This lime green 1968 Mercury Park Lane is a very rare car: Lincoln-Mercury built only 1,112 Park Lane convertibles this year, and just 215 of them had this simulated woodgrain side trim, wood-tone “yacht paneling” borrowed from the Colony Park station wagon.
I have to confess that I’ve never been a big fan of wood (or “wood”) trim on postwar cars, even on the inside, and the appeal of the woodie is mostly lost on me. In good condition, with the right paint color, wood exterior paneling can look very nice in a quaint museum-piece sort of way, but I don’t love the log cabin vibe, and thinking about the upkeep involved quickly cools any desire I might have to actually own one, even in a fantasy garage scenario. Prewar wood-bodied station wagons were typically owned by people or businesses with staff or servants to handle the sanding and varnishing — it was too much for most private owners, and an ill-kept woodie can really become a fright.
I could say the same for simulated woodgrain, which became a popular luxury trim item for station wagons as the real thing was fading away in the early 1950s. Fiberglass paneling and DI-NOC vinyl applique doesn’t require sanding and varnishing, but wear and weather can leave it looking pretty bad. Since the wood trim is intended to evoke an era and a class with which I have no emotional connection or particular affinity, it doesn’t do much for me.
A while back, I happened upon this old RM Sotheby’s listing for a 1968 Mercury Park Lane convertible with woodgrain side trim. Now, I dimly recalled that Chrysler briefly offered “Sportsgrain” woodgrain on the Newport hardtop and convertible around that time — I’ve seen a couple of those, although they were also rare — but I hadn’t known that Mercury did the same thing. This Park Lane is quite striking in its dark Augusta Green, giving an unusual two-tone effect.
The Sotheby’s listing unfortunately had only that one photo, and so I’ve been occasionally poking around for other Park Lane hardtops or convertibles with this option. However, the wood-tone paneling option — sometimes described as “yacht paneling” or “Colony Park paneling,” since it was also used on the Mercury Colony Park station wagon — was very uncommon, as were the two-door models on which it was offered.
Mercury first offered the Park Lane from 1958 to 1960. It was part of a short-lived, disastrous attempt to move Mercury upmarket, an effort that proved both badly planned and very ill-timed — it was supposed to rival senior Buick models just as Buick sales were collapsing. The Park Lane went away after 1960, but its upscale-sounding name was too good to lose, so Mercury tried again in 1964. This was more successful for a while, with production peaking at 38,800 for 1966, but the Park Lane series started to slip for 1967 and was dropped again after 1968.
The wood-tone paneling option, which cost $129.50, was optional on the 1968 Park Lane two-door hardtop and convertible. It was seldom ordered, but part of the reason for that was that the two-door Park Lane models were seldom ordered: Production for 1968 totaled 2,584 two-door hardtops and just 1,112 convertibles. I couldn’t find any figures indicating how many hardtops got the wood-tone exterior, but the Marti report for the lime-green car pictured here says it was applied to a mere 215 Park Lane convertibles.
When this car was built, the base price of a Park Lane convertible was $3,822, $93 more than a Chrysler Newport convertible, but $74 less than a Buick Wildcat Custom convertible. This Park Lane has Whisper-Aire air conditioning, front disc brakes, power steering, power brakes, and automatic transmission, and probably listed for closer to $5,000.
Lincoln-Mercury issued a special brochure for the wood-tone paneling option, which claims that the simulated walnut paneling was also available on the Mercury Brougham two-door hardtop. This claim poses some problems: 1968 Mercury brochures indicate that the Brougham was available only in four-door sedan or hardtop form, not as a two-door — the Marquis was the top two-door hardtop for 1968. Was the woodgrain option available on the 1968 Marquis? Maybe, but I couldn’t find any examples so equipped. The 1968 Marquis was not very common either, with production totaling 3,965 cars, so even if it could be ordered with “yacht paneling,” there might not be any survivors today.
In any event, the wood-tone option was basically the same as you got on a 1968 Mercury Colony Park station wagon, except that on the wagon, the woodgrain was also applied to the tailgate.
The Mercury treatment covered more surface area than the Sportsgrain option Chrysler offered on the Newport hardtop and convertible, but was somewhat less elaborate.
Chrysler’s version, borrowed from the Town & County wagon, threw in some fake wood planks, whereas the Mercury just used chrome strips to separate the vinyl woodgrain applique from the adjacent paint. Part of the reason I’ve never really gotten my head around the popularity of these simulated woodie treatments is that the woodgrain appliques were essentially just big decals. Given the later popularity of wraps, which are more or less the same thing, some people clearly don’t have a problem with that, but it’s not generally how I would choose to spend my money.
Nonetheless, I do like this Park Lane convertible — I think in large part because of the green paint, which makes for a pleasant visual balance. I prefer the darker Augusta Green of the Sotheby’s car to this car’s Lime Frost, but it still works. The white convertible shown in the brochure excerpt above fails to move me, and darker, redder colors like Grecian Gold or Black Cherry don’t offer enough contrast with the simulated walnut.
The interior treatment sets off the Lime Frost paint rather nicely. As I said earlier, I don’t normally care for woodgrain interior trim, but on a car whose flanks are slathered in it, it seems silly to quibble about that. It is thematically consistent, if nothing else.
The Dark Ivy Gold upholstery is an interesting look, although the brighter green of the floor mats clashes a bit.
I’m curious about what led Lincoln-Mercury to offer this option in the first place — I don’t think it was a response to the Chrysler option, which I believe arrived midyear as a spring 1968 addition. Both Mercury and Chrysler had offered some actual woodie convertibles along these lines around 20 years earlier, although the Chrysler Town & Country convertibles (and 1950 Town & Country Newport hardtop) seem to be much better known today than the very rare 1946 Mercury Sportsman. However, the Mercury wood-tone paneling brochure doesn’t make any appeal to nostalgia, simply describing the simulated wood as a “fine-car touch” previously found only on luxury station wagons.
In Hollywood, when you have several big movies or TV shows with similar high concepts, you can often trace them back to some common origin point. In this case, I wonder if the inspiration was contemporary trends in interior design. This was before my time, so I can only testify to the abundant woodgrain trim of ’70s and early ’80s decor, but a 1968 item in Popular Science noted the growing trend of interior wood paneling using pre-finished sections of plywood, printed with different grains or textures to offer a variety of looks at a modest cost. Automotive styling organizations usually have people looking at non-automotive design trends like these to see if there’s anything worth borrowing.
If that was what happened, the results were a commercial flop. While affluent station wagon buyers continued to favor simulated woodgrain (the Mercury Colony Park and Ford Country Squire wagons greatly outsold their cheaper woodgrain-free counterparts in 1968), hardtop and convertible buyers didn’t seem interested. As best I can determine, Lincoln-Mercury dropped this option for non-wagon models after 1968. The Sportsgrain option returned on the Newport for 1969, but remained unpopular and was dropped after that. Since the woodgrain trim was very similar to what was already available on station wagons, I don’t imagine the failure of these options caused any fits of ritual bloodletting among the accountants at either company.
Chrysler, of course, later tried again with the Town & Country version of the LeBaron convertible, added during the 1983 model year. Costing an extra $1,000 over the standard LeBaron Mark Cross Edition convertible, the Town & Country gave you simulated wood planking along with its woodgrain applique.
The pseudo-woodie LeBaron was never terribly common. Standard Catalog of Chrysler 1914–2000 puts total production at 3,721 convertibles through 1986, with over 40 percent of those sold in the first year. However, the investment must have been small (there was already a LeBaron Town & Country station wagon with similar side trim), and it was attention-grabbing, if not necessarily in a good way. I always hated these things whenever I spotted one — I thought the planking was tacky, and it was beyond old-fashioned by the mid-’80s, very much at odds with contemporary trends in automotive aerodynamics. Today, these LeBaron convertibles are rare enough that my judgment of them has mellowed to “kinda silly-looking.”
But, I do get a kick out of this Lime Frost ’68 Park Lane. Its novelty value sets it apart from other large late ’60s convertibles, and most of the mechanical stuff is standard big Ford — not a bad thing for a collector car of middling value. (This one has the four-barrel Marauder Super 390 and C6 Select-Shift Merc-O-Matic with a tall 2.75 axle.) The woodgrain isn’t to every taste, but on a green car, no one could accuse you of missing the forest for the trees.
Related Reading
Curbside Classic: 1968 Mercury Colony Park – Ahoy There, Matey! (by Tom Klockau)
1958 Mercury Park Lane: The ‘Over-The-Top’ 50s Car You’ve Probably Never Seen (by Stephen Pellegrino)
Cohort Outtake: 1969 Chrysler Newport Convertible – At The Beach (by Paul N)
It _IS_ pretty .
-Nate
Very much agree with the point that vinyl wood grain is simple “a big decal”, and as such it reminds me of wraps on today’s cars. I don’t get it, although it is somehow better on a big wagon than a sedan. Probably, that’s just familiarity and hence can’t really be explained rationally.
Yes, the mid to late 1960s through the 1970s was a time of wood grain. It was in everyone’s homes (mostly the photo-reproduction kind, although we lived in a few houses with real wood paneling in some rooms). Most of the social hours of my childhood were spent in various kids’ wood-grained-paneled finished basements (“rumpus rooms” I heard them called). Sometimes watching TV on a set that also featured fake wood grain on its console.
There was a lot of fake wood paneling in the late 60s to early 70s. The wood grain was printed on the plywood panel. There was even green paneling.
One room of our house (built in 1971) has real wood paneling. My desk that I built in 1971 as my project in high school wood shop has fake wood paneling on the sides and back. That was a matter of cost; the desktop, drawer fronts and posts are all solid walnut.
Wow this thing looks loooooong!
Shooting with a wide angle lens tends to do that when close to the subject.
The Park Lane IS 220.1 inches long, and it is almost 5 inches longer than the Colony Park wagon, so it is genuinely a very long car.
WoW. I didn’t know this was real. I thought someone did a “custom one-off” just to be funny.
Yikes. Disliked it on any(every) wagon and cannot stand it on this. Poor car.
I prefer the Green Pontiac in the BG a few pics in.
I usually say that “I’d take one” or “I’d drive it”, but in this case, I’d take it and sell it. Would probably only drive it to the edge of the yard
I can only guess that one of the ideas of a woodgrain convertible (at least in the way it was applied to those late sixties’ Mercurys and Chryslers) was to harken back to the days of, say, Jay Gatsby in the Roaring Twenties, when high-end sport boats were constructed mostly of wood. The name Chris Craft comes to mind. There are devotees of those old wood boats, and it would appear that those kept up in pristine condition are rather valuable. But, as pointed out in the article, the upkeep would be labor intensive and expensive.
But that seems a little old fashioned. To drive home the point, Chrysler later offered a one-year-only ‘Mariner’ package on the 1973 Newport with a more nautical theme, including a round C-pillar porthole window, quite like that of the one on the 1957 Thunderbird hardtop. But the Chrysler Mariner most definitely did ‘not’ have woodgrain appliques so it was more like a modern seagoing vessel.
Wood boats is what I think this was *supposed to* evoke too, the fact that it was trimmed with chrome and not with fiberglass planks may have been a cost saving move, but that’s exactly how Chris Crafts are trimmed too.
I mean I’ll say this, big floaty full size big block convertibles really are about as close to the driving experience you can get on pavement, it’s an absurd concept but so are flying cars and it didn’t stop the jet/rocket age tailing craze just 10 years before these. Cars were fantasy machines back then.
Their modern equivalent must be the very ugly excess of cladding ( wheel arch / front rear clips ) on the so-called rugged look of wilderness SUVs. That reminds me more of that than modern wrap, these last passersby, almost unnoticed while the rugged look leaves me with black plastic between my teeth. In any case, there are sometimes strange combinations like Cobra Jet Ram Air with with faux wood panelling
Good point about the plastic cladding. That stuff has infected so many vehicles. It’s about the only way that a station wagon can sneak onto the market in the US (see Audi, Volvo, Subaru), although in all of those cases the manufacturers have pretty much given up the ghost and have moved to full-on SUV bodies. With even more cladding.
And just like vinyl roofs and vinyl wood grain decals, this cladding can cover up a multitude of problems that only become worse problems once exposed. See my post today about the rust on my 2007 Highlander under its (albeit modest amount of) cladding.
I remember an ad that ran in magazines for these. I only saw it later and wondered why I had never seen one.
I always thought that Lime Frost/Lime Gold paint that was popular on 1967-69 FoMoCo cars looked simple awful with a white roof (whether a convertible or a vinyl-covered one). Black worked, white didn’t.
Quite a rare and interesting find – never imagined Mercury would slap vinyl “wood” on a convertible
The combination of white top, Lime Frost and wood tone is somewhat jarring, but that Augusta Green looks nice, although not something I would even consider
I quite like the Augusta Green, especially with the green top, although unfortunately that’s the only photo I could find of that car. (Given the rarity of the woodgrain option, it might well have been the only one built in that color.)
There was a hardtop version in my home town of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Light blue in colour as I recall. Don’t recall if it was a Park Lane or Marquis but I am thinking Park Lane.
I actually kind of like the white brochure one, I prefer wood to contrast off of a neutral color like it, where this shade of green gives me strong family truckster vibes.
More than anything I this is representative of the Mercury brand’s identity in that it really didn’t know what its identity was exactly. This car sans wood trim wasn’t exactly a compelling product on its own and hadn’t been in the years leading up to it, so why not slather on some nidoc and see what happens? The result is…. Uncompelling, but mildly memorable at least, which is a win by Mercury standards.
For me wood was exclusively station wagon fodder, I literally cannot picture a 77-91 B body wagon or box Panther wagon without wood panels and when I have rarely seen them without they look naked. Coupes and convertibles are weird novelties by contrast, I do remember the K car ones well, thanks to Planes Trains & Automobiles and who can forget Jon Voight’s LeBaron from Seinfeld as comedy punchlines, but in modern terms seeing them is akin to seeing a coupe or sedan with SUV style black cladding, LED lightbars and a roof rack… there’s no rule that they can’t but it just looks wrong
Yeah, I think that was basically the gist. The Park Lane four-door hardtop had been selling okay for what it was, but the two-door models were dead in the water, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the arguments for offering the woodgrain option was that it might draw enough attention to remind people that the two-door models still existed.
I first saw the 1982 Chrysler Mark Cross Town & Country on a turntable at the annual auto show that year. A spectator remarked “It comes with its own Packing Crate!”
Hah! +1