Yes, that would be yours truly, alongside a 1971 Grand Prix. I was two years old at the time – and had already driven said car. Twice.
Last time the CC Kids bandwagon rolled through, I decided not to hop on. My Curbside Classic contributorship had only yielded about three posts to date, so I figured it’d be best if folks got to know me a bit before delving into those models dearest to me, much less cracking open the family photo album.
But now, with some forty posts under my belt, I suppose it’s as good a time as any.
At the risk of boring you all with too much background, let me say that the automotive bug bit me early.
Despite growing up in modest surroundings, my parents always took great care to make the most of what we had. Our house may not have been huge or modern, but it was always well-kept and clean, right down to the neatly trimmed lawn and shrubbery. Things like birthday cakes and backyard toys were homemade, but that wasn’t a problem – they were great. And my father, a mechanic, always took pride in keeping the family vehicles a cut above.
Our family never bought new vehicles. We never needed to. Dear old Dad had a real knack for seeing the potential in certain older vehicles. He’d routinely turn what first appeared to be a jalopy into a gem we were proud to call our own.
There were never any six-banger sedans in our driveway… no sir! Three different Grand Prixes, a Firebird, and a Chevelle all graced our garage at one time or another. I myself came home for the first time in an orange ’73 Nova RS.
Even when the time came for more doors, we didn’t do it in the usual way.
My old man fell in love with his first Grand Prix – a ’71 with a 455, cream interior, and a slightly roughed-up body. He saw in it the same things I’d come to discover as I got older: it was sporty, yet classy; had horsepower and torque to spare; had plenty of room for a tall guy and his family to ride in comfort; and was something unique, without so much as a hint of “me too” about it.
Here’s the lead picture one more time, to bring us back around. It was shot a couple months after the bodywork was completed, and just hours after the rebuilt motor had been reinstalled.
There was no hoist in our garage back then, and no rafter strong enough to support the hefty Poncho long-block, so my old man had to get creative. He put some very large boards across two fat oak trees in the backyard, 10′ off the ground, with enough room for a car to fit between them. This became the “motor pulling tree”. Roll the car up to it, use the come-along to lift the motor out, roll the car away, back the pickup in, lower the motor, bring it into the garage. Reinstallation was pretty much the opposite.
The engine rebuild took place in the family garage, like so many before and after. Dad would work on it each evening after work, buying the needed parts a few at a time, and within a couple weeks it would be ready to go back in.
Remember when I said I’d driven the car twice by the time that picture was taken? It’s true! I remember it well… me struggling to see over the three-spoke, woodgrain-trimmed Pontiac steering wheel, aiming the car while the old man pushed it towards the “motor pulling tree”. Nothing in my life up to that point had made me prouder. Best of all, after the rebuild I would get to do it again!
That was the first of three Grand Prixes my dad would end up having throughout my childhood – a pair of ’72s would join it in the years to come. Sadly, health issues would later force Dad to sell off all three.
But that is not the end of the Thelen GP saga – not even close! The groundwork has now been laid for several future COALs, including my ’71 SJ, seen here in “barn fresh” condition several years ago.
So many stories to tell! Growing up with the cars, chasing parts and compiling “the stash”, build sheet bingo, unearthing one of our “original three” ten years later, hunting for – and finding – the perfect Prix, and all the other cars and characters I stumbled upon in the process. Where to begin…?
The rake on the red GP is crazy. Your green one is going to make a really nice ride when your done.
the GP sits perfect. Made me really miss how muscle cars used to look back when they were mean and badass rather than high dollar investment cars.
“the GP sits perfect. Made me really miss how muscle cars used to look back when they were mean and badass rather than high dollar investment cars.”
+ 1000! I hate show poodle musclecars
Kieth, very much looking forward to more tales of Grand Prixdom. Love all the 69-77s.
I’d blame it on Pop being young (25) at the time – but I know he’d do the same again today 🙂
Though I’m not planning such an aggressive rake for my SJ, I know it’s going to have to be at least a little taller in back than in front. I really dislike the way those cars look when perfectly level on original 14″ wheels – even worse when they’re sagging a bit in back.
15″ Rallye IIs, little bit taller springs in back… that’s the way I like ’em. The stance of the ’71 above was a bit radical for my tastes, but hey – better that than how it was!
btw I smiled at the “motor pulling tree” The hoods on these cars are so long that a normal cherry picker probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. I had the engine out of mine last year and it took quite a bit of creative maneuvering to get the engine to clear the front end.
I like a little rake to these GPs as well. If I was doing some hot rodding to my 73 Id probably juice it up a little too but its stayed at OE heighth since new so who am I to mess with it, besides I really like the way it handles.
And just like with women, there is no time for saggy rear ends.
My theory? It’s always easier to do motors on these while the front clip is off 😉
I do appreciate true factory stock muscle cars too, but as I said, it’s really nostalgic to see one as I remember them from the 70s when let’s face it, they were cheap cars driven by people mostly without large car budgets. the Boyd cars today are too expensive looking for my taste. if I had the cash, I’d duplicate the 55 in Two Lane Blacktop…. there’s the perfect look for a street car.
Love the cake – is that a generic blue car or based on one your family owned? My Dad made me a few toys, mostly boats – I wish I had them today. He also bought me quite a lot of toy cars because, like you, I was wild about anything automotive from a very early age. At least I still have many examples of those he bought.
Looking forward to seeing the restored GP SJ – great car.
First off, let me say that my mother was a terrible cook, but a wonderful baker. She could make roses out of frosting that would pass for real, but yet never failed to burn the roast.
Every year, us kids would get to choose what sort of design we wanted for our birthday cake. Over the years she did excellent renditions of cars, trains, boats, fish, and whatever else had my attention in whatever given year.
What you see there is her first attempt at drawing a car on a cake. She needed something to refer to, so I had to limit myself to things I could produce an example of.
Thus, we have something that resembles a blue first-gen Camaro, quite similar to a certain Hot Wheels car I had at the time 🙂
I need to find more pictures. Some of her later ones were real masterpieces (I always felt bad eating such artwork when the time came!)
Too bad most of these GPs were raped of their drivetrains for GTO clone “projects” (destroy two cars trying to make the ultimate hot rod). These are neat cars although I don’t really warm up to them until the following year.
Cars with their butts in the air don’t look right to me and the ones I’ve piloted drive terrible. I’m looking at the road, my arm doesn’t rest comfortably on the sill, & I feel as if I’m about to fall into the steering wheel. My first Firebird had this issue and ironically my most recently purchased Firebird has it also (but not for long).
“Too bad most of these GPs were raped of their drivetrains for GTO clone projects”
+1. Far too many were victims of such misdeeds.
The ’72 that came after the featured ’71 was one of them, having a smokey wrong-year Pontiac 350 upon arrival.
Dad’s third GP – last to be bought, last to be sold, and our DD for five years – eventually experienced a similar fate. (Spoiler alert: When I stumbled upon and re-bought it years later, its drivetrain was long gone.)
Even my SJ was motorless and trannyless when I bought it. As a result, I ended up hunting down and buying a code-correct motor for it a couple years ago.
In an unrelated incident later, I ended up finding the car whose numbers matched my new motor. Sadly, it was rotting away and unable to be bought. Another SJ, almost as clean as mine… Sundance Orange with tuxedo interior. Arrrrhhh!
I look forward to you & your father’s complete GP history. Don’t leave any build-sheet details out!
I photographed my SJ’s build sheet immediately, in case it turned to dust out in the sunlight. Here it is – a little teaser of things to come.
Pretty sure the other three’s sheets are stashed at semi-random points throughout my father’s hardcover Chilton manuals. Will have to go digging for those one day soon.
While looking for the picture shown here, I also came across the build sheet for an as-yet-unmentioned ’72 J that’s sitting in my backlot. Have to get to that one’s story, too!
I had to do a search for a Sundance Orange GP and this one popped up. Wow, I love it!
http://www.hemmings.com/classifieds/dealer/pontiac/grand_prix/1598852.html
Yes. Just looked at the pics… very, VERY similar to the car I found. It even has the honeycombs! (Strangely, I’ve seen only three Sundance Orange GPs over the years, and all three shipped with honeycomb wheels.)
Give it a black vinyl top and white pinstriping, yank the 8-track, and they’d have been twins.
I like mine a bit more understated (hence a triple-black SJ with Rallye IIs), but still, I find that combo interesting. I still visit the owner once a year, leaving him my card each time, in hopes that one day he’ll decide to let it go.
But I don’t have high hopes. According to the locals, he has a bit of a reputation – he tends to hoard cars for several years, suddenly get crush-happy and clean house, wait a while, then start back up with the hoarding again. They claim the cycle plays out every 5-8 years or so; and the tales of treasures lost in the last crush-a-thon are too heartbreaking to repeat.
Hopefully one of these times, I’ll catch him on the right day…
If a hot car with cool wheels and a grumbling V8 doesn’t look right with its butt in the air, then you are just too young. 🙂 This was THE stance in the early 70s.
As for the rape and pillage of big engines for musclecar clones, welcome to the place where fans of C body Mopars live. 🙁
I love these cars! My Pop had a 1972 Grand Prix (non-SJ) in Wilderness Green with a Tan top and Saddle bucket seat interior. I was just 5 when he got it, but was already hugely car crazy and spent so much time with that car. It had the 455 and was very quick, and nicely equipped overall with power windows, AM/FM, A/C, tilt, cruise and best of all, Rally II wheels. I used to beg to wash it, and just loved to sit behind the wheel and “drive.” And it got a little more real too: Pop would let me sit in his lap and steer the car as he drove around a parking lot. The view out over that long, sculpted hood was unforgettable. These GPs will always be a true favorite of mine.
Love the cake in your birthday picture. That is perfect for a car guy!
Hey, great story!
Agreed.
+1 It’s helpful to get to know better the folks we hang out with here. Nothing like childhood to explain the adult.
“So many stories to tell! Growing up with the cars, chasing parts and compiling “the stash”, build sheet bingo, unearthing one of our “original three” ten years later, hunting for – and finding – the perfect Prix, and all the other cars and characters I stumbled upon in the process. Where to begin…?”
Well I for one want to know all about the above!
Dad was a mechanic, and also got similarly creative to remove motors. He had a block and tackle which he could mount to a rafter in our car port, but the only problem was the carport was the only flat bit at the top of the steep driveway. So the engine could be hauled out, but the car couldn’t be rolled back – lest it rolled down the hill!
And there was the time we needed to take the Holden 308 V8 out of my Uncle’s jetboat, that had to be effected via chains wrapped around the hydraulic arms on a tractor. Good times 🙂
these make me think of wide ties, and herb on wkrp in cinncinati.
Herb was more of a Chrysler man, if I recall. (When calculating his potential commission on a big sale: “Yup, we’re definitely talking Cordoba here!”)
Perhaps one of his well-paid counterparts over at crosstown rival WPIG (“those swine”) would have had the resources and the style necessary to own one of these 😉
For what it’s worth, at least a Cordoba had its fine Corinthian leather. The seatcoverings in a ’71 or ’72 Prix never heard so much as a moo – they were merely vinyl with some upmarket-sounding name. (’69s and ’70s could be had with real leather)
A neighbor had a 69 Model J, in Verdoro green (?), no vinyl top. Long, lean, mean & green! Rally II wheels, that car was so COOL to us kids! He would park it on the street in front of the house, until a near miss by a drunken driver convinced him otherwise. Unfortunately, he was arrested by MP’s for being AWOL from the U.S. Army…don’t what happened to the car after that, but I STILL like this generation of GP! 🙂
Puts me in mind of a story I heard once about my dad and a buddy of his, back in their high school days. The buddy’s aunt had a ’69 that fit the description of your neighbor’s to a tee. Apparently they were no strangers to raising hell in that car.
At one point, the story finds them in the parking lot of the local bowling alley (circa 1982). It has rained recently, and the car is even more eager than usual to break loose the back tires. Some dorky looking individual carrying an umbrella is walking across the parking lot.
In a moment of comic genius / youthful hooniganism, the two start whipping donuts around the pedestrian while the buddy leans out the window, making Indian war cries (hawahwahwahwahwahwah). Apparently the look on said pedestrian’s face was priceless.
When I was in high school, the closest anyone came to “having fun with a car” involved putting a brick on their Ciera’s gas pedal to see how long it’d run. Kids just don’t know how to have fun anymore 🙂
Great remembrance! That rear rake on dad’s GP was the norm back in those days, thanks to Monroe and Gabriel Air Shocks. What’s funny about these days of numbers matching muscle cars and the like is that you very rarely see a restored “Day 2” muscle car as represented by what your Dad’s GP looked like. Air Shocks, Ladder Bars, Cragar S/S mags, headers and Cherry Bombs were what everyone was running on their cars. Not many kids left their Hemi-Road Runners, Goats and Chevelles unmolested.
Not to mention the steam roller-like L-60 Bias Ply rear tires!
Great story, Keith. I always wondered where you got your inclination to yank out engines and transmissions, and now I know.
I never paid that much attention to these GPs when they were newer, but I like them quite a bit now.
Yup. Most of the vehicles I grew up with were either on original motors that Dad rebuilt, or were motor swapped (if the previous owner damaged it past the point of salvation, or if it was just too little to begin with).
Especially once I hit junior high, motor swaps were becoming more common in the family garage. By 2000, our two family vehicles were an ’89 Chevy G20 “half conversion” van (captain’s chairs and a second row, but never anything beyond that), and an ’85 Regal (went from Grandma to Dad, and later from Dad to me).
The van was originally a tired 4.3 – used it that way for a year, then dropped in a 350 (as was planned from day one). It was driven for six more years, at which point it was retired due to frame rust. The motor was then pulled by me, and later got installed in a ’71 Chevelle, which I have since sold.
The Buick was originally a 3.8 – we used it stock from 1995 until 2001, when it developed rod bearing issues and was replaced with an Olds 307. It too eventually began to succumb to the tin worm, and was traded for the rust-free blue C1500 seen in the background of many of my pictures.
So, yeah. Inexpensive replacement motors for the win!
I loved the front/rear treatments on the ’69 the best!
“the GP sits perfect. Made me really miss how muscle cars used to look…”
The GP was not a true ‘Muscle car’. It was a personal lux coupe, from 1969 to 1987.
However, early years, one could equip it with powerful motors and 4 speed manual. But, there was never a ‘GTO’ version. In the day, a modified 60s/70s coupe would be called a ‘Street Machine’.
And again, not every RWD car made before 1980 is a ‘muscle car’ as some young car fans assume.
“And again, not every RWD car made before 1980 is a ‘muscle car’ as some young car fans assume.”
No kidding. Way too many people of a certain age (say, born after Reagan left the White House) think 1975 Nova sedans, 1973 Mavericks and 1976 Dodge Dart Customs are muscle cars. No, no, no!
There were a few of these Grand Prixs still around Tompkins County by the 90s and I barely remember them. Those Pontiacs just seem to oooze the country folk mentality and not in a bad way.