My late, beloved grandma almost always had gum or mints in her purse. It was part of the Sunday morning ritual when my family would visit for a roll of Certs to be passed around in the car before we all arrived at their church in rural northwestern Ohio. Wintergreen is the flavor that first comes to mind. Certs were fine, but I preferred gum. When Grandma would take a twenty-five cent pack of Big Red from her crocheted purse, I knew three things were about to happen. My tongue was about to burn with the cinnamon, things were about to get delicious, and before passing out the foil-wrapped sticks of Big Red, Grandma would rip them in half.
Dang it. Sharing everything with siblings was not my favorite. It’s not that I didn’t want the other Dennises to also have nice things, but sharing one skinny stick of gum seemed like thrift taken to an unnecessary extreme. “But Grandma… I want a whole gum!” I wouldn’t have dared say that to her because: a.) I loved her dearly; and b.) even as a kid, I had figured that half a stick of Big Red would be better than no Big Red at all. At least it wasn’t like ripping a teeny, tiny piece of Trident in half, but not by much.
With Grandma in the late 1970s on one of her visits with Grandpa. Flint, Michigan.
The rub would be when there would be an uneven number of people in the car. The logical thing in such cases might have been to let the last recipient have an entire stick of gum to himself or herself, but if my memory serves me right (and it usually does), Grandma would first search the contents in the bottom of her purse to see if there was another half-stick hiding out down there. I kid you not.
I suppose this sort of makes sense as taken within the context of both of my maternal grandparents having been born in the 1910s and having lived through World War II in its entirety. They had been accustomed to stamps and rationing, and judging by the amount and variety of items they had saved from throughout the years, they didn’t like to part with things. My mother also had three siblings, so a dollar had to stretch pretty far for a family of six supported by the income of one farmer.
Anyway, if Grandma would find said leftover half-stick of chewing gum, the recipient would then have to deal with the wrapper often having come partially loose and the resulting lint and whatever else had stuck itself to either side. Funny how I don’t remember ever having passed on such a “treat”, just because I loved my grandma so much. I probably would have eaten braunschweiger on crackers if she had offered it to me. Wait… I did. I digress, yet again.
The color and condition of our featured car reminded me of that half-stick of Big Red gum scavenged from the bottom of Grandma’s purse. There’s its shade of faded crimson, the chalky finish on its hard, flat surfaces which also had miscellaneous indentations, and the same generally unpretty appearance. Conducting a license plate search yielded a few pieces of key information, the first of which was that this car had originally been built in Olds-land, or as it’s actually known, Lansing, Michigan.
To me, there’s something automatically special about an Olds built in Lansing, or about a Buick built in Flint, where Buick had been headquartered for close to a century from between 1903 and 1998. In its earliest iteration as Olds Motor Vehicle Company, Oldsmobile had been primarily headquartered in Lansing, from 1897 all the way through the end of the make in 2004. That’s over a century, and I’m still a bit sad about Olds’ disappearance.
The second noteworthy thing I noticed from my search results was that it was powered by a 5.0 liter (307 cubic inch) V8 with 140 horsepower, which was a legitimate Olds-engineered powerplant. The standard engine for the ’83 Ninety-Eight was a Buick-built 4.1L V6 with a four-barrel carburetor and 125 hp. The 5.0L V8 was the only other gasoline engine available, as the only other option was an Olds diesel 5.7L V8 with 105 horses. Our featured car had a starting weight of literally two tons, so if I had wanted a new Ninety-Eight that year, I likely would have sprung for the five-liter.
There was that whole fiasco of the late ’70s in which it had been discovered that due to limited supply of Olds powerplants during that boom of extraordinary production and sales figures, some cars had been fitted with engines produced by other General Motors divisions instead of with official Oldsmobile Rocket V8 engines. Unless one was satisfied with the Buick V6, anyone who wanted a V8-powered ’83 Ninety-Eight was getting an Oldsmobile engine, though the diesel 5.7 provided anything but rocket-like propulsion in a car of this size and weight.
A total of just under 119,800 Ninety-Eights were produced for ’83, which included two- and four-door Regency models and also a Regency Brougham four-door. Only 13,800 two-doors found buyers, representing under 12% of total production. My Encyclopedia Of American Cars from the editors of Consumer Guide doesn’t give a breakout between the Regency and Regency Brougham four-doors, but the low volume of the two-door indicates that a Brougham coupe likely would have been a pointless exercise.
There is something very grandparently about this car, including its very plush, soft, crushed-velour interior with pillow-topped seats. By ’83, this kind of full-sized Oldsmobile wasn’t for everybody, but the original buyer of this one had purchased a motoring experience that was purely Oldsmobile. They got the entire stick of Big Red.
Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois.
Monday, June 30, 2025.
Brochure pages were sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org. The Big Red pic was from the internet. Click here for my 2018 writeup on a different, same-generation Olds Ninety-Eight.
Sadly, our ’62 Buick Special was not built in Flint, but South Gate, CA. Sad.
From what I recall having read, and with the exception of the H-body LeSabres of the ’80s, most of Buick production in Flint past a certain point was reserved for the halo cars like Electra and Riviera. At least we had the HQ for close to a century.
There’s something about this old Olds that says “Chicago” to me so very much. It’s clearly a beater and is still around likely because its elderly owner seldom takes it out on the street; and for good reason as it seems that some recent outing likely resulted in the unfortunate front end collision. I’ll bet that the Olds probably came out the winner in whatever that was (unless it was the back of a delivery truck or a building…could be.)
Thank goodness there’s the image of some saint or another watching out over the whole situation.
My grandma preferred rolls of fruit-flavored Life Savers…which also did a great job of collecting lint.
Jeff, no doubt the other car lost. No matter what it was, it was probably a TKO. And yes – the Life Savers! My grandma had those, too! Butterscotch also reminds me of her. And yes, I can almost taste the lint. There was no way to effectively seal off the foil on a roll of Life Savers once opened. The good inventors at Bulb Head should do something about this.
You’re the expert on this, but I can just imagine how that front-end collision probably occurred at about 6 mph (i.e., a hair over the resistance of the bumper system) and was one of those old-folks accidents where the car drove into something and kept going until gravity stopped it. Enough to wreck the plastic filler panel and vaporize the side turn signals, but the headlights, eh, they’re fine.
About 30 years ago I worked with a guy who was a huge VW Beetle fan, and that’s pretty much all he drove. He said one time he got hit head on with an Olds 98. Ended up with rods through his legs. He showed me the pictures, complete with the beer cans, I had to hold back saying anything.
My grandma carried Certs, Velamints, and Dentyne. And sometimes Wint O Green Lifesavers. Never had Big Red, nor am I a fan of gum in general because it gives me gut ick. Main thing I remember is those commercials, the jingles I can still play in my head. The writers did a great job. Maybe they don’t make them like that anymore. Or maybe I’m getting old. Or maybe because I choose to live in the woods, where I can barely get network TV anymore, and have enough other things going on. Like now, lunch is over, time to get back to work.
I’d say the commercial jingle writers of that day did exceptional work. It’s how many of us still recall the melodies and words to them decades after they had last run on network TV. Coincidentally, I find it admirable that you can live without it, for whatever that’s worth.
Getting Big Red from my maternal grandmother, often torn in half, sounds familiar. Juicy Fruit was popular also. The bad thing about those half sticks is how blasted hard they got from hibernating in the bottom of purses – it was like trying to chew ceramic tile until the mouth got it rehydrated.
It’s a shame the poor old thing looks so beleaguered (good luck in finding a new header panel) but the condition also helps reinforce how stout of a constitution this old thing has. 42 years, with a good portion of it undoubtedly being in Chicago and it’s benign automotive living conditions, and it’s still going. Something tells me it likely starts rather quickly regardless of ambient temperature.
Oh, the hardness of an old, half-stick of gum. I just felt my fillings shudder. And why was it called “Juicy Fruit” (another gum my grandma had)? It was neither juicy (the “juice” was one’s own saliva), nor did it taste like fruit. Still, I did like the taste, but I probably liked it more because of those commercials that showed attractive people skiing and driving Subaru BRATs, and such.
This Oldsmobile will surely start all Chicago winter long without the hint of protest.
As far as I think I know, “Juicy Fruit” was the brand Mr. Wrigley gave his bananas and pineapples brought from Central America, and then he applied it to his chewing gum. I’m a bit too lazy to consult Wikipedia, which probably has the answer….I still like it, and in my childhood it was an absolute rarity given that in Uruguay you could only import raw materials…so candy was made locally. No American gum for you!. There was an annual big “Nation’s Fair” when I was a kid, and at the American stand you could buy Wrigley’s chewing gum, Hershey’s chocolate, M&Ms, at the British embassy you could get different teas, Cadbury chocolates, and so on. But the real way to get those was when somebody traveled abroad which of course was far from common 50 years back. The American embassy did a raffle with a Mustang II or Mustang Fox, either 77 or 78. I remember the winner was a bricklayer or carpenter who said he’d sell the car to be able to build his house. The car itself was painted in a canary yellow that wasn’t exactly my idea of a dream car to get.
My 84 2 door was white with chocolate brown interior, so maybe like a chocolate Necco wafer with its chalky-white coating?
My grandma favored Life Savers. Wint-O-Green was my favorite, but teetotaling grandma was partial to Butter Rum.
JP, what I find funny is that all three flavors of Life Savers you cited are or were my jam, but hard pass on the chocolate Necco wafers.
I remember trying to like them as some tie-in with the candies some of my relatives had enjoyed back in the day, but I could never quite get over it that they didn’t quite taste like chocolate. And then there was the chalkiness you mentioned.
Grandmas…what fond memories many of us had. My 2 grandmas were polar opposites…both Ukrainian immigrants, but one had the societal airs about her in our Ukrainian church community and the other was peasant stock, used furniture and all. Guess which one seemed to have a cozier, more loving home and an endless supply of peppermints?
I never knew much about Oldsmobiles growing up but thanks to the many, many Olds write ups here at CC I’ve gained a great appreciation for them. I think I would have been an “Olds guy” back in the day….
I like that your two grandmothers were that different, and the fondness with which you described your one grandmother’s more modest and more welcoming environment. I had only ever known my mother’s parents; I often wonder what my dad’s parents were like, though I have pieced together some of it as I reflect on my dad and how things tend to play out generationally.
My great aunt “E” had a navy blue Olds 98, similar year with the wire caps. Blue leather interior. I kinda got the impression this was really more my late uncle Doug’s type of car, a retirement present that he sadly only enjoyed for 2 or 3 years before he passed in 1986.
She traded the parade float in on a new white Plymouth Acclaim with crank windows. Which I guess there were worse cars in 1992, she could have gotten a Ford Tempo or Chevy Corsica. I always remember Aunt E, the Oldsmobile and her house smelling like a combo of old lady perfume, Virginia slims and roast beef, cause that what she usually served when we came to visit
Your description of your Aunt E and the tastes and smells you had come to associate with her was poetic. I could almost imagine my own version of what your visits were like based on your last sentence.
And of the three replacement cars you mentioned, I might also have chosen the Acclaim, which seemed a reasonable, domestic facsimile of the concurrent Honda Accord at the time.
Both my Grandmothers are long gone, neither one of them ever learned to drive, but one did have lots of candy in her house…not just at Christmas or Halloween, mostly hard candy but also chocolates. Unfortunately it didn’t serve her well, she had diabetes and eventually had to have her lower leg amputated. I’m pre-diabetic myself and diabetes runs on that side of my family so I have to be careful. The other grandmother was proprietor of a Mom/Pop grocery store that she closed when she turned age 65, 50 years ago. My Dad would accuse us kids of eating all her profits…she did have candy, but also big tins of bulk pretzels and nuts, and a chest freezer with ice cream (bars and cups).
My Dad was only to buy one Oldsmobile, a 1965 F85 wagon he got after our ’63 Rambler Classic wagon was totalled in a parking lot of a motel not far from the home we had just vacated before we moved to Burlington, Vt. But he had an aunt who owned a series of Oldsmobiles starting in the 1930s but I remember a 1962 F85 and a 1969 98. The latter was the car she had when she had a bad stroke, she couldn’t drive afterward, remember my Grandfather then my Uncle who assumed it afterward. I think I drove it probably in the late 80’s, probably because my Grandmother didn’t drive and we’d flown from Texas and used it in lieu of getting a rental car. It was a very nice car.
My Dad had a ’78 Chevrolet Caprice Classic wagon which was somewhat similar to the ’83 98 in your article. Though by today’s standards it wouldn’t be anything special, it was probably the best equipped, most luxurious car my Dad was to own, and the only car he bought out of the showroom. He thought about buying a then new ’79 Ford Country Squire, I don’t remember but there was something he didn’t like about it, but would have been a shoe in since he owned a ’73 Country Sedan and ’69 Country Squire before it. Unfortunately it was in an accident in 1984, he went 2 sizes down and bought his biggest regret, an ’84 Pontiac Sunbird which went through 2 engines and got junked in maybe 6 years despite being maintained at the same Pontiac dealer he bought it at per the book.
Kind of feel cheated that now I’m the age where one of these would be nice, comfortable ride, easy to get in/out, they no longer sell these new (or anything that resembles one). Too bad.
I enjoyed reading your recollections here – thank you for sharing them. I imagine it must be some kind of torture to have a sweet tooth and also diabetes. It’s not the same thing at all, but very occasionally I will miss the warm sensation of alcohol, but that is done-zo for me and has been for over five years now.
I can see how your dad’s ’78 Caprice Classic wagon that was so beautifully equipped, as much as I’ve read about the downsized B-bodies of the year before being the talk of the town and huge sellers for GM.
My paternal grandfather, “Pappy Tom”, had a 83 Olds 98 Regency Brougham from 1996 to 2003 – here’s me behind the wheel of it in the summer of 1999.
It had the 307 Olds, and I don’t remember him ever complaining about the lack of oomph in the car – even compared to his 74 deVille. The 200R4 made highway cruising a breeze, and that blue velour was very comfortable on long trips to Knobles. It was the first car he had with a cassette deck –
He ended up selling it as the Pennsylvania winters started to eat out the underside. No mechanical issues aside from needing a new kickdown cable, with that Olds V8 burbling along without issue.
As much as I love the 80’s RWD Fleetwood Brougham/Brougham….a 83 or 84 Olds 98 Regency Brougham with the blue velour would be hard to pass up. Even with the finicky “Tempamatic” system.
My Greatest Generation grandmother Zelpha never had candy or gum on her….Boomer Granny Scholar on the other hand would have the individual Life Savers mints, as well as strawberry Creme Savers.
Tom, this is awesome – and thanks for including that picture. I can imagine the Olds 307 being, as you alluded to, a strong, smooth, comfortable highway powerplant. An older brother had one of these Ninety-Eights purchased used as a “dealer’s special”, and I got to drive it a few times. I can attest to that velour interior being very, very cozy and comfortable.
My gran was seven when WW1 started in 1914, and then came of age in the Depression and WW2, so she too was a bit on the stingy side with lollies and such. Her handbag, which seemed to contain such a bottomless assorted pile of unknowable crap that I’m pretty certain that anything up to and including a small house rebuild could be done from it, only ever had mints when I was little. They also had quite a bit of the handbag rubble stuck on them if given out, which I’m convinced that she only did to watch my eyebrows practically blow off above my streaming eyes from the extreme heat that they produced. She always crammed one down after one of the millions of Country Life ciggies she smoked – or possibly ate, given the speed – to smell nice, which, perforce, she didn’t (the combination of super-mint and ashtray being an olfactorily unedifying one). Loved her, though. An uneducated lady with no pretensions and a great sense of humor
Later in life, when the smokes had stopped, she took up consumption of this appalling block of Cadburys chocolate, which was called Snack, in which each square was filled with startling-colored runny goo of various hues, each one after the other looking more and more like an industrial waste product fit to dissolve concrete, and probably about as nutritious. However, when you’re a young teen and your dear gran offers you a leaking square of handbag fluff-stuck chocolate with phlegm-yellow filling – “pineapple”, allegedly – it seemed mouth watering.
Just, thank you for this. Your musings never fail to entertain not only because they are hilarious, but because they also usually contain references to things from your part of the world down in Oceania with which I am usually not familiar. Like Snack.
For the record, I would now totally try Snack if I found some at a local foreign foods market here in Chicago just because of your reference to it here.
Joseph
Great to see another one of your posts…It’s been too long without one! I can’t compare Grans too much, as I was the youngest grand kid, so my maternal grandmother (who wasn’t too maternal) had shuffled off by the time that I was 4, and my paternal grandmother, who was over in England, was decidedly eccentric. Sum total was that there was no mints or gum for the fat kid. I did have a number of aunts who knew their way around a kitchen, so didn’t lose too much weight in the interim. Your Olds looks very much like the ’81 Delta that followed me home late last year, and that will be next year’s project. Looks like the same colour too!
Thanks, Dean. Nice Olds!
Boy, did that great story bring back memories for me. Not big red gum, but ours was normally juicy fruit. lol. So many great memories.
Thanks, Dan. Juicy Fruit was another brand of gum my grandma would have. As I had mentioned to JP above, I’m still trying to figure out how the flavor is supposed to resemble fruit, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there. I like the flavor.
Maybe the front end of this was in my mind when I read your paragraph intro that included “Noteworthy”. At first glance I read “Noseworthy”, and that about sums up this Olds, not in a good way.
I think “noseworthy” as an adjective is brilliant and should make an official appearance in an essay here at CC.
Chicagoland. Home of the Gallant Men of Olds!
Chad, as a Chicago transplant (albeit of twenty-plus years), I was unfamiliar with your reference. Then YouTube! Awesome.
Oldsmobiles and Chicago…that’s where an awful lot of very nice people bought hundreds of thousands of Oldsmobiles. My hometown was the number 1 Oldsmobile market. Chicago lead the way in making their Cutlass the most popular car 50 years ago. So finding an Oldsmobile in a car lot in Edgewater is like finding a Studebaker in South Bend. Home turf.
98. That’s what my uncle drove all his life. I clearly remember being wowed by his beautiful cars. He took the “IC”, (Illinois Central – pre Metra era), into the Loop to the Inland Steel HQ on Michigan. I took the exact route 20 years later. Walked from his house to the station, rode the train to Water Street, then up the escalator to Upper Wacker. He did it for 40 years. So his Olds weren’t daily driven.
The first 98 of his I remember, was his white 1960. Then, his aqua 1965. Then his Avocado 1970. Finally, his white 1974. All like limousines. He suddenly passed in 1974. My Aunt traded his car in for a 1974 Olds 442. She drove it until she stopped driving 15 years later.
Most Chicagoans over the age of 40 know someone who had an Oldsmobile. So seeing this grand 98 pleases me!
Great recollections – thank you for sharing them here. I imagine that in many working class, Rust Belt cities, Oldsmobile was as far up the Sloan ladder that many upwardly mobile families felt like they needed to go. I’d say the same about Flint, except for that we built Buicks and there was the GM employee discount.
Nice looking 98!
I never lived close to either of my grandmothers, so time with them was scarce and so are the memories. I do remember a couple of things about my maternal grandma’s purse; when dining in a restaurant she would take the extra cracker packets, and she always had some sourdough starter in there.
As I’ve mentioned before, I worked at an Oldsmobile/Cadillac collision center during the eighties, so I have lots of experience with these. This one is a bit unusual, as it is a non-Brougham model, but more so as it has no vinyl roof. I recall very few of those coming through the dealership. I do agree with Jeff Sun’s assessment of the front end collision. and the headlights do look fine, but the aim is quite low. But, if you don’t drive at night it’s not a problem.
These were great cars and very popular, especially with the mature set, because they were the type of car they were used to and enjoyed. I later had an ’80 model, which was the last year of the 350 gas V8. I enjoyed it very much, and wish something like it was still available.
A very good read, Joseph. Thanks.
Thanks so much, Patrick. After reading Jeff’s comment and now yours, I looked again at what appears to be the apparent angle of the headlights. As you said, they look straight enough. I’d also guess that the age of the owner / driver might be such that they don’t do a lot of driving at night. I’m starting to see a difference in my night vision when I drive. Gasp.
My grandma also carried gum in her purse, though her gum of choice was Chiclets. Are those still made? I never thought of it, but the cardboard box did a good job of keeping lint out, and the coated pieces of gum were easy to clean off if need be. Mostly these were the white peppermint ones, but the assorted flavor/color Chiclets were occasionally on offer. She kept some in her kitchen too. She never had a car and never learned to drive; I guess you can get around easily in Montreal without a car.
See, Chiclets were fine, because they came in that little resealable box. And they had that hard shell to keep stray lint from sticking
I had to check the internet to see if Chiclets are still made, and it looks like in their original form, they disappeared after 2016. That seems like an extraordinarily long run for a candy introduced all the way back in 1900.
I forgot to mention another Chiclets advantage: it’s nearly impossible to break them in two…
Apparently other companies have bought the rights to make/sell Chiclets, but I don’t know if they taste like the old ones. I was disappointed in the current rendition of Teaberry gum I bought a year or two ago. I totally forgot there was also Tiny Chiclets that were sold in a small bag, you needed a few of them to equal even a half-stick of regular gum.