Mine looked just like the one in the advertisements.
(welcome our new Sunday COALer)
It was the Spring of 1983. I was about to graduate from High School and had been accepted into the Computer Science program at the University a few towns over. I was seventeen and had my driver’s license but just hadn’t needed a car up to that point. Now a I needed something to get me to and from school and whatever part-time job I could land.
Student loans and financial aid covered a lot, and as long as I was pursuing a degree I could live at home rent-free (with free meals). It was my parents’ quiet incentive: Go to college or start paying rent. It worked on my older siblings and it worked on me.
So what to drive? My parents drove full-size cars and I used them on occasion, but for myself I wanted something smaller and cooler, like a Chevelle or a Nova. No funny foreign cars need apply in those days.
Practicality (meaning having no money) reared its ugly head, however. My parents rarely bought brand-new cars, but my mother always had the “nice” car and my father drove the “old” one. The neighbors were selling their 1975 Lincoln Continental sedan, and that became my mother’s “new” car. My father kept his 1968 Bel Air because of the low miles, which meant…
Buckle your seatbelt or you’re going to slide across that seat when you make a hard turn.
I was the proud(?) owner of a 1971 Chevrolet Kingswood Estate. A wagon was not exactly the cool wheels I was hoping for, but free is free and it would get me to a job where I could hopefully save up for something better. The car itself was in fairly good shape, painted in that metallic gold from the advertisements, with a generous slathering of fake wood paneling on the sides. There was no rust to speak of, but the lower half of the clamshell electric tailgate no longer went down after someone had rear-ended my father a few years prior. The cosmetic damage was minor and he never bothered to get it fixed.
My tailgate didn’t disappear, nor did I have the roof rack.
I got a part-time job as the stock boy for a greeting card store at a nearby mall and was soon attending classes. I made new friends, started volunteering at the school radio station one night a week (spinning classical music, no less) and life was good.
I met my friend Karl in a European history class. He, too, was driving an old family wagon: A 1972 Chrysler Town & Country. Naturally, boys being boys, we had to pull them up alongside each other to see who’s was longer. The Chrysler won, of course, which Karl still delights in reminding me.
At some point the water pump needed replacing. I was not good with mechanical things, but my older brother replaced it for me. (My father would later joke that he was going to leave me his tools in his will because he knew they would stay in pristine, unused condition). That night I picked up my friend Mike to work our shifts at the radio station.
Near the end of our drive home I was feeling good about having a working car again. We were on a fairly deserted stretch of straight highway, it was 1:00 in the morning and the speedometer said the car could go to 120, so I thought, “Why not?”
I put the pedal to the floor and we were going 85… 95… 100… and then POOF! A cloud of smoke billowed out from under the hood and all of the lights in the car went out. I managed to steer the car into the breakdown lane. A passerby stopped and gave Mike a ride to his parents’ house nearby. His father came by and the car came to life with a jumpstart.
It turned out that while replacing the fuel pump my brother had accidentally wedged a battery cable next to the engine block. When the engine got hot enough the cable melted and the battery was drained in an instant. He replaced the cable and all was well. I might have neglected to mention to my brother or father exactly why the engine got hot enough to melt through the cable until somewhat later.
Aside from that my time with the Kingswood was uneventful. Joke as I might about the wagon being a girl-magnet, a year later I had some money and I was thinking again about Novas. My father had other ideas, which I’ll cover in my next COAL.
The parents of a childhood friend of mine bought a new 1971 Chevy wagon with the Brookwood trim, which was equivalent to the Biscayne trim level in the sedan versions.
Same gold color without the wood panels.
It served as a primary family vehicle until 1982 with a couple of visits to the bodyshop along the way to address rust issues as the car aged .
It was then passed down to one son and then the other and it finally wore out after 13 or 14 years of service.
In my opinion, the 1971’s had the most attractive front end styling of the ’71-’76 generation with the classic eggcrate grille treatment.
I am not a huge fan of large Chevys, but if I was going to own a 70s Kingswood Estate it would have to be a 70. The 71 through 76 models are just too big for my tastes.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
If you can afford the gas, Just run with the wagon till you get the degree and your first job.
At that age I think a lot of car ownership was tied up in self-image. Plus, I wasn’t entirely comfortable driving a boat like that.
Great writeup for me, for two reasons. First, in 1986, my best childhood friend and I turned 16 and his first car was a wagon like yours. Great memories of going to high school football games. Loaded full of us kids, the back end scraped constantly: parking lots, driveways, even a good bump in the road.
Secondly, I though I was the only teenage boy who ever worked as a stockboy in a greeting card store. I hadn’t thought about that job in years. I did it prior to my license, rode my bike to the shopping center. It was a 1950’s strip mall; the Hallmark store was large but packed full of stuff, and the “stockroom” was some distance away in some unused space. Had to carry (or roll) box after box back and forth when the holidays “changed over”. Had a crush on an older teenage girl cashiering there, and she had a new Fiero. Good times.
I was the only male employee for four stores (two card stores, a stuffed animal store, and a Spencer Gift-style store). I had a serious crush on one cashier and absolutely no luck in that department.
The warehosue was a few miles up the road from the mall, and I’d drive back and forth in their early 70’s ChevyVan. It made the Kingswood seem lithe and sprightly.
The annual Christmas ornament delivery and setup in July (for the collectors) just confused me. And every quarter I had to flip the cardboard facing on all the shelving to the appropriate color.
These GM wagon were demolition derby gold! They kicked some serious butt.
A couple of miles from where I used to live there was a guy who did demo derby and it was kind of sad seeing the parade of those wagons showing up in front of his house. Most of them were fairly well worn but I saw a few that looked fairly nice over the years. A few weeks later it would be on the trailer prepped for the next demo derby.
The Lisbon sisters didn’t want the ‘69 Kingwood, they killed themselves avioding it.
Absolutely huge for a first car, but maybe you took your drivers test in this car? I used the family 1st generation VW Passat [Fox?] to pass my test and that was right sized to show off my brand new reverse parking skills. I’d be terrified even now to drive something this long, wide and low. Handsome wagon!
I learned to drive and took my drivers test in my father’s ’67 Bel Air. Needless to say, a three-point turn on a city side-street with cars parked on both sides of the road was a bit hairy. I learned to drive in suburbs and should have had a bit more practice where there were more cars. But I passed!
My parents gave me the same choices:
Go to school full time, live at home rent free.
Go part time but I have to work and pay appropriate rent.
Work full time and pay rent and follow all the rules, no drinking, no overnight guests. My wheels at the time (1985) was a 1969 Pontiac Tempest Custom S.
Took my driver’s test in a ’73 Impala 9 passenger wagon (by ’73 they’d dropped the separate model names for wagons). Great highway cruiser. Recall occasions taking friends to an arena concert and on a deer hunting trip, among other escapades.
Something seen on YouTube – later clamshell wagons had the 3rd seat with a fixed seat bottom that didn’t cushion the ‘cabbage’ hump (8 passenger?) and didn’t retract. My recollection of ours was that the seat bottom cushioned the cabbage hump. It was attached to the seatback so that when you folded it down, the seat bottom sank deeper into the well behind the cabbage.
Sounds like a great COAL series coming! Can’t wait for the next installment!
We were going 85… 95… 100… and then POOF! A cloud of smoke billowed out
That vignette ended up being a lot less mechanical trouble than the above quote made me think!
It scared the heck out of me. I thought I’d blown the engine.
a friend of mine drove a Kingswood in high school in the mid ’70s. When he pulled into a gas station he always said, only half jokingly, “check the gas and fill the oil”, that thing burned a lot of oil by the time he drove it. Also of note his family was extraordinarily messy and the floor of the back seat was usually filled with empty soda cans which we chucked out the windows for miles (this was back in the days when littering was only mildly frowned upon).
Nice car and great write-up.
The one in the ads looks just like the one a friend’s mom had when he and I were in high school. He drove it to school on occasion until it was his turn to drive the family hand-me-down ’64 Rambler.
I’m looking forward to your next installment.
Looking at that Tailgate shot, why that number on the Plate? Weird.
Would I have liked it for my first? Well, my first car was a ’73 Civic, which I believe could be parked in the back of this Chev with the seats still up, and given that I couldn’t even park the Honda, my answer is no. (Seriously, I could not parallel park the little thing at first because everything else I’d learned on was bigger, so I’d swing in reversing and allow for a big wheelbase that wasn’t there and the tiny ass would end up poking back out at an angle!)
I know the ’71-’76 GM’s were fairly ridiculous in any efficiency metric, but they were all very shapely giants, especially the early little-bumper jobs, so in one sense, I WOULD have loved it as my first car. Well, to look at, anyway. I have to admire your early parking skills: I believe I would have shortened that Kingswood often and unintentionally.
Incidentally, the speed test and boom-and-bust cycle also struck my Civic, being a demented teen: however, unlike your wagon, it did not survive. I too may possibly have been economical with the the truth when questioned by my father as to how the rod had left the block through the sump.
Some trivia for you. In the bizarro world of GM Australia, the biggest-selling Holden from 1968 to 1979 was the Kingswood (sedan and wagon). There would have to have been close to a literal million made over that time. In fact, so ingrained in the society was the name that there was a popular TV comedy series from ’80-’84 called “Kingswood Country”. This concerned a supposedly typical suburban household dominated by a misogynistic, racist, ignorant, rabidly pro-Holden Kingswood-owning father and his long-suffering family. (At best mildly amusing to my 12 yo self 40 years ago, it is now simply atrocious). Luckily, the country has also changed enormously since then.
I see the complete DVD set for sale online at just $129 AUD for anyone interested in 20th century anthropology.
Drag racing estates…this is going to be a good COAL series!
Man I remember riding in the back of those land whales back when they were new. As a scrawny kid, you could get up and walk around in there. Too bad the thing went poof when you were out speeding around. I’m told that at north of 100 you can watch the gas gauge needle dropping!