Not my car, but identical the one I had—right down to the pitted chrome on the bumper.
When I left off, Rick and I were living in Washington DC and driving a 1987 Toyota Celica. It was a great little car: fun to drive; sporty, and spot-on reliable. It was primarily Rick’s car, since he had no easy public transit access to his job at the hospital, and every two weeks he was working a 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM shift, which meant either he had a long wait at night for a bus to the subway, or I had to come get him. So most of the time he drove to work and I took the subway or the bus to my job downtown.
About this time, I joined a BBS called GLIB (for Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau). A BBS (Bulletin Board Service) was a dial-in multiuser system where folks could exchange messages; engage in real-time chat; send emails, and post about different topical issues of the day. Think of it as a text-based Facebook, but without annoying ads and spam and friend requests from Russian women looking for a sugar daddy. It quickly became quite popular, and was an online community for DC-area LGBT folk. We’d have regular happy hours at a local watering hole where we could actually meet in person and connect a human being to an online user name. It was at one of those happy hours where I met ‘DC BEAR’, known in real life as Chip Manuel.
Typical Chip—mocking himself while he gave a presentation to his co-workers
Chip was a big guy—6’3″ and 250 lbs with a full beard, hence the name “Bear”. We hit it off immediately, and began hanging out after work and on weekends. Rick really liked him—Chip had a way of putting me in my place when I got too full of myself. Soon we were fast friends. When Rick was working Chip and I would do things after work or on weekends. He grumbled that he always had to drive because Rick had our car.
Chip had a 1987 Ford Taurus MT-5. If you’re not familiar with this model, here is an Auto Trader article about it. It was a base model, with an 88-hp nonturbo four-cylinder engine and a five-speed manual transmission. It was advertised as having a “taste of performance”, but it was more of an amuse-bouche than a taste, for it was something of a slug. It did have a “touch of class”, meaning a real tachometer and mouse-fur cloth seats. Chip’s was maroon with grey interior. I asked Chip why he bought the MT-5, and he said that he wanted the Taurus because it looked cool, and added “With the last name of Manuel I had to buy a manual”, and the MT-5 was the only model to offer a stick shift. I remember Chip lead footing it around the DC area, rowing back and forth on the stick shift. The car did its best to respond, but with so little horsepower it did so with a whimper instead of a whinny.
Chip was a brilliant computer programmer who worked for a DC-area tech firm. He lived in Riverdale, MD about 12 miles northeast of DC, but worked in Fair Lakes, VA, which was a LONG trip around the DC beltway at rush hour. If Riverdale is at 2 on the clock, the exit for Fair Oaks is at 45 on the clock, plus another 10 miles on choked freeways. So he’d often break his commute by stopping at our house in DC for dinner before heading home. When I met him he had ripped his home apart for renovations, and inside it was basically a shell, so he spent a lot of time bunking at our place. Or possibly for a nice meal we had cooked up.
In 1989 Chip went to Boston for a three-month work assignment. When we got home we were horrified; he had lost a ton of weight and looked very gaunt. Rick, being a nurse, dragged him to see the doctor where we got the dreaded news: Chip was HIV positive, and had progressed to full-blown AIDS, which is why he lost all that weight. Rick and I were crushed; back then, with no treatments available, an AIDS diagnosis mean you’d most likely die within a year. Chip took the news as well as could be expected. But over the next few months, as his health deteriorated, he began spending more and more time at our house. Some days he couldn’t drive home to Maryland, and some days he couldn’t even get to work. Finally Rick and I moved him into our spare bedroom so we could make sure he got adequate nutrition and care. We put a high-speed modem (all of 9600 baud!) on our computer so he could work from our house. We spent weekends and nights working to put his house back together so he could at least have food, a comfortable place to sleep, and a full bathroom.
In February 1991, the three of us went on a cruise together, a repeat of trip we took in 1989. Chip was crabby the whole way, probably because he sensed it was his last vacation. In April we finally got him back into his house to live, and he stayed for a month before he went into the hospital for the last time. He died in June—blind, deaf, and a skeletal shell of his former self. Even though it’s been three decades since he died, Rick and I still call our guest bedroom here in Seattle “Chip’s Room”, a tribute to his memory.
Shortly before Chip died, I went searching for his will at his house. It was nowhere to be found. I thought it might be on his computer there, but the hard drives had been erased, along with the backup tapes and floppy disks (presumably by his sister, who wanted to make sure she got his house). I wrote up a will using a computer program leaving everything to his mother and sister, except the Taurus which was bequeathed to me. I figured that would be what he wanted.
So, via Chip’s bequest, we became a two-car family. I spent some time detailing the Taurus; it was a mess, because taking care of cars was not something Chip did. The old bull cleaned up pretty well, and gave us good service for three years. It had a few glitches: The passenger door lock was broken when someone tried to break in one night. The gas gauge stopped working—it would register “Full”, but stop at “Half.” So I got used to keeping the car topped up. It was nice having two cars: I got a parking pass at work with a new promotion, so I splurged and drove the four miles to my office. It was a great relief not to have to slog eight blocks in blistering humidity during the summer to get to and from the subway.
The gas gauge in ours broke so it wouldn’t go below half full.
The end of the road came in 1994 when I was driving down the George Washington Parkway in Virginia. The timing chain let go, and the engine stopped. I coasted to the shoulder and wondered what to do. Fortunately, another friend from GLIB “Navy Bear” happened to drive by and saw me standing by the car. We used his AAA account to have the car towed to a Ford dealer. I dumped some money into getting it fixed, but Rick and I decided it was time to start looking for a new car for me. With my recent promotion we had put some money away, so we felt we could indulge in the luxury of new second car.
There was only one car I seriously considered: I had fallen in love with the new 1993 Chrysler LHS. I had just turned 40, and my small sporty car days had evolved into a desire for a big luxo-car. Call it a midlife crisis, if you will. There was just something so magnificent about it—the crouching stance, the interior spaciousness, the cool curve of the rear window that evoked memories of 1950’s Jaguars. So off we went to the local Chrysler dealership in Alexandria, VA. I really wanted one in a brilliant teal blue or maybe raspberry red, but all they had in stock was white. I’m terribly impatient, and didn’t want to special order one, so I decided on the white one. They gave me a decent trade on the ’87 Taurus, and I signed a three-year lease.
(these are pics from the Internet, not my actual car.)
When I got home I parked the car outside our house. Later I stood at the window upstairs and just stared and stared at it. It was so damned gorgeous. It looked like it was moving, just standing still.
The LHS/New Yorker were the large versions of Chrysler’s LH platform: Chrysler Concorde; Eagle Vision, and Dodge Intrepid. These cars made a clean break from the Iacocca-era K-cars that proliferated like rabbits. They came with an all-aluminum V6 and front wheel drive, with the engine mounted longitudinally rather than transversely. The LH cars were, in fact, heavily based on the Eagle Premier, a legacy of Chrysler’s takeover of AMC in 1987. In a clean break from Chrysler’s past, the team that developed the Premier was put to work updating it for a larger vehicle, using the same basic drivetrain design but Chrysler rather than Renault/AMC underpinnings. As I understand it, Eagle Premier sedans were used as test beds for the LH cars. In the hierarchy of Mopar, the LHS was the flagship, intended to replace the K-car Imperial. The difference is obvious:
Like night and day.
My car had tan leather seats that were nicely button-tufted. A high-end sound system gave great sound, and for the first time I had a car with A CD player! One of the advantages of the LHS and the cab-forward design (which moved the wheels out to the edges of the car) was a cavernous back seat. Compared to the base New Yorker, the LHS had somewhat firmer suspension, and the handling was nice and crisp for a car that size. We took the LHS on several road trips with a couple of friends who were quite tall and large, and they were perfectly comfy back there. They christened the car “The HMS Crutchfield”, and joked you could carry a Miata in the trunk instead of a spare. In the three years I owned (leased) the car, I had absolutely NO problems with it. It was the most trouble-free car I’ve ever owned.
Speaking of Miatas (or is it Miatae?):
Ours was this color, only with a tan top instead of black
About this time, Rick decided that since I got a new car, he should get one, too. Despite being four years older than I, he too had a midlife crisis and decided to trade his 1987 Celica in on a Mazda Miata. He chose a new 1994 model with the upscale trim, which included tan leather seats; good sound system, and a nifty tan top. The previous summer I had rented a red Miata (with an automatic!) on a business trip out west. Although I had to stick my luggage in the front seat since the trunk is so small, I found that even though I’m six feet tall I could fit comfortably in the driver’s seat if I put the seat all the way back. Getting in took a bit of contorting, but once inside it was quite comfy. And a definite blast to drive. Rick is 5′ 7″, so he was able to get in and out with ease (though he kvetched at me for moving the seat back and not returning it to his setting).
So Rick had his first new car registered in his own name. He loved that little car.
Ours had a tan top like this one
Now, granted, we didn’t put the top down all that much because driving around town in muggy DC summer weather is awful. One time we were in the car on a terribly hot and humid summer evening when President Bush and the visiting President of Mexico were taken from the White House to dinner. Which meant all of downtown DC was shut down for security. Traffic was inching along, just enough so we couldn’t get out of the car to put the top up. So, despite the AC blowing full bore we were quite uncomfortable. And a couple of times Rick got caught with the top down when a sudden DC thunderstorm hit, and he had to find a place to pull off the freeway so he could put the top up. But during spring and fall zipping around town or through the Blue Ridge mountains with the top down was a joy.
The Miata was wildly impractical, but we loved it. If we needed to have passengers or luggage or large purchases we always had the LHS for that. So for awhile we were a happy two-car family.
Then, in 1994, a new family member arrived in the form of a mountain cabin in WV. Our place was 125 miles west of DC atop a mountain ridge with five acres of land. It was almost heaven during the summer, but in wintertime the snows hit. The Miata was useless in snow, and despite being hefty with front wheel drive the LHS didn’t do well going over the mountains and up 1 mile of steep dirt road to our place. So a four wheel drive vehicle was in order. More on that in my next installment.
COAL № 1: Buicks Aplenty; a Fiat, and a Pontiac • The Early Years.
COAL № 2: 1958 Plymouth Custom Suburban • Dad’s Biggest regret
COAL № 3: 1965 Buick Sportwagon • My first car
COAL № 4: 1967 Datsun 1600 • The first car that was legally mine
COAL № 5: A Pair of Pintos
COAL № 6: 1983 & ’87 Toyota Celica • What’s the Plural of ‘Celica’?
Further reading:
Curbside Classic: 1986 Ford Taurus/Mercury Sable – At This Moment, You Mean Everything
(The Not Often Seen) Curbside Classics—William Stopford’s take on the Taurus MT-5.
Curbside Classic: 1996 Chrysler LHS – Lost Hopeless Soul—Brendan Saur’s take on on the LHS.
So sorry for the loss of your friend Chip. It sounds like he was very lucky to have such great friends. I think many younger people today don’t understand what that disease was like in those days. I am glad you got to keep his car. The HP was pitifully low on many cars in those years.
Always enjoy the human element of your posts! Remember well the panic and fear of the early days of HIV. Lost several friends and was a fortunate survivor. As Memorial Day weekend approaches, I think of IML, good times(many years with now ex partner), and the effect of HIV on large gatherings. Chip was very fortunate to have you and Rick. As for the cars, a close friend (long time Cadillac buyer) bought one of the first Taurus in town. What a surprise! Being a big car fan, thought she had lost it! 😮 But she loved it, She kept the 77 Cadillac intending to sell it. When my Grand Marquis needed to be in the shop for a week, she insisted I use the Coupe de Ville. Partner and I bought matching gold bands and exchanged them in that Cadillac! Unfortunately we lasted 12 years, but then I was traded for a newer model, and I’m NOT talking about a car! Hope you and your Rick enjoy the cabin and the rest of your lives happily 😊 ever after! 😉.
“Traded for a newer model”…… When Rick bought the Miata, the practical side of me questioned him about whether a convertible in DC made sense. He gave me his patented stabby side-eye and said “At least I’m trading my CAR for a newer model and not YOU.”
While we have much in common, our taste in cars is very different. Love my LAND YACHTS. As for my Chrysler cars, I loved my 83 and 85 RWD Fifth Avenues. The FHS (Luxury High Series) was way to aero and lacked the formal look I love. Was not crazy for K car versions of New Yorker, Fifth Avenue, and Imperial. However the ex mentioned in other post bought a new 93 FWD LeBaron. Was surprisingly comfortable with plenty of leg room for my 6 foot frame and had an upscale Luxury look.🏆 😃. Seems like there are a lot of Rick’s out here this morning! 😉. Hope you and your Rick have a great Memorial Day weekend and a great June 🏳️🌈, BROS!
Rick W: Rick and I met in Seattle in 1976. We’ve been together ever since. We got married on our 35th anniversary when it became legal in DC. That way I could put him on my health insurance plan and save $1,000/month. How’s that for romance?
For 28 years I sang with the DC Gay Men’s Chorus. In the 80’s and 90’s we lost dozens and dozens of members to HIV/AIDS. I lost track of the number of memorial services I sang at. The youngsters I sing with in the Seattle Men’s Chorus don’t understand what we went through. On twenty-something asked why we wore red ribbons on our tux jackets during performances. As someone his age would say….. I can’t even!
Congratulations to you and your Rick. As Bobby Lieber sang in BROS, Love is Love. 💖. Saw BROS multiple times and found so much of my own experiences. 🏳️🌈. Hope you two have many more years together! If you haven’t yet discovered Randy Rainbow, check out his great satirical videos!
I too enjoy Randy Rainbow’s WAY over the top videos but many are scared by them .
-Nate
As for those 😈 who do not appreciate Randy, Let them 😠 rant 😡and 😤 rave! If you haven’t seen BROS, it’s a MUST! 🏆 👍 🏳️🌈
We have some automotive “close-but-not-exact” parallels:
Taurus sedans and wagons were the DEC/Compaq/HP company cars of choice and all seemed fine as long as they were traded in before the warranty expired. That also goes for our personally owned Sable wagon.
Chrysler’s LHS was an extended and “nice-a-fied” LH like our Eagle Vision TSi. It seems your version offered better trouble free service than did ours. It was a good automotive design idea that I believe suffered from poor execution. Chrysler did a much better overall job with the subsequent PT Cruiser.
I have never driven an NA Miata, so putting the top up may be a more complex job than it is on my 1999 NB. The NBs did away with the zippered plastic rear window and replaced it with a permanent glass window with defogger. 25 years ago I could put up the top with one arm while sitting in the driver’s seat. However, at some point since then, I lost the strength to do that and now need to get out and lift it up with two hands.
I’ve always considered myself to be a New Yorker even though I moved away from the Big Apple 35 years ago. My second time living in Manhattan was from 1983 to 1990 and during that time I sadly saw co-workers and same-floor neighbors fade away from HIV. It was a sad, sad time. Chip was blessed to have you and Rick with him.
I had a Concorde LXi with the 24-V 3.5L V6 and fully loaded – I put 300M alloys on it and it was a wonderful car. It was such a fine car that I sold it to my parents as a “spare car” and it also served them well. My ex wife’s grandparents had a new LHS in gray when we were dating, and I did like that car. My other vintage Chryslers were a Turbo LeBaron convt and a New Yorker 5th Ave with hidden headlights similar to the pic posted above. 3.3L V6 that was very reliable as opposed to the Mitsu 3.OL and the puff of smoke those always gave due to valve guides. Talk about a COMFY car, you could drive across a couple states and feel like you just drove to the grocery store.
Thank you Steve for another great chapter. And thanks for sharing Chip’s story and your memories.
It sounds like your time in DC was right around the time that I stopped regularly traveling to DC as both of my parents passed in the first half of the 1990s and beyond business trips, I no longer had reason to visit the area. So it was about then that I began to realize that the area was changing so rapidly from the place in which I’d grown up. Most noticeable to me was the traffic. While even in the 80s, I didn’t give much thought to driving 1/2 way around the beltway most any time of day (aside from maybe one particularly bad hour in the morning rush and another in the evening), by 1994 I felt that traffic was just bonkers nearly any time of day. So, thinking of commuting in anything in DC … from MD to VA … is now mindbending. To me at least.
Those cab-forward Chryslers always bothered me from an aesthetic perspective as there was just something about their rounded-ness that I could never take to. Still, I have a friend who for several years drove nothing but those (which he got as handmedowns from his dad) and he loved them for the same rear-seat spaciousness you describe. I have to admit, I did ride around with him (he lives in the DC area still) and his family and five of us…three in the back…rode in cushy comfort. These may have been some of the last “regular cars” that offered that sort of space and comfort…as it seems that minivans and then SUVs pretty much moved into take that territory by the turn of the century.
DC Traffic is indeed horrible. They have a good rail/bus network, but there has been so much growth the the roads are perpetually clogged. We bought our home in WV in 1996. We used to leave DC at 5:00 and drive the 125 miles in 2 hours. Over the intervening 20 years the traffic going west on Friday afternoon got so bad that we either left work early at 2:00 PM or left early Saturday morning. It would sometimes take us an hour to go 12 miles out to the Beltway, another hour to get from the beltway east on I-66 until the break-away point at Centerville, and then 90 minutes to the cabin at normal speed. It was too nerve-wracking. I don’t see how people drive that commute daily.
Toward the ends of their careers as Federal employees, my parents partook of something called “flex-time” which basically meant I guess that you could start your 8 hour day whenever you wanted, ending 8 hours later. My impression was that this was a federal government thing designed to ease traffic in the area.
So, my mom – who worked for DoD at the Naval Observatory – used to head out from Bethesda down to the District each morning around 4am. My dad – who worked for USGS out in Reston – would leave about 5am. They were civil servants, working dairy farmer hours. But they avoided the traffic…and that seemed all that mattered.
I’m enjoying this series very much. My grandparents bought a ’94 LHS in forest green over tan, which was a very pretty car. I drove them from NJ to Vermont in it on more than one occasion for family holiday weekends, and I loved driving it. For such a big car it felt like it was on rails through mountain twisties, and of course it was a joy on the interstates. Weak headlights were its only fault.
On HIV- It is indeed a shame that the younger folk are so apathetic in its regard. I just buried longtime dear friend last month after multiple organs failed him over a short time. He was 46. He was diagnosed just a few years ago, perhaps after being positive for longer than he might have thought. He was on meds and in treatment, but in his case the virus won the race. Throughout his last days and hospitalization, neither HIV nor AIDS were mentioned in interactions with medical staff or his family. It was as if it should be swept under the rug as some relic from the past, but in truth what else causes a man in his 40’s to experience multiple organ failure? I’m thankful for PREP, and for the sun-shiny, happy portrayals of those living with HIV in the TV ads for Byktarvy and the like, but it’s important for people to remember those dark years. And for those too young to remember, it’s important for them to understand why there are so many resources available to them today. (And I’m now off my soap box)
I sing with the Seattle Men’s Chorus, a predominately gay group. When I talk to some of the younger singers, they are completely clueless about what us older folk went through. Nowadays they see HIV as something that, if you get it, you just pop a pill or two and things will be fine. That attitude baffles me…. and I turn grumpy old man real quick.
Thank you for the amazing story and I am sorry for the loss of such a good friend.
I had the chance to drive a 4 cyl Taurus and man, was it ever a dog. The V-6 was no ball of fire, either, but it didn’t feel dangerous like the four banger.
Who knew there was a “4 cyl, Taurus”? It’s a new one one me.
One of my high school classmates’ parents had an MT-5 wagon! That had to be a low-production model.
“Who knew there was a 4 cylinder. Taurus?”
My work here is done! 🙂
Steve,
Reading about you, Rick, and Chip brought back a flood of memories. My best friend Richard, who was also my next door neighbor, was a gearhead and car nut just like me. We grew up in the town of Garrett Park, where time seemed to have stopped in the 1930s, it was right in the middle of Montgomery County, MD, I suspect as residents of “Mon’ky County” you’ve at least driven thru Garrett Park on Strathmore Road between Kensington, and Rockville Pike.
Richard and I were almost inseparable until our later high school years, when I began dating girls, and he did not. It was a few years before he finally said he was gay, and my response was “Yeah I’ve known for a long time, but I’m OK with that”. While our interests in partners was different, our interests in vintage luxury cars was almost identical.
I was 2 years older than Richard, and when he talked his father into buying a 1955 Packard Patrician, it was I who did all the driving, and that was when, in 1968, I fell in love with Packards, quickly finding an original 18,000 mile example of a 1950 Packard Eight sedan. Richard also found and bought a 1957 Packabaker Clipper with the supercharged 289 V8, and 6 months later when he found a one-owner 1953 Packard Patrician sedan with factory A/C [about as mint as can be found], he decided to let the ’57 Clipper go, and I bought it for $100. The Clipper ended up being my daily driver during my last 2 years of High School.
Richard was extremely smart and a beautiful guy [both in looks and demeanor], and as a result had lots of close friends. So it was no surprise when in 1986 he took me aside and said he had HIV and AIDS. You and I know all too well that in the early days of AIDS, it was truly a death sentence. and by the spring of 1987 he was in the hospital. My girlfriend at the time was soooo scared that when I would visit Richard in the hospital, I would become infected, and at that time the medical community didn’t have a full understanding how the virus replicated. Because I was very open to to those in the gay & lesbian community, Richard and I had many mutual friends, and within 2 years almost all of those friends were gone.
When he became ill and it was clear there was no way out, Richard made the decision to dispose of his car collection, and most were presented to his friends, including a car I lusted after; his 1961 Facel-Vega Excellence. I kept the Excellence until a terrible lightning fire destroyed my restoration shop, and I needed to sell off cars for some badly needed cash, so the car went to a collector in New England.
Today, some 35 years later, I’ve sold my home on the eastern shore of Maryland, and my girlfriend of 10 years and I have moved in with her very elderly and frail parents as they need our assistance in navigating everyday life. We live in a nice house with Chesapeake Bay water view just east of Annapolis, MD. Her father is now openly gay, and contracted HIV about 20 years ago. While it’s no longer that feared death sentence, and his HIV is untraceable due to the advancement in medical care and medications, he still needs daily help with a lot of things we take for granted. So much has changed, yet so much remains the same.
As Washingtonians in the 1980s, I’ll bet you read the Washington Post. If you remember there was a columnist by the name of Bill Gold, and his column ran next to the comics page. It was called “The District Line”. Every once in a while Mr. Gold would write about his 1955 Packard Patrician. It was his car that Richard and his father bought back in 1967, that push started my interest in Packards and antique cars in general.
Was an avid reader of the “District Line”!! DC was a nice to place to be back then, most folks did not want to “move into DC”. They wanted the “burbs”.
Place is so over developed with unaffordable housing now a days.
Rick and I named our first schnauzer “Packard Patrician”. When Dad called me and said his dog’s litter was ready for adoption, I was reading an article about a 1955 Packard Patrician. That’s where we got the name for our puppy.
Love your dogs 🐕 name Packard Patrician. I once adopted a cat found on February 27. That being Elizabeth Taylor’s Birthday and cat’s eyes resemblance to Cleopatra make up, named her Elizabeth M. (For Maggie the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)TAILER. Great minds…? 😉
True friends are priceless . Chip was very lucky .
“The Miata was wildly impractical, but we loved it” ~ this is as it should be ~ my sister wanted to buy herself a BMW rag top and all our siblings told her she shouldn’t, didn’t deserve it etc. , after 20 + years sober I felt she’d earned it and told her so, she bought it and loved it, drove it every where from her home in Richmond, Va. for years .
Always enjoy your posts .
-Nate
Well, I don’t have any experience with the cars in this installment, but the backstory cuts a little closer.
One of my uncles is also a nurse, and during the 80’s he and his partner did palliative care for at least one friend with AIDS, possibly more. That seems like so long ago.
It was long ago. Nice they could offer help//support.
One day when Chip was in the hospital for the last time Rick came over to see him. Rick worked as a nurse at an adjoining hospital, and was in his nursing uniform. He found Chip incoherent and covered in shit. His nurse refused to touch him. She had laid his lunch on his bed try and walked away. Chip tried to eat it, but he’d soiled himself and smeared feces all over his face. Rick is normally laid back and reserved, but he went to the charge nurse and threw a rage with the power of 1,000 Patti Lupones. “GET IN THERE AND GET HIM CLEANED UP AND TREAT HIM WITH DIGNITY AND RESPECT. NOW!”
That evening Chip was cleaned up, with his beard neatly trimmed and his nails cleaned and trimmed. We took our complaints to hospital management and got the nurse fired.
Steve – I’m very sorry to hear of your loss of Chip. I’m a little younger than you, so I’ve only ever experienced that level of loss from HIV/AIDS only through hearing stories told from those who lived through it or through the movies i’ve seen about that time in the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
To the cars… the MT-5 Taurus used a larger version of the 2.3L HSC engine that came in Tempo/Topaz (which I’m very familiar with). I’ve read up on the MT-5 and it is laughable that they tried to pass that off as the sporty Taurus only because it had a manual trans.
I agree with you, the LHS was a beautiful car. It came out when I was in high school and even though I tended to be more ont he sportier side of the equation with my likes of cars (the Intrepid and Vision were my favorites), something about that LHS was just right.
Reading your name and that of my partner reminds me of a quote from Miss Clairee in the movie Steel Magnolias… “all gay men have track lighting and all gay men are named Mark, Rick, or Steve”
Even decades later, I’m sorry to hear about your friend Chip. Sounds like he was a good guy.
In the late 80s I was working in a hospital, as an electrician, not a clinical role, but it was so sad. Guys would come in and be assigned to “Death Row”, a small wing of 10 or so rooms where nobody walked out to go home. And with so little known at the time if I had to do work in one of those rooms I almost held my breath. When you don’t know, you don’t know.
Oh yeah, cars. Were the Taurus with /5 manuals really much slower, except perhaps top speed, than the base 6 cylinder? The Chrysler LH series? Seemed interesting, even good at the time, but talk about not aging well…
Another excellent (and poignant) read.
My only exposure to a Taurus MT-5 was back in my auto detailing days in Seattle during the late 1980’s. We were cleaning and detailing trade-ins for a local dealer. One of the cars was a year-old MTY-5 in Ubiquitous Taurus Burgandy (with the burgandy mouse-fur interior). I remember hopping in. seeing the shifter and thinking “Cool! A Taurus with a stick!”, My initial enthusiasm soon was downgraded to utter disappointment when I entered I 405 NB at NE 4th, started to accelerate through the gears, and felt barely any forward momentum. The 4 cyl/AT (of which my mom had at the time) was beyond sluggish-she always said, “If you need to accelerate, turn off the A/C!”
(*Mom-why did you let dad buy you a 4-cylinder Taurus-was he too cheap to splurge for the V6?)
I made sure the A/C was truly off in the MT-5. (it was).
By the time I got to the exit to 520 westbound and over the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge toward Seattle, it had finally reached 60 mph. It was a slow and somewhat noisy drive back to the shop. I remember thinking “Why -, oh why didn’t they come up with a M/T-equipped V6 Taurus?” 2 years later, the SHO made its appearance…
I always thought the 1994-1997 Chrysler LHS was one of the classiest-looking cars of the 1990’s. It also had one of the best-looking interiors ever in a Chrysler product. Peak 1990’s Chrysler before Bob Eaton sold out to Daimler-Benz.
Thank you, also, for the story on Chip. At the end of the article, I began to miss him, too.
Keep the memory of him alive-he sure seemed to be one of those once-in-a-lifetime friends.
(*forgot to clarify a sentence) s/b ‘Remembering driving other Tauruses ( Tauri?) that were equipped with the 4cyl/AT that were beyond sluggish (such as my mom’s) I remember mom saying, “If you need to accelerate, turn off the A/C!”‘
(I miss the ’15-monutes-to-edit-after-you-post’ feature…
Wow, the MT-5! In my first couple of years out of school, one of the lawyers at my office had been driving a 77-ish Cadillac Seville that he had bought from his father. This guy was about 10 years older than I was, so late 30s at the time. He asked me for the biggest, cheapest new car he could buy. Aircon and an FM radio were his two must-haves. I had read about the MT-5 and told him – and he promptly went out and bought one. It contrasted with the Taurus of another of the partners there, one that was completely loaded with leather and a sunroof. I think they tried to make it sporty, but I have come to think of it as a latter-day Galaxie 500 with a six and a 3-speed.
Haha – that Miata (and that driveway) looked awfully familiar – oh, wait . . . they’re mine. Oh, I can only imagine the fun of that trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway in that car. Really, about any trip in that car was fun. It’s too bad about the humid weather, but hopefully you found a few weeks in the spring and fall that encouraged the top to come down and get the car’s full potential.
J P: It was an amazing experience to drop the top and cruise down the Blue Ridge Parkway and the back roads leading over the mountains to our cabin. Fun times!
Not so much fun was when Rick got stuck in the snow a mile from our cabin with no phone service and he had to hike up the hill to get me to come down and help dig him out.
As others have said, Chip had some great friends and I suspect Steve and Rick had one too.
I’d go the Miata over the LHS, though YMMV. Red with a tan roof is a rare combination, at least other there. Green and tan is fairly typical
Well written story and it brought back my own memories. Spent many long weekends in DC during the 70s, 80s, 90s. Cruising I-95 from Richmond, VA, to DC. Traffic so heavy and fast almost impossible to be pulled over for speed. Going South on I-95 from DC to Fredericksburg has been almost stop-n-go since the 1960s.
Back in the day drove 90+ mph from Richmond VA, to DC to go clubbing every two weeks. Drove a 1972 Mark IV, 1975 Imperial, 1976 Eldorado conv. All great highway cruiser’s in their day.
Rob, my companion of 20-years, was not a car guy but we had many memorable road trips together with our cats and dogs. Unfortunately he died suddenly +20 years ago in his late 40s. Rob was a Mensa (very high IQ). He danced and sang in NYC Theater and was a published author. But, when it came to cars, he had issues. Once, when I was working in the Middle East and Rob was responsible for my auto in NYC, Rob inflated the tires to the point of exploding. My NYC mechanic emailed me he was going to padlock the hood to keep Rob from messing with the car
Rob was a good driving companion. The years we lived in NYC we had a small house in the Pocono’s, a 2-1/2 hour drive out of Manhattan. Never failed, one cat would barf 10-15 minutes from home. Rob always had tissues ready.
MT-5s are so rare now. I’ve been searching for an 86 Ford Taurus LX wagon in red for nearly 5 years now and even finding one of those has been so hard…