Well, here we are, with granddad’s Olds Delta 88. A ’72, I think. Left to right, it’s Mom, my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and me. Summer of 1981, waiting forever for a ferry on the N.C. Outer Banks. Looks like a very similar blue Olds in the background, and an Olds Omega behind that!
It’s a nice added touch that Nana is giving my Mom bunny ears, and Mom is giving her own mom the bunny ears. Ladies, please, can we just get a nice family photo?
My maternal grandmother was pretty petite. My mom is 5’2″ on a good day, and you can see she was a bit taller. Grandma must have been no more than 5′ or so. And this big brown barge was her everyday car.
Before that, she had a 1967 LeSabre, which somehow didn’t seem as large. Hers was this shade in blue, an ice blue. The baby blue interior was shiny, silky fabric. It reeked of cigarette smoke, in a comforting, 1970’s grandma kind of way, if that makes sense to anyone else. Grandmas sashayed around department stores and the grocery store smoking back then. There was always one burning in the ashtray, even when they were too busy cooking or knitting or playing bridge to touch it. It was the smell of my youth.
She assumed the helm of the Delta 88 when my grandpa bought our 1976 Volare wagon, identical to this one, which occurred when we bought the new 1979 240D.
The Volare had plaid seats like the lower right photo here, from the 1976 Volare catalog. Ours was a brown/orange/yellow plaid though, to go with the butterscotch colored paint. Wow, what a riot that would be to see on a new car today! But I digress.
My best friend in grad school was a car nut, like me. We shared an old house with two other guys. While the two housemates studied, my best friend and I talked cars, and drove around for hours in the 1991 Prelude, looking at new and used cars. There was no internet, really, yet. We didn’t have cable. Smartphones were years away. It was how we killed all our spare time.
One day, we had a chance encounter with a 1976 Olds 98 Regency hardtop for sale. It was massive, and very weathered. Of course, it reminded me of grandad’s Delta 88. His was long gone by this time.
Grandma and Grandpa were back down to one car, a 1988 Chevy Celebrity they bought new. It was the last car either of them drove. We had to take the keys away from my widowed grandma by 1995 or so, because she started getting lost in the neighborhood where she had lived for 30 years.
The 98 (Ninety Eight?) was silver, and for whatever reason, silver Detroit cars did not hold up well. This was probably 1993 or so, so it was old but not yet 20 years old. The paint was flat and devoid of any hope.
But, the interior was divine! I’ve never been to an actual brothel, but this is what I would imagine the Playboy Mansion circa 1976 looking like.
Lots of fake carvings, buttons, and gratuitous embellishments, like you see on 1970’s furniture. It was so much more exciting than the off-white interior of the brown Delta 88. As weathered as the exterior was, the interior looked pretty darn good. It wasn’t faded or torn. The seller wanted $750.00 for it. We talked him down to $600.00 cash. My friend put up half and I put up the other half.
We painted it with white tractor paint and a brush. We masked the trim and did a neat job. The white hid the brush marks well and it looked pretty darn good, I kid you not. Black would have been nice with the red interior, but applied with a brush it would have looked like crap.
The air didn’t work, but with all the windows down on the pillarless hardtop, it was about like a convertible anyway.
It had a 455 but you’d never know it. It couldn’t get out of it’s own way. Google tells me it had 190 horsepower on a good day. It ran smooth as glass, so I don’t think there was anything wrong. It was just so heavy and so de-tuned for emissions and economy, I guess.
It had an “economy meter” that plunged into the red if you so much as rested your foot on the accelerator.
The Olds quickly became the go-to vehicle for anyone we knew who needed to move. We put a set of cheap whitewalls on it, but I don’t recall any other repairs. A good thing, since we were broke. We moved my now-wife from one address to another in it; we filled the trunk with furniture, and her dresser fit in the back seat. This thing had room to spare! We hauled mattresses for friends on the roof, and filled the trunk with ice and kegs one weekend. My friend used it to build a chain-link fence dog lot for his girlfriend, later his wife.
The power windows eventually all simultaneously failed, a short or some electrical gremlin. That meant it couldn’t be driven unless it was cold weather, as you would suffocate. But in cold weather, the windows would fog up due to the lack of A/C or being able to crack a window. It was a rolling terrarium.
It didn’t get driven much after that. As graduated neared, we had to do something with it before our lease was up. And, neither of us had told our parents about it either. There was a small old garage behind our rental house, and we had left it in there (or as much of it as would fit). Our next door neighbor was an older gentleman with a Cadillac, a 1970 I think. It was his everyday car.
We asked him if he wanted the Olds, for free. We didn’t need or expect money for it, what with no air and no windows either. We had gotten two years and $600.00 of fun out of it. He acted like we had given him a million dollars. His face lit up and he gladly accepted the keys, and moved it across the street to his carport. He kicked the Cadillac out into his backyard.
My friend married his grad school girlfriend, and I married mine. You’ve already heard about my subsequent rescue COALs. My friend had a couple of rescue COALs that I know of. He called me with excitement when he later bought a halfway decent Grand Wagoneer Limited.
And, he later picked up a very nice Electra Estate wagon, with leather and the alloy wheels.
My friend, who had never smoked anything, developed a cough he couldn’t shake. About eight years after we graduated, he died of lung cancer, leaving two kids the same age as my two oldest ones. I think about him every time I see a big old Detroit anything, and wonder what he would have to say about it. I’m getting misty eyed typing this, actually.
And I still remember what he said when we bought the 98 together. I didn’t have the money to spare, really, and neither did he. I wasn’t sure I could pay my part of the rent and power. “I think I made a big mistake”, I said. His reply? “No, I think you just made the best decision of your life!”
The 1976 98 had the best frontal styling of any big Olds in the 1970s, in my opinion.
He’s right, you know. Life is too short to rush, and far too important to take seriously.
Love the confederate flag in the original photo. Back when people had a “sense of humor”
? Would it still be humorous if it was a nazi swastika or iron cross ? .
They both represent ignorance, hatred, racism , intolerance , white pride, on and on……
-Nate
I’d like to know why the Confederate flag is — or at least appears to be — springing forth from the Spitfire. AFAIK, Canley was never in the confederacy. Triumphs of that era usually displayed the Union Jack.
It’s the Carolinas, so I’m not surprised to one furled out in a fit of “southern pride.” It’d be more at home flapping from the back of a K5 Blazer.
Great Story!, and well written. I can just picture all the cars you described. I miss the 4 Door pillarless hardtop body style. I know, they were not safe, or practical, but they had a personal style that is missing from today’s swoopy aerodynamic cars. Who cares about fuel economy, when you can cruise down the street in one of these barges. Buick’s and Olds were and still are my favorite in these years.. Thanks for the stroll down memory lane.
These things were everywhere in my life. Your grandparents’ 72 looks to have been painted Baroque Gold, the color that my mother tried to get for the Cutlass Supreme she was buying that year. I got intimately familiar with the entire 72 Olds lineup as I passed time in the showroom while Mom was doing the hard parts of car buying.
A friends dad had a 75 Custom Cruiser, the only Olds that could possibly have been more if a fuel swilling tank than yours. Those were good looking cars with interiors as nice as GM was capable of in those years of fantastic plastic.
And I am in awe of anyone willing to paint a car with a brush. Nothing says “I really don’t care if my car is just a good 50 footer” than a good brush paint job. It probably looked better than most spray can hack jobs I have seen.
I’ve got a near 9 year old car with a white paint job, and until I saw the picture of that white car I wondered just how good, or bad, a painted with a brush paint job looked. That photo makes me less hesitant to try that on my car.
In the mid-sixties I was walking my friends paper route with him and we came across a housewife painting a big Plymouth with a 4″ brush and a can of beige interior flat latex. Never saw the finished product – she couldn’t have had ten bucks into it.
“It reeked of cigarette smoke, in a comforting, 1970’s grandma kind of way, if that makes sense to anyone else.” It does. My maternal grandparents’ Electra Limited hardtop had the same smell. I miss it.
Oh, the memories of cigarette smoke! My grandmother’s Bel Air stunk too. Everyone smoked back then, and everywhere. People even smoked differently than they do today. It was common to see someone inhale smoke and then rattle off in conversation as the smoke drifted up out of them as they talked, and some would exhale out of their nose. Just a whiff can transport me back in time with thoughts of people long since gone.
This post reminds me of my grandparents and you nailed it with how people used to smoke differently. I remember watching my grandmother inhale, and then a good 45 seconds later she would talk and the smoke would come out with her words. Other times she would do this thing where the smoke would come out her mouth while simultaneously being re-inhaled through her nose!
Even better: the lingering aroma of pipe smoke. Cigarette smoke was Dad, pipe smoke was Granddad.
Yes! My grandfather smoked pipes and they smaller so good!
Yes, the cigarette smoke thing makes complete sense although none of my grandparents smoked within my lifetime. But nearly everyone else did.
Having driven a 350 powered ’74 Olds 88 a few times in high school, these big GMs had something special about them. Sure, they aren’t everyones sugar stick, but the serenity and smoothness they provided is something that hasn’t been easily duplicated until recently. And these old GMs still possess more presence and an unabashed sense of being comfortable in their own skin than anything since.
The smell of tobacco smoke…yes, it brings back memories of my Grandfather.
I think I remember a book named ‘Shenandoah’ wherein the story line took place around the Civil War which contained something that has stuck with me for years –
A little girl’s father comes home after being away (fighting?) and she runs up and hugs him.
“She loved the comforting man-smell of her father, a blend of tobacco, sweat, and horse”
Thank you for this beautiful story and finding the perfect pictures for it as well. The patina silver Ninety Eight Regency Coupe gets two thumbs way up from me.
“My friend used it to build a chain-link fence dog lot for his girlfriend, later his wife.”
Did she continue to live in the dog lot after they were married?
A wonderfully entertaining story. Those big GM land yachts were something. I remember my father buying a new 1970 Olds 98, black on black, bringing it home and taking his appreciative sons out for a spin before parking it in the garage. We woke up next morning to find it had dumped ATF all over the garage floor. But that was the only trouble he had with it, put over 160k miles on it before selling it to a family friend who wrung several more years out of it.
I assume the economy meter was a vacuum gauge?
Yes. Many cars if that era had them. They were useless because everyone could figure out that the gauge needle simply mimicked the movement of the gas pedal.
There’s a chance the gauge could give warning of engine problems like leaking valves, improper carburetor mixture etc, but they were never promoted as such.
These cars are proof that when GM “got it right “, they really got it right.
Unfortunately, when GM got it wrong….it was an unholy disaster.
Like several others have commented, the cigarette paragraph was evocative (and hilarious). None of the adults in my family smoked within my lifetime (I ended up smoking for seven years), though my grandpa the farmer smoked for years before giving it up before I was born.
I remember many places smelling like baked-in smoke when I was growing up. I don’t remember finding it a particularly offensive smell (probably because my parents didn’t smoke).
Great words and pictures – I enjoyed this one a lot.
Lovely story, thank you.
The power and fuel economy on many 70’s cars can be improved with a bit of tuning. Unfortunately I’ve never seen an article on the unique challenges of tuning’70’s cars. Most can benefit from proper tuning and repair and modification of the various mechanical engine control systems. Various devices controlling ignition advance, vacuum advance , air inlet temperature all get stuck, killing power and economy. Sensible repair and adjustment helps enormously. Sometimes they can be bypassed depending on your local climate . Also today’s fuels allow for ignition timing and carburetor mixture thats a bit different than factory specs, for improved operation.
Great story. Another car body with mandatory rear skirts; Olds handles these particularly well, here, and the big car looks great.
I’ve been watching old daytime TV shows. Garry Moore comes striding onstage in “I’ve Got a Secret,” cigarette in hand, and plops down behind his desk where there’s an ashtray. He doesn’t quite have it in his mouth while speaking . . . but almost. Amazing . . .
What great story telling .
I’m sorry you lost your friend but his memory clearly lives on in your heart .
Yes, those ‘fuel economy gauges’ were directly connected to the intake manifold .
Also, most 1970’s engines can be peaked and tweaked to passable performance .
Lastly, I know I’m old because Grandma in the green blouse looks cute to me….
-Nate
That is how I knew that I was getting old. I started thinking that gray hair on women was sexy. Also, if I saw a middle age mother and her twenty something daughter, I looked at the mother first.
Thanx Charles ~
I began to realize that Woman over 35 offered way more than the younger ones ever thought of about _three_decades_ ago .
Sigh .
I should prolly just die now .
Stil having wayyy too much fun though =8-) .
-Nate
My grandpa had a 72 98 like your one. It must not have had as much smog equipment as it was older and sold in Canada. The 455 Oldsmobile rocket engine seemed to have lots of get up and go. I remember sleeping on the back window tray on family road trips. In the 1970’s seat belt use was not manditory yet and life was cheap(er). It made the rounds around the family after he replaced it with a 78 delta 88. One of the carpenters at my fathers shop finally wound up with it and drove it until the late 1990’s when the combination of tin worm and a loose coil wire allowed to much fuel to get into the exhaust and then got ignited. This blew out the muffler in a dramatic explosion. And he finally sent it to the wrecker.
I ended up with the 78 delta 88 for a while. However coming from previous 4 cylinders and paying $5 in gas to go get a coffee convinced me to pass it on to a friend in need.
the 72 Olds 98 offered dual exhausts as an option, which would have increased the net horsepower by about 25. Axle ratios were at least 2.73:1 but more likely 2.93:1 depending on options. The 1976 98 was single exhaust due to the catalytic converters and the axle ratio was probably 2.56:1. Engine tuning has reduced the horsepower, so performance is noticeably decreased.
My guess is that the OLDs 455 with dual exhausts would have been rated around 250 net hp in 1972 but by 1976 probably less than 200 (around 190?).
Ah, few things bring back memories of my youth more than a discussion of smoking. I grew up in a working class neighborhood in a small town in Kentucky and smoking was virtually universal among adults. I can remember being sent to the corner grocery to purchase cigarettes for my father when I was no more than 8 or 9 years old; yes, that was technically illegal but it was a law that was seldom, if ever, enforced. Back then there was no such thing as a non-smoking area, with the exception of churches and schools, and the atmosphere in the teacher’s lounge in my high school resembled a forest fire. In the early seventies, when I was a student at the University of Kentucky, smoking was permitted in the dorms, the dining facilities and even in the reading rooms of the library. How times have changed, and for the better in this instance.
Love the spitfire in the background
Yeah, eh? My mother’s mother was maybe 5′ if she was wearing substantial shoes, and she drove a ’71 Cadillac Calais. Peered out at a small slice of the world visible through the crescent between the steering wheel rim and the dashboard. Bystanders saw a great big Cadillac being driven by…erm…apparently by a wisp of grey hair.
Grandpa, on the other hand, was average height—maybe 5’9″ or so—and he drove a ’72 Dart.
Go figure!
Great story and what a wide ranging and wonderful collection of pictures! I have a soft spot in my heart for all those cars, including the Volare (I had a 77 coupe) and especially the Grand Wagoneer and Estate Wagon (two of my favorite wagony vehicles).
The stench of cigarettes in my parent’s cars growing up was real. Dad smoked Merit, Mom Kents. I always felt our house smelled like a bar (it did, for several reasons…). Genius that I am, I vowed I would never smoke or drink. Mom even gave me permission to smoke at 13, because that’s when she started! I made good on abstaining from alcohol until 19. Hard to go to bars and date and avoid drinking… Beer still disgusts me to this day, however. Cigarettes got me at 29 when I was going through a very ugly break up and move… Why ever did I take up smoking, I’ll never know. Dumb dumb dumb. That said, I never smoke indoors or in my cars because of the memories of that god awful stench that will never go away.
@JC;
Those who were kids in the pre 1980’s (I’m guessing) had to suffer dense clouds of cigarette smoke indoors all year long, if you lived in snow country, (I did from birth until 1970) it was incredibly miserable unless you took up the habit ~
I’ve never liked cigarettes but smoked a pipe for a few decades, all smoking is flat out _stupid_ and deadly. no matter what the death dealers say as they try hard to make it ‘cool’ so you’ll begin .
I think I was 12 when I began, Jesus H. Christ was I a dumb ass .
-Nate
My paternal grandparents smoked in the house and I rarely ever smoked in teh house because of the way theirs smelled. Their clothes, the food, the cat, everything smelled like cigarette smoke. I have finally kicked cigarettes and am down to vaping. But I am with you on the smell. And know what you mean about taking it up.
My father had a ’75 and ’76 98 Regency as company cars. Does anyone remember what extremely wide spark plug gaps the 455 engine used with HEI? I know the AC # of the spark plugs was R46SX or R46SZ. If I remember correctly the R46SX was .060″ and the R46SZ was .080″. GM and Oldsmobile claimed this wide plug gap was effective at igniting lean EGR diluted fuel mixtures and also could last 22,500 miles. I believe GM called this the “Efficiency System”.
Also does anyone remember the GM specification steel belted radial tires which debuted in ’74 or ’75? My dad’s ’75 used JR78-15 tires. These tires had a very unique tread pattern.
Last question: Why did Oldsmobile’s V8 never go to the tapered seat 5/8″ hex “peanut” spark plug like the rest of the GM V8’s? It seems to me that right until the end of the 307 V8’s production Olds used the 13/16″ hex plug with metal gasket rings.
@Glenn ;
Yes, the then new HEI systems were all specc’d out to .060″, it turned out that although it really did help combustion it also chewed up plugs, caps and rotors at an alarming pace so they reduced the spec. after a few years .
Older Hot Rodders will always increase the spark plug gaps (even on 6 volt systems) to .035″ ~ the improvement is instant and startling .
I install breakerless ignitions in most of the old engines I touch and always open the spark plugs to .040″ ~ the reduction in emissions is nice too .
‘peanut’ spark plugs date back to the 1940’s and heat up faster yet run cooler…..
Some older Honda Motos use them too .
-Nate
A follow up to my message above: In September 1975 I was working at the Woolco Automotive Department at 21st and Shadeland in Indianapolis. I was driving a ’72 Chevelle with a 350 at the time. It used AC R44T spark plugs. When HEI debuted on the ’75 350’s, R44TX plugs gapped at .060″ were called for. These plugs were much more expensive than the R44T’s. Interestingly, the 1976 and later model 350’s called for R45TS plugs gapped at .045″. This was the same plug used in the ’71 Chevrolet 307’s.
When I was 20 I worked for a small speaker manufacturer. The warehouse manager drove a silver ’76 Custom Cruiser, essentially a 98 in wagon form. It was about 7 years old so he decided to repaint it. I was asked if I wanted to wax it, and said yes. That was the first car I had ever waxed, and it was the last. Did it the old school Turtle Wax way. Took me a whole week’s worth of lunch hours to do it. That was a lot of car. I told myself I’d never wax another car ever again, and I haven’t:
All this discussion of tobacco makes me smile. Everyone in my family, including me, smoked, except for my father. I remember many family gatherings where the air in the house was like a country smokehouse, with everyone puffing cigarettes and cigars and sipping champagne and good Scotch whiskey. And yet, thank God, no one succumbed to smoking ailments. I quit in April 2015 after 50 years of sucking Marlboros, and my health seems fine, knock wood. But I have to be honest – I still miss my cigs.
Oh wait, this is a car blog, not “Smokeshop Classics”…
I have a nostalgic smell for stale cigarette smoke, partly from Grandma’s house, but mostly from a farm toy show that I attended every year as a child, held in a run-down, absolute pit of a hotel that used to be a Howard Johnson’s–the blue paint on the roof had worn through, exposing the original orange. All the hallways and ballrooms reeked of stale smoke, even though smoking was no longer allowed outside the lounge. About 10 years ago, that pit was finally vacated and torn down, and the toy show was moved to a much nicer hotel across the street. There, you can only smell smoke in the designated areas. We still attend the show every year, but this was the last year my father was an exhibitor, and we won’t be going next year (only because we have a big family vacation at the same time). The farm toy hobby is currently in an ebb stage, as many hobbies have an ebb and flow. But the National Farm Toy Show in Dyersville remains the destination of any toy farmer.
THIS is why I come to this site. I read COALs about Toyotas and stuff, but these are the cars I come to read about. Thanks for this one.
Great article and thank you. That Confederate Flag on the Fiat (?) sure dates the photo a bit. My mama hated Cigarettes so much that she left fossilized Butts from late Great Aunt Vera in her second hand Dart’s ashtray for the 10 years mama owned the car.
Grew up during the 80s and 90s…my grandmother’s house and car had the cigarette smoke smell well into the late 90s when she finally stopped. My father and grandfather (other side of the family) both smoked pipes, but, especially early on when more such places existed, my grandfather’s cars smelled great because he would purchase special blends of pipe tobacco from tobacconists. By the early 90s those kinds of stores were disappearing…the generic gas stationHalf and Half pipe tobacco he and my father used as a result did not leave a lasting smell. Then of course there were the friends whose parents’ houses smelled of both liquor (usually gin) and cigarettes.
Great article on an old soldier. I hope the old man fixed her up. I have a 1975 98 Regency in baby (“horizon”) blue with navy velour that I need to write up yet. Same gauges as yours had except the original owner did not buy the fuel economy monitor, whose spot is taken up by an Olds rocket symbol. It’s a nice cruiser with a very comfortable interior and handles reasonably well for its size in comparison to the descriptions of the big FoMoCo products of the day I’ve read on here (most recently xequar’s great articles on driving the 70s Continental and T-Bird). Unlike you, I have mostly been lucky with the electricals–all the windows, the TempMatic climate control, seats, and radio work great. Fortunate to know a guy who knows who to fix TempMatics as mine was stuck on heat only at first…now functional. The only issue is the passenger side power door lock switch.
I don’t know as I’d characterize the 190 HP 455 as a total dog, it puts out 350 lbs/ft of torque. I think 0-60 is around 10 seconds. Let’s put it this way, it’s not a rocket (pun intended) but it merges into highway traffic without any issues, and it’s responsive if you put your foot into it.
Glad you got to enjoy yours for a bit. I lost a good college friend who enjoyed American iron, much too young, too. Think about him often.