The Fever. The pattern had become quite apparent to me. Each spring and each fall I got the almost irresistible urge to buy a car. Six months was pretty perfect timing, really. The weather was great those two times of the year so that the jobs that any new-to-me car would require could be done in comfortable weather, neither freezing or profusely sweating. And six months was about the time it took to fully experience what my new-to-me car had to offer. There was no bigger thrill than the initial period of infatuation with a new car. Smelling its smells, listening to its sounds, feeling its surfaces and otherwise wallowing in the newness of the experience. It was kind of like a series of extended test drives, except that I was responsible for all of the repairs.
By this time, I think I had done a full brake job on every car but the Cadillac(s). Plugs, points, air filters, wiper blades, and probably two or three batteries. Had someone run a business that let a guy swap interesting old cars every six months for a fixed monthly fee, he might have had me as a customer for life.
In the spring of 1980 I was ready. Ready for what? As much as I loved it, I felt that I had inhaled or absorbed all the newness that my 59 Fury had to offer. I could have paid for a transmission rebuild but chose not to. I rationalized to make it about the gas my V8 Plymouth was using, but I really didn’t drive enough to make that a major factor. And anyway, it was spring and I was restless. I was also finally ready to become a Mopar Man. Technically I was a Mopar man already, what with my 1959 Plymouth Fury and all. But that was old-school. I was ready to become a REAL Mopar Man, and that was going to require something with a real Mopar starter.
I found my next car as I generally did at that time, pretty much by accident. Another of my Sunday drives through a car dealer lot got me again. Bill Gaddis Chrysler Plymouth in Muncie was a favorite. First, it was a chance to check out new Mopar stuff, but they tended to have some interesting used cars. I had a near-trade experience when I found a silver 1961 Plymouth Belvedere sedan in their lot. A slant six with the pushbutton TorqueFlite, I asked and they let me take it for a spin. It was tighter than my 59 Fury sedan, uglier than my 59 Fury sedan and slower than my 59 Fury sedan. None of the dash electricals worked and to top it all off, one of the wheelcovers tried to escape during my brief test drive. I no longer remember, but I probably tried to offer my 59 as a trade, and undoubtedly the salesman was not interested. My guardian angel was on duty.
But one fine May Sunday I found the real thing. A 1971 Plymouth Scamp, Tawny Gold Metallic with a dark brown vinyl roof and beige/gold vinyl interior. A slant six/Torqueflite satisfied my desire for economy. Also, the front fenders (where these often erupted in rust) were perfect (though the rear quarter panels were more typical with a little Bondo in their history). By this time, I was well acquainted with the slant six because of some cars that my roommate Dan had driven (found by his father Howard). I had driven both the red 72 Duster (six auto) and the red 74 Charger (six 3 speed).
I was really excited that it was a Scamp (a Dart Swinger would have been just as good) because I really liked the square-cut lines on them. These early ones still had vent windows (I was a smoker and this mattered) and I couldn’t get enough of that concave back window. There were only two problems. First, the car had something like 96K on the odometer and looked a bit more used than most of my prior cars. However, the car drove right and that slant six both idled and ran as smooth as a baby’s butt. Second, I did not have the $1095 the dealer was asking.
A call to my mother arranged a loan to bridge me until I could sell the car she still called Moby Dick. She hated Moby and would have loaned me almost any amount of money if it meant my getting rid of it. I managed to bargain the dealer down to $875 (if memory serves) for a cash deal and I was now a real Mopar Man. With a classic Mopar to boot, for the next several months until I finally managed to offload it. At 9 years old, this was the newest car I had ever owned. I immediately set to work on the little things it needed – It needed tires and one flying saucer wheelcover from the junkyard to replace the mismatching cover (from a 68 Chevelle) that irritated me every time I looked at it. I then installed the Brand X am/fm/cassette unit I had taken out of my Mustang before that ill-advised trade. Look at me, another new car!
I have never been one to name my cars, but I did eventually take to calling this one The Scamper. The Scamper would become my loyal companion through thick and thin for the next five years – busting through every JPC auto ownership record and setting a standard that would not be broken for quite awhile.
I owned that car long enough to start doing the same repairs more than once. I went through two sets (or was it three) of used tires – the seconds being my first-ever radials, which were transformative. Exhaust systems and brakes and the cheap rebuilt starters got done multiple times, plus there were the usual things like U Joints, valve lash adjustments and such. That was the car I really came into my own at wrenching upon. Like when Dan and I tried hooking his father’s boat trailer onto the really solid hitch out back. That part was fine. The part where we hooked up the electrical connector less so. “Hmmm” I thought the first time the car’s sensitive ammeter dove hard to the “D” when I applied the brakes. A different word came to my mind when it did it again then bopped right back to the middle. OK, a fuse will be an easy fix. And would have been had I not been dealing with the little Hercules of a fuse, the strongest fuse ever made – the one that would stoically withstand a fatal jolt of electricity while refusing to give up. Death with honor! Disney could have made a great movie about that fuse. The rest of the electrical system was not so valiant. (Sorry). The short traveled past The Little Fuse That Could, barged up into the steering column and murdered the emergency flasher switch, that was surely taken by surprise.
Not my car, but a pretty good replication of my interior, which was pretty presentable but for the drivers seat. A series of K-Mart-style seat covers hid the duct tape which covered some of Chrysler’s famous Insta-Split (TM) vinyl.
I made do for awhile without fixing it. I was at school and lacked my tools and a decent place to work. The lack of functioning brake lights (another casualty of the dead flasher switch) was a problem that was solved by pulling out the headlight switch when braking. At least during the day. If there was someone behind me at night I would start doing alternating turn signals. So long as I could get traffic behind me to notice that I was about to do something, I trusted that they would pay enough attention to figure out what that something was. The real fix was accomplished several weeks later, which required removing the steering wheel and dropping the column (supporting it from a rope tied to the vent window frames) in order to get to that switch and its wiring.
The Scamper had been a fairly high trim car with the light package that included the fender mount turn signals. It had always irritated me that they never worked – someone had cut the wires, probably when replacing the fenders that were so un-rusted. A trip to the Direct Connection parts counter resulted in a special-ordered light kit that gave me everything I needed to re-activate those oh-so-cool fender-tip turn signal lights. Life was good. And I was quite proud of my fix of the worn lower door hinge that caused the same droopy door that irritated me so on the Mustang. The right number of washers used as shims between the door and the hinge for each hinge bolt lined the door up just fine.
As the rear quarter panels continued to slowly melt away I had the good fortune that my friend Lowell had just graduated from technical school with his credential in body and paint work. He had the tools and I had a summer job at an auto supply warehouse which allowed me to buy paint and supplies at cost plus 10%.
We spent a week of after-work bonding time. Bondo-ing time, actually. No, it was better than that. It involved metal snips, a pop riveter, fresh sheetmetal, filler and sanding. Lots and lots of sanding. Lowell’s air sander and a borrowed compressor made the job so, so much easier.
I will confess to being quite pleased with my reproduction of the body character line that went from an outie to an innie at the leading edge of each rear wheel opening. That part was all me. We got the car ready for paint and took it to his then-girlfriend’s house where her father had a pretty good compressor and spray setup in his garage, including an old furnace blower to blow paint fumes out into the neighborhood as it sucked (not nearly enough) good clean air in through a furnace filter in an open window. The neighbors were surely delighted.
Several hours later the Scamper emerged in its fresh Tawny Gold Metallic acrylic enamel.
The color was a touch off (it was a whisker more greenish, a whisker less brownish), but I learned a hard lesson about color variability in mixing and spraying metallics. All in all, it looked fabulous. Until the brown vinyl roof started to peel later that year.
The following summer we all had a mini-reunion as we stripped the vinyl off the roof, filled the hidden welds and painted the roof with a 1972 Chrysler butterscotch color that was really close to the painted parts of the interior. It seemed easier to leave the chrome edge trim there and go with a contrasting color rather than to fill all the extra holes and try the impossible task of blending the body color.
The Scamper saw me through the last two years of college and a senior year pizza delivery job. Sadly, I broke a band in the transmission when trying to rock out of a snowbank one cold night at work and the car would no longer go into reverse. A local transmission shop fixed me up for about $350 and I was back to delivering pizzas. I remember thinking about how much money I could have saved if only I had bit the transmission bullet two years earlier on Moby. Oh well. That was also the winter that the plastic gear on the distributor disintegrated one subzero morning. A junkyard distributor was an easy fix – once I figured out what the problem was. It was too cold for the university to hold classes, but not too cold to replace a distributor in the alley behind our apartment.
The Scamper then saw me to law school where it stuck by me for the entire three years. The car looked reasonably presentable and I came to appreciate the low-stress way of doing its job compared with the newer cars of my roommates. A 75 Mustang II, an 80 Monza hatchback and a 77 LTD II sedan – none of the three held the slightest bit of interest for me, as I had the Scamper and it had me. My friend Lowell also had a Mustang II in this period, and he was always jealous of how smoothly the Scamper idled.
When the differential started to howl at the end of that first year of law school, I never considered an alternative to fixing it. A junkyard differential/leaf spring combo (because I discovered a broken spring in the process) had me back on the road. When that diff started to howl too, I finally broke down and took it in for some professional attention, which put the little car right again. And little things that would have irritated me before became kind of endearing, like how I must have sprung the retaining tab on the driver’s wiper arm because it kept wanting to work itself off. I got in the habit of periodically smacking it back on. I think it only flew off a couple of times while I was driving.
In the last 2 or 3 years, I had stumbled upon a hack that really made the car sing. Cold starts had always been immediate, but it was a different story when the engine was warm and the weather was hot. A second heat shield gasket under the carb solved that, and with an interesting side benefit. Howard had taught me the magic of the “road tune” – forget about factory timing marks. Just advance the timing until it started to ping a bit on a test drive, and then back it off a touch. That double gasket did an interesting thing besides insulate – it would allow the engine take an extra 8 or 10 degrees of timing advance without knocking. Both fuel mileage and performance really jumped in the summer time. I noticed that the transmission shifting was affected a bit, so I scribed a line at the original setting for the kickdown linkage and slid it down a bit until the shifting felt right. In the fall it all went back to factory because the setup took super long to warm up in cold weather. I never figured out why the double gasket allowed such aggressive timing advance, but it did.
As I came close to graduation from law school, my Mother was quite convinced that the Scamper was beneath my new station in life. I was coming to agree with her, but for the first time in my life I was not that eager to get rid of my daily driver. I readied myself to ditch it, but every time I got in and fired it up, the slant six would purr as smoothly as ever despite now having 145K on it.
The car and I seemed to understand each other. But every relationship must come to an end (especially when half of the relationship is a car). I was approaching graduation from law school and the start of a career and it would soon be time to move on from the cheap wheels that had served me so faithfully.
This last photo was taken Thanksgiving weekend of 1984, at what would turn out to be the start of my last six months with the car. I had forgotten about this photo, and had also forgotten that the one place on the car that had not been rusty when Lowell and I had our epic Summer O Bodywork was now doing what the quarter panels on A bodies always did. It was just a little slow at it. It was going to be time for new (or at least nicer) wheels and I began a transition into my next car – details to come.
Every car has a personality and The Scamper was no different. I eventually decided that The Scamper was like the title character in the movie Rudy. Lots of other cars came out of their factories better looking, more luxurious or with more performance and sex appeal. But The Scamper had heart and would come through when the cool cars failed. Like the sub-zero Christmas Day of 1983 when out of four cars in the driveway, all much newer and more expensive, The Scamper was the only one that would start. At the end I got over five years and about 50,000 miles out of a car that many would have considered used up when I got it. My days as a serial car philanderer may not have been completely over, but I had learned what a good relationship with a car is supposed to be like.
Around May of 1985 I was beginning my first career job. It was then that a friend bemoaned how a drunk driver had plowed through his yard and creamed his old but faithful Toyota Corolla. “I just hate having to buy a car when you need a car” he said. “They know you’re desperate and they screw ya.” Ed was a lawyer who had come from steel mill country up near Chicago (a place we in Indiana call “The Region”, though locals pronounce it “Da Region”) and he was a practical dude. I told him I could solve his problem, and I did. He bought the Scamper for $575 to drive while he took his time looking for a new car. I later asked how it went and learned the horrible end of the Scamper – After it had served its purpose (Impeccably, I should add) Ed had it up for sale and some guy wrecked it during a test drive. Dammit. The most heroic car I ever owned cut down in a stupid traffic accident.
Several years later I was driving past a sleepy little used car lot. It was one of those lots where cars at the bottom of the bottom wait for some poor soul willing to sign over a disability check and make weekly payments. I did a double take. There was a 71 Scamp in Tawny Gold Metallic with a 1972 butterscotch roof, a color combo sported by no other Scamp in the world. I pulled in but nobody was there. It was The Scamper, all right. With a different engine – someone must have been fooled by the oil pressure light that never worked, or maybe the wreck broke something. And the rear floor was spongy as the hidden rust kept up its work. I knew it was time to move on and I sadly walked back to my car (I don’t even remember which one) and drove away, feeling like I had abandoned it. But I did not. It was only a car and its time had come. By now it was the second half of the 1980s and almost everything from 1971 had been put down years earlier.
I still occasionally have dreams about The Scamper. Usually it involves me opening the door to a garage I had forgotten about, and there it is, still waiting for me. It starts right up and I am reminded of the feather light power steering and the smooth idle, and I wonder why I stopped driving it. And then I wake up and remember that The Scamper has been in Mopar Heaven for at least a quarter century. And I am sad because I really, really loved that stupid little car.
Amazing those of us of “a certain age” have such similar experiences…
Mine was an eight-year-old ’68 Valiant Signet, Slant Six and Torqueflight, B5 Blue with dark blue top…nicknamed “Smiley” for the slight grin in the grille…
As a poor college student I couldn’t really fix much, so it was more of a Slant 5 as one cylinder was dead….didn’t matter, it still always fired up and ran.
Like you, after graduation I moved up – but still have extremely fond memories and much respect for Smiley…one tough little car…
Very few really lusted after these cars (until recent times) but everyone respected them.
“Scamp” is a great car name! These were everywhere when I was young.
Jim, I have been patiently waiting for this chapter and it did not disappoint. You have mentioned doing work on it over time but I had not realized it was to this extent – well, body work anyway. Sounds like you had little issue with it mechanically.
For years these Valiants held almost negative appeal to me. Yet one day that started to swing and dart the other direction to the point I might enjoy having one if I were to dip my toe into the old passenger car arena again.
I have thought the same thing about maybe getting another, but the Scamps and Swingers are my faves, and they have become a bit pricey for my tastes – at least for decent ones.
Great chapter. You have an excellent ability to self-reflect and to capture your growing awareness and maturity in these chapters.
A 1972 Valiant – same slant 6 and 3 speed automatic – was the car that ferried me and my friend group through high school. It was owned by one of the friends whose parents were a bit less engaged with him than the rest of our parents were with us (and that’s saying quite a bit for the mid-to-late 1970s), so they granted him a car and pretty much let him go wherever unchecked. So in fact, he was the only one of the friends who had his own car and didn’t have to go through his parents to request keys.
He, and me and the rest of our friends being quite sensible (from my current perspective) guys, never did anything wild with it, but rather drove that thing all over the mid-atlantic going on road trips, backpacking expeditions, and other (largely) wholesome adventures. I’m totally serious. That Valiant was the perfect car for that. It was rock solid, always started (even at 2am when snowed in on the Skyline Drive in VA), and just went. It also was continually rusting….ultimately becoming mostly rust colored vs. the deep green that it started out being.
Great memories here. I still have fantasies of getting one of these.
Thanks Jeff – I have found the process of writing/editing these to be a great chance to look back at life and the changes that have come with the passage of time.
Yes, these things were really good at rusting – though not as good as Pintos, Mavericks and Vegas. A friend of my mother drove a strippo 1969 Valiant 100 w door sedan that she bought new. By 1980 that poor thing had holes everywhere. Mine held out against the rust amazingly well – at least in the front half of the car.
In your second-to-last picture, I can see a lot of ’67 Fury in the body side. Never noticed that before! This bodystyle has never done much for me, but a stock slant six car looks nice, especially with those wheel covers. I can see why you became attached to it. Your paint job came out great!
Your family really was into Mopars if your driveway is any indication. 🙂
I always saw the styling language of the 1967-68 bigger cars in these, and that was one reason I liked them so much. It’s funny that with the Dusters being roughly the same cars, they were all about the fuselage, so these were almost like two different generations in one, depending on which A body you bought.
Those other two will figure into next week’s installment. Let’s say that population in the driveway represented the ultimate experience when I was at the peak of my Mopar-love.
I was a kid/teenager when these were popular and I didn’t understand why Chrysler felt a need for both the Scamp and Duster (along with their Dodge equivalents). Both were Valiant-based, both were priced similarly, and both looked more stylish than the Valiant sedans, one being a hardtop and one a semi-fastback also with frameless glass. I think the Duster’s higher decklid gave it more cargo space and was also available at least some years with a fold-down rear seat, but the Scamp’s roofline looks like it would allow for more rear seat room, plus roll-down windows instead of pop-outs. Anyway, my aunt and her husband were diehard Moparites, and she had an early Scamp parked in the one-car garage whenever I visited (eventually replaced by a ’79 Volare coupe which was actually reliable, then a post-facelift Reliant), while her husband had a succession of New Yorkers from ’65 (or earlier) to ’93 parked out on the cobblestone half-round driveway with both an entrance and exit to the road (what are these called?). Plus rode in the back of both a Scamp (or Dart Swinger, don’t remember) and ’76 Dart sedan in school carpools, the latter belonging to the neighbor across the street. My neighbor to the left had a Dart Swinger, and neighbor to the right had an old ’63 Dart sedan, so I was surrounded by these things. I never wanted one myself though, finding them a bit crude and old-fashioned even as I admired their reliability. Our main family car when I was growing up (and long after) was a ’66 Dodge Polara, and it bothered me that the styling language on the ’76 Dart across the street wasn’t much different than on our ancient Polara.
The answer is corporate politics.
This body style started in ’67 and for the first few years the Valiant was 2 & 4 door sedans only, the sporty body styles went to the Barracuda. Dodge had the Dart sedans, but also the Swinger hardtop.
When the Barracuda went to the bigger E body, the guys at Plymouth came up with the fastback Duster on their own.
When the Duster turned out to be such a success, Dodge wanted a version too, and Plymouth demanded the Scamp in exchange.
“I still occasionally have dreams about The Scamper. Usually it involves me opening the door to a garage I had forgotten about, and there it is, still waiting for me… .
Yea, I have that dream too, except in my case the car behind the previously unknown garage door is a dust covered, tire flattened, gelled gas, barn find condition ’53 Chrysler requiring much much work to ever move on its own power again. And even if I do all that work, it will still be a ’53 Chrysler, meaning a not that great driver to start with.
“… “road tune” – forget about factory timing marks. Just advance the timing until it started to ping a bit on a test drive, and then back it off a touch…”
In the mid 1970s I was visiting my father in a hospital where he was recovering from surgery and he told me the ’61 Ventura was not running right. He had tuned it up earlier but felt the timing was off. Could I take a look at it?
While GM V8s had distributor trap doors for timing adjustments while running, we didn’t have the proper equipment. So with my trusty adjustable end wrench, I set the distributor to the factory marks, took the Pontiac out on Long Island’s Southern State Parkway, pushed it hard, pulled over on the grass and advanced the distributor, pushed it hard, advanced the distributor, pushed it hard, and when it started pinging, went back to the prior setting. I expected a NY State Trooper to come by and ask what I was doing but none appeared.
To me the fondness of a car is more like recalling the good memories of one’s past. For example, I miss the salty smell of the sea from my childhood, the anxiousness of graduating college and starting my first “real” job, the Sunday morning walks in Manhattan to get bagels for breakfast as a 30-something, and the sound of doves cooing just yesterday at age 78 on a warm foggy morning.
You describe my tune-up procedure pretty well. I didn’t have the little distributor window, but I could just turn it until the engine sped up a bit to advance and the other way to retard, and could hit a happy place after a few repeats and a 2 or 3 mile test loop that included a highway with some stop lights.
This has been a great way to look back and break loose a lot of memories.
Beautiful story thank you. How many of us anthropomorphize our cars and regret parting with them? My newer cars are just devices but my first car seemed like a true companion. Letting that go was traumatic, like losing a friend.
“my first car seemed like a true companion”
I am starting to experience this again with a long-term driver that I should replace but don’t really want to.
To my knowledge, I have never “anthropomorphized” my car.
Or have I?
Great read and a great car! The virtues of an America Inline 6 shine as always. I’ve yet to own a Leaning Tower of Power, but I’d love to.
I’ve owned a pile of cars and the good ones do become like a friend. I have some that I still regret letting go of to this day.
“I’ve yet to own a Leaning Tower of Power, but I’d love to.”
As the 70s wore on, Chrysler’s smog tuning took a big toll on these. My law school roommate later bought a 74 Scamp from an elderly neighbor. It was a really sweet low-mile car in great shape, but that 1974 version never ran nearly as well or as strong as my 71.
In a reverse CC effect, I saw a Dart Swinger going eastbound on Queens Boulevard yesterday while I was going westbound at around 1 pm, but with two querulous yard apes in the rumble seat I couldn’t do a classic Kveens illegal U across the median to follow it, like the Pied-Eye Piper
Great story and great car, JP.
In my recollection, a lot of 70s MoPar A-bodies – and to a lesser extent GM X-bodies – were bought, both new and used, by non-car or even anti-car people out of some form of necessity.
But a whole lot of those folks wound up loving their cars, or at least having a begrudging respect for them.
I had the great fortune to live in an age where these things were both really common as older used cars and (mostly) dirt cheap. My roommate Dan cycled through 3 different Dusters. I really wanted one with the V8, but never got one. Those things were FAST.
My first reaction to the Tawny Gold was “yuck, any other color but that…” until I got to the excellently judged roof repaint; talk about a transformation of character. Much less visual heft, and rather classy matching the interior like that. Job well done, J P.
My Grandmother was particularly fond of her Valiants as well. I’ve heard them described as the CamCord of their day, and with some thought that’s probably a good descriptor. They didn’t over-promise anything, and what they did do was competent and predictable. The two Grandma had of this generation were a Soft Yellow ‘68 Signet and a Lucerne Blue ‘74 Scamp. The ‘68 was a six, the other had the 318. Both had A/C. She was particularly fond of the ‘74, and I chalk that up to her being a lead foot (that car was fast), and it being the first new car she purchased “herself”. Grandpa had passed, and she wanted nothing to do with the gigantic still-new Newport they bought together the year before, so off it and the ‘68 went for the Scamp. She kept it until 1982, which seemed an eternity back then, but what exactly would replicate the qualities that car possessed in say 1978-1979? It eventually gave way to a 2-door V6 powered GM A-body, which seemed a natural progression. The Pontiac quickly revealed itself to be a poor imitation of the virtues Grandma liked about the Scamp (imagine that…).
Yeah, that was a weird color. Friends would look at it and ask if it was brown or green. It wasn’t really either one, but could take on one shade or the other depending on the light. For quite awhile I wasn’t crazy about it but it kind of grew on me. It is one of those colors that was really of its time. And I am still on the fence if I liked the look better with the dark vinyl roof or the light painted version.
I always wanted one with the V8. One of roommate Dan’s 3 Dusters was a brown 73 with a 318 mated to a 3-on-the-floor stick. That sucker was fast. It also was a dice-roll on cold starts. If it caught and died, you were SOL without the can of starting fluid in the trunk.
Greatly enjoyed this chapter. I totally understand the appeal of these A Bodies; they made by far the best used cars for a very long time. I used to recommend them regularly, until I switched to recommending a used Corona or Corolla.
Your car is of course essentially a high trim version of my dad’s ’68 Dart stripper, with the 170, three-on-the-tree, and manual steering. I’ve driven versions like yours too, and for the most part, they made a much better daily driver.
Always loved the very gentle metallic ticking sound of a /6 at idle, thanks to its mechanical lifters.
Body work is something I’ve never taken on, except for the most minor kind. Well, I did teach myself fiberglass repair work after I bought the ’77 Dodge Chinook for $1200 with a branch sticking out of its fiberglass roof. The work is a bit nasty, but at least it’s never going to rust. 🙂
I didn’t pay much attention at the time but came to learn how uncommon the power steering was in these, especially with manual brakes. I got really spoiled with the 1-finger parking.
I am right there with you on the sound of that engine at idle. As for the body work, the job would not have turned out nearly as nicely without Lowell’s expertise. I am sure I would never have been that ambitious with it on my own. The paint job was decent but the bodywork under the paint was almost perfect – which made sense as Lowell was more of a bodyman than a painter. I learned a lot of good stuff from that experience.
Seems like the Scamp and Demon was about the time the belts really began tightening at ChryCo (mainly for the Plymouth division). While Dodge got a nice Demon version of the Duster with a Swinger doghouse and it’s own, model-specific tallights, the Scamp had a Valiant/Duster front end but it was otherwise identical to the Swinger from the cowl back. This is most noticable on the first 1971 Scamp with the mis-matched side marker lights.
Chrysler took care of that little styling faux pas the next year by giving ‘all’ their compacts and intermediates the same, generic, plastic 3M-sticker marker lights. While it’s true that the side-marker lights now all matched, there was a little something lost in the cost-cutting move.
I had actually never noticed the thing about the marker lights until you mentioned it here.
Those A body changes in 1970-71 were interesting. The Valiant sedan body got dumped after 1972 and both shared the longer wheelbase Dart body. The Duster got picked up by Dodge with only minimal changes to taillights. Plymouth got the Dart Swinger hardtop in trade. The taillights in the rear bumper were different – the Scamp had a single rectangular taillight per side while the Dart/Swinger had twin lights per side.
I learned all about this when I was junkyard shopping for rear wheel-opening moldings in preparation for our bodywork to replace the cobbled up ones that had been there. No other Valiant could be a donor, but every Dart sedan used the identical part as my Scamp, making for easy shopping.
In fairness, I think it was our own A-body guru Daniel Stern who first pointed out the first year Scamp’s mismatched side marker lights because of the diffence between the Valiant and Dart. FWIW, the 1971 Demon’s side marker lights didn’t match, either, since it used Dart front fenders and Duster quarter panels.
But even more obscure is the difference between the Scamp and Swinger’s taillights. Believe it or not, they’re ‘not’ identical. Daniel can explain better but, although they will technically interchange, I think it has something to do with the internal fresnel lens being different. Why Chrysler would do someting so minute that virtually no one would notice is beyond me.
Of couse, it’s hard to explain a lot of the things Chrysler did…
You got close enough to round up to an A, rudiger. The ’70 Dart taillights have Fresnel optics: a magnifier like a bullseye in line with the bulb’s filament and surrounded by concentric rings all focused to “look” at the filament, thus magnifying and distributing the light. The ’71-’73 Scamp taillights, same size and shape, have rectilinear prism/spreader optics; the light is magnified by a reflector bowl behind the bulb. IIRC the ’70 Dart taillight housing is a zinc die cast (pot metal) item, while the ’71-’73 Scamp housing is plastic. Pretty good odds the seemingly pointless lens change was down to the ’71 setup being maximally less expensive even with tool-up for a new pair of lenses.
Or else some little Napoleon-type strutted into the relevant department and said this car is absolutely not going to have those idiotic round Fresnel optics in the taillights! or something—as is rumoured to have happened with planned coil springs in the F-body (“Chrysler cars have torsion bars and you are going to put them on this car!”).
This is the sort of esoterica that makes CC a worthwhile read. I’d forgotten that the 1971 Dart had gotten new, quad taillights so, yeah, the change of the Scamp’s taillights was made expressly for that car, alone.
Here’s a possible explanation for the odd change: Chrysler never anticipated the need to build either the Scamp or Demon. But with the stunning success of the Duster, suddenly, those plans went out the door as Dodge almost certainly demanded a piece of the big Duster pie with their own version.
So, in exchange, the Scamp was born at the last minute. But to keep some semblence of division identity (back when that still mattered), the Scamp got the 1970 Dart’s old bumper instead of the Dart’s quad light bumper. The parts supplier for the taillights had to be brought back and, as theorized, some bean-counter, in a decidedly GM-like move, made the contract for a different, cheaper style taillight than was used in 1970.
It’s worth noting that the pre-5mph bumper Valiant 4-doors kept the old, sixties vertical taillights at the sides of the trunk lid while the Dart sedans got the same taillights as the Swinger hardtop.
I have some difficulty getting onside with the scenario you describe. There wouldn’t have been any bring-back-the-supplier scramble; the list of companies Chrysler bought lighting parts from was very short, and the ’70 Dart lens tooling would still have been in very active use when the ’71 Scamp was being designed; bommed, and build-supplied. They could’ve easily used it if they’d decided to go that route. Also, there’s no certainty here—just a guess I made based on Chrysler’s general tendencies—that the ’71 Scamp lens was any cheaper to make than the ’70 Dart lens. The lens itself probably was not. The Dart lens had black paint around its inner perimeter; deleting that (as was done on the Scamp) certainly shaved some money out of it.
It could also be as simple as “Let’s change the lens a little for the Plymouth car versus the Dodge car”. Look at the ’74-’76 Valiants and Darts: physically interchangeable taillights with different exterior details.
I don’t imagine we’ll ever know for sure.
This car has really good lines. I like the sedans but the coupe really is beautiful. South Africa only got 4 door six cylinder models, but we did get the Charger coupe, also only 6 cylinders. So this 2 door is pretty exotic and highly desirable to me. So weird to hear people talk about these as as plodders. Those hubcaps are something else, are they really standard? Look like they are from a Salt Lake racer. Thanks for a great read, loving this!!
Thank you. I am with you – the longer I owned this the more I came to appreciate the lines that had a lot of complexity and nuance for such a boxy car. It remains my favorite version (except maybe for the short-lived Dart convertibles).
Those wheel covers were a one-year-only design and were also found on Plymouth Satellites that year. Those kind of dated my car but they are my favorite design over all the others ever used on these.
If these were ordered with a 340/4sp, they wouldn’t be called plodders!
I owned this 1971 Dodge Dart Swinger, equipped with the 6 cylinder engine. I installed Hooker Headers (why ?). This photo is when I entered it at the local drag races in 1979, my time in the quarter mile was 19.9 seconds. I think it’s possible to walk the quarter mile faster. I could not kill this car and it was mostly neglected by me. Gas in the tank and mash the pedal all day long. Good memories.
Wow, if there was ever an engine with a manifold design that didn’t need headers it was the slant six. I think you would have gotten a better result with my double carb gasket and timing advance trick than with the headers.
That would have been a really good looking Swinger in its day.
My headers had a interesting sound . If you look close at the photo, it was dual exhaust out one side . Most of my friends had cars with V8 engines and would have a few good 😂 laughs at my performance exhaust sound on a slant 6. At any rate, I was happy with car and it never let me down. Key switch failed for a period of time and I would use a wire from battery to the ignition coil, screwdriver across the starter solenoid and she would fire right up. Once I arrived at my destination a quick hood raising and remove wire from coil to stop engine. This low budget repair lasted for a month until I had a new key switch installed. Great memories
….
I think I recall running the quarter mile in my slant six Dart Sport at about 20 seconds, even considering I had a 1.5 second reaction time at the lights.
JP, Excellent story of a true friend you had in the Scamp. That name always brought the little dog of that name from the Lady and the Tramp movie to mind.
I know the fever of which you speak. I know it quite well. It occasionally consumes me to the point I am craigslist.com-ridden until I find the cure….thankfully less so of late.
The Dart/Valiant gets better looking the older it gets, the size is good, the lines are great, there is enough detail variation between years and trims that there is something for everyone, and even the most basic one still has lots of goodness.
One thing that exacerbates that fever is writing a COAL series. I had not been on craigslist/fb marketplace/nextdoor/whatever other car source I can think of in a long time before I started this process. Now I am sitting here wondering if I need an old one-owner 4Runner in my life. Must. Stop.
Great story, I had teachers and neighbors with Swingers and Scamps. By the time I was of car buying age in the late 80’s they were pretty much all gone. I recall stopping once to look at a light yellow 1970 Dart Swinger for sale at the side of the road. I was really excited to find one until I got close and saw that it was hopelessly rusty.
Your sure got good service from the Scamper, and you managed to keep it looking good throughout your tenure. Well done all around.
I think I finally decided the secret – the car was never nice enough that it tempted me to try to make/keep it perfect. That has been my weakness, but I avoided it with the Scamper. It was always good enough, and I was able to keep it good enough, but it never got better than that. Which worked out really well, all things considered.
I worked it out that I owned 21 cars during a 3 year period in the late 70s, nearly all old bombs with a couple of good ones that didnt last either, nowdays I seem to avoid changing cars too often and opt to spend good coin on parts instead, my C5 is getting new brakes all round to give it a longer lease on life instead of replacing it for approx 10x as much and my Hillman is getting a twin choke carb and headers because I feel like it.
Great story, I had maybe 2 or 3 cars out of the at least 60 I owned that I really loved and still miss. Some cars do that, and usually not the high end fancy cars.
I have always liked these. When I was at university my mother bought a 72 Duster, which was mechanically great, but I found the visibility to the rear to be poor compared to the Scamp, although it did give a huge trunk. In the summer of 1973, after I graduated I spent some time traveling and visited my aunt and uncle in Germany. They were both with the Canadian Forces, in the medical core. I am not sure of the details, but there was some tax break on cars. My aunt always drove Volkswagens and she was on her second Squareback. My uncle, who grew up in Poland and had not lived in North America very much, drove a Plymouth Scamp, almost identical to this one. It seemed a very strange car to drive in Germany, and he was definitely not a car guy. Although it is not really that large it seemed wide driving through their village. Maybe it was just inexpensive.
I never liked the Dusters as well. Part of it was styling and part of it was that the bodies felt more substantial on the Scamp (and the sedans) in the way that the fuselage C bodies or the 71 B body never felt as substantial as the prior generations.
This is a valid observation. The Scamp can trace its engineering back to the 1967 Dart hardtop.
The Duster, OTOH, was brand-new from the cowl back, and Chrysler almost certainly did some cost-cutting for the new, swoopy bodystyle. It was definitely done on a budget. For starters, the Duster’s side windows had an extreme ‘tumblehome’, the most of any car up to that time (and for some years later, IIRC).
This has been an enjoyable series so far, JPC, but I must say that while I liked your Galaxie 500 convertible and Mustang, the appeal of the Cadillacs and Fury eludes me.
We are back in sync with this A body. It’s hard to think of a better car for a college student during the late 1970s/ early ‘80s. For the times, these were reliable, reasonably efficient and sensibly sized for parallel parking. I also agree with those who noted above that the Scamp and Swinger look even better with age.
Oh, and on that color…It illustrates the maxim that the auto industry is subject to the same whims as the fashion industry. My sixth grade teacher, who circa 1973 or so was one of the very few male teachers at my elementary school, wore a suit that was either brown or very dark green, depending on the light, a hue which was very nearly identical to Scampers. Unlike the Scamp, I don’t think that suit would look better with the passage of time.
I liked these, too. I always felt the styling of the 1970-72 models was the best. I remember Chrysler had a clever commercial for the Scamp in 1974: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNzGyFHmkIQ
I had forgotten all about that ad!
Another great episode to this series. My first car was supposed to be a 1970 Duster. The owner totaled it before I could take possession. The sound of the starter and the smell of the car came roaring back with your story.
Thanks JPC – really enjoying your series!
This was a very enjoyable read JPC. These cars were everywhere back in the day; several friends and classmates owned them, and I got to drive a few. When I met my wife-to-be in Indianapolis in the mid-70s, her parents owned a ’74 Duster and a ’72 Coronet sedan.
Great car Mr JPC, At the same time you bought yours, on the other side of the world, I started driving when I turned 18, I had a slightly older Australian relative of this, a 69 Valiant Regal Hardtop, except mine was a 318 car, I had some great times in it.
Its funny to hear the comments about these being compacts, most people over here thought they were huge, due to their length.
I too still have dreams of when I own the car again, and am driving it around, always a happy dream, without doubt it was the most fun car I have ever had the pleasure to own.
But I think my favourite car of yours so far is the Galaxie, though that may change as I think there are some more Mopars to come, and I loved that green color when I was a kid, you could get it on the Aussie Fords.
Thanks for these great COALS.
I’ve always found these to be very handsome cars, but I could never see actually buying one. A two thirds scale 1967 Plymouth Fury, it exudes a rock ribbed conservatism that George Romney would have loved. From a young man’s standpoint, all the stigma of driving a full-size car, but without the heft, luxury, features and big motors.
Scamp, and Swinger, always seemed a bit out there as names on these. Rather whimsical for cars that look like they take life seriously.
These have compact Chrysler written all over them, and I was always a bit surprised that a Chrysler version wasn’t made after the first OPEC embargo. They eventually made do with a Valiant Brougham, a name which seems more fitting with the styling.
Chrysler may have wiffed it by giving this car to Plymouth when it already had the Duster. Dart Swinger sales were actually pretty good, but the Plymouth Scamp struggled against the Duster, with the Duster selling close to 5 to 1 over the Scamp in 1972.
Could a 1971 Chrysler Windsor compact coupe have been chapter one of the Cordoba story, where a planned Plymouth became a classy Chrysler and sold very well?
If there was ever a Ma Mopar, I think we’ve found it in the Scamp’s lineage….
One of these could have been a good small Chrysler, but it would have taken a bit more refinement. I didn’t mention that you got a lot of road noise with these cars. I took the back seat out once and saw that the floor under it was just bare metal. I sprayed some of that thick black undercoat material to cover the area. It quieted that car down a lot.
I would love to see the new company called Sallantis bring back the barricades Now they are doing away with the challenges and chargers. They need something new but old. The company and the world can use a little boost to everyone’s life today with out so much cost.
Thank you. A great read. My dad had a ’71 Scamp with a 318. Whenever I got to drive it instead of the beat out ’65 Coronet that I typically drove, I loved it! Too bad it got totaled by a semi!
A nifty car ~ when they were new I didn’t think much of the various MoPar A – Bodies, they _always_ started and ran, in New England this is a big deal .
Older now and I think they all look lovely .
-Nate
You’ve mentioned/we’ve kicked this around before. There is no mechanism by which a double carb gasket could change anything so as to allow any amount of additional timing advance without ping, let alone 8-10 degrees. I don’t doubt that the car did what you say it did, but really think something was happening other than what you thought you were seeing; a correlation/causation confusion. I could take guesses at what might’ve been happening, but eh, what’s the point; you made the car run well. But if you were to try the same trick on twenty other Slantt-6s, I do not think you’d be able to get a similar result on any of them.
The reason why the double carb gasket made the car cold-blooded is that by raising the carburetor it effectively shortened your remote choke thermostat’s pushrod’s length, making the choke not close as firmly or fully. Likewise, by raising the carburetor an extra 5/16″, you effectively shortened the kickdown linkage—which you noticed, at least to the degree necessary to correct it.
Great stories; I’m onside with your mother: I like this car better than the ’59.
This is indeed one of the great mysteries of my life. I remember discussing this issue during your run of /6 COALs, and remembered later that I had IDd the issue with the kick down linkage and adjusted for it. And yes, you ID the reason for the rockier warm-up period.
But I also know that the car would tolerate little to no timing advance beyond the 0 degrees BTDC with one heat shield gasket under the carb but would tolerate a bunch of advance with the double gasket. Could it have been from effectively longer manifold length? Cooler fuel being inducted/burned? If I still knew someone with a/6 I would try to recreate the setup but I don’t. And maybe modern fuel blends would make an apples-oranges experiment anyway.
I found it mind boggling at the time, and recall being amazed the first time when it wouldn’t ping at 2 degrees advanced, then 4, then 6. It’s in the same category as holding an L-shaped piece of coat hanger wire in each hand and watching them cross as you walk over a water or sewer line in your yard. It shouldn’t do that but it does.
The intake manifold length was not significantly changed, nor was the temperature of the intake charge, so it’s neither of those. My best quicky guess at the moment is that you were adding ’73-up type carb base gaskets, which lack the vacuum port channels of the ’72-down ones. This would’ve richened your part-throttle fuel mixture quite a bit. Rich mixtures burn much cooler and so are much less ping-prone. It would also have compensated to some degree, at least in nice weather, for the slackened choke. It would’ve made your gasoline economy worse, but wouldn’t’ve richened the mix enough to blow clouds of black smoke or instantly foul the spark plugs.