words like receiver), “Japan”, “rule of road”, “Middle East”, and “Korea”.
I’ve noticed that curious effect before, of snow laying just around a parked car,but not on the pavement a bit further away. Why? I have to assume that there’s just enough solar radiation coming through the clouds to warm up the dark pavement except in the shadow of the car. Or the sun was out a bit readier and did that, except in the shadow of the car. I can’t think of any other (rational) explanations.
I’m going to posit that the snow is coming in at an angle, hitting that side of the car, and dropping to the ground.
That doesn’t explain why it’s only laying on the ground in its shadow, eh? Are you suggesting it’s only snowing right over it, and not in the rest of the parking lot? That would be an interesting phenomena. 🙂
Look at the other side of the car; no snow on the ground. I’ll bet that the side facing us is the North side.
Keep in mind that considerable solar radiation comes through even thick clouds, otherwise it would be dark as night. Solar panels generate electricity in cloudy weather too, just not as much.
It also explains why when it’s very close to 32 degrees, you’ll see the snow starting to lay on the grass and other light ground, but not on black asphalt, as it absorbs more radiation.
This morning I brushed a little bit of snow off the car after work and it looked just like that, so maybe that was it…
That car is so cool it kept the snow frozen! Ill take my prize money now. Small bills please.
Ha! we have those placemats, bought when the kids were little (20-30 yrs ago) and the wife didn’t like changing the tablecloth after every meal!
The ’90s version of Buick Century and similar Cieras were pretty good cars, even CU recommended them as good used car buys. The son’s wife had one in college and put a lot of miles on it, driving it for 3 years regularly from central VA to Long Island to visit my son in grad school at Stoney Brook. It rarely needed anything but I serviced it for her at times and it had around 190k on it when she finally asked me to sell it for her, and it sold for about what her father had paid for it 4 yrs prior, the 1st owner having been a careful older woman owner. Good family cars and later on cheap beaters for sure.
Sleigh Ride is my fav Christmas song! And I really liked the A-body wagons, esp. the Buick versions. Yes, they hung around way too long and the quality never matched or even came close their Japanese competition, but I still liked them.
https://indianapolis.craigslist.org/cto/d/1990-oldsmobile-cutlass-ciera/6753164400.html
Dangit now I want an A-body wagon.
Ooooo, wood and wires!
CC effect – saw a Century woody on the road just a couple hours ago.
For maximum nostalgia factor the wagon would have to have the fake wood paneling, and the family TOWERING over it with even the preteen kids able to see across the top of the roof.
Nice tie-in. There really is something quaint and picturesque in the holiday spirit about these pictures!
No snow, not a Buick nor even a wagon, but I was passed by a briskly driven and nearly new looking Celebrity sedan on I5 in Northern California this morning. Good looking car.
Ahh my winter beater of choice. Heavy V6 over FWD. Right now my 93 Century sedan has less than stellar front tires on it, (2 new tires are in my shop, just haven’t had the time….) and with last weekends 16″ snow in SW Virginia the sedan still performed admirably. Yes these cars stuck around way to long, but they remain a solid sub $500 beater option.
Well they’re a good bit more than $500 in anything resembling roadworthy condition here in Central Indiana, but an A-body has long been on my short list of cars to consider for winter beater duty. Simple and sturdy and cheap suspensions (rear beam axle, $15 shocks, etc), steel wheels that run a size that is both good for pothole duty and cheap and easy to replace. Around here you just need to look out for rot, as brake lines and fuel lines and such can turn even a mechanically simple and cheap-to-buy domestic into an expensive hassle.