Car and Driver ran a lot of stunts in its heyday, but this was one of their most bizarre: In spring 1968, they sent English associate editor Charles Fox on a weekend jaunt from Manhattan to Washington, D.C., dressed in a Nehru suit and bead necklace, with no money, no credit cards, and no U.S. ID — just 12 unaddressed personal checks and a brand-new Lincoln Continental Mark III. Here’s Fox’s account of what happened.
This article, which ran in the August 1968 issue of Car and Driver, is one that could never be written today. It’s becoming hard enough to deposit a check in your own bank account, much less pay for anything by personal check. Even back in the days when writing checks was far more commonplace, a lot of businesses were wary of them, especially if they weren’t local. If all you had were starter checks — the kind banks issue new account holders, with no preprinted address — you were probably out of luck; today, if you tried to get a business to cash one for you, they’d probably call the cops. The idea of going on a multi-state road trip with no money other than checks now seems like madness.
Yet, that’s exactly what Car and Driver enlisted Charles Fox to do, judging that it would be a good way to assess just how far the appeal of the new Lincoln Continental Mark III might actually go.
(By the way, if the style of the cartoon people in the above pages looks familiar, it’s probably because artist Paul Coker Jr. was a regular contributor to MAD Magazine for many years.)
Intended to revive the lineage of the original Continental and the ’50s Continental Mark II, the Mark III had just arrived in April 1968, but it had already made a definite impression. Fox remarked:
A preliminary trip around Manhattan convinced us that Henry Ford II’s new Lincoln was a significant automobile. Old men looked and smiled wistfully. The people who never looked, looked. Doormen and chauffeurs and cops and airline stewardesses stared unashamedly; some pleased to recognize a new Lincoln, some curious to know what it was. But all of them impressed. The car is an event, an occasion. On the whole, the only people who tried not to look were other Lincoln owners. Stripped of their comfortable status niche, the poor souls didn’t know where to cast their eyes.
So buy yourself a Nehru suit, C/D commanded. Let your hair hang down. Wear a string of beads maybe, and go take a trip in Ford’s flagship. See if 17 feet of unmitigated opulence, with a miniature Rolls-Royce-style radiator stuck on its nose like a chrome-plated Band-Aid on a razor nick, puts gas in your tank, food in your belly and a silk pillow under your head at night.
Lincoln-Mercury says the Mk. III is Henry Ford H’s answer to his father Edsel’s Continental Mk. I and brother William’s Continental Mk. II. Automotive Quarterly says, “The Mk. III is as close a reflection of his (Henry II) personal taste as anything automotive can be.” Pretty impressive, huh? So let’s find out if Henry H’s taste impresses anyone else besides his board members or the senior account executives at J. Walter Thompson. Go be an elderly Rolling Stone. Be a cockney guru.
Be anything you like, but get out there into Rolls-Royce country with a dozen unaddressed personal checks on the Chase Manhattan, no more identification than a British passport and a London County Council driver’s license, and see if all those hard-nosed nickle-minded, middle-class American retailers lie down and let Continental Mk. III class run all over them.
“It sounded like a great idea,” Fox mused, “What else are you going to do with a Lincoln apart from running a figure eight race against an Eldorado?” He’d been promised an unlimited expense account, so if he could get people to accept his checks, they would be honored — an important point, since some jurisdictions have very expansive definitions of “check fraud” and are enthusiastic about jailing people for it. “But by Friday night,” he admitted, “week-long talk among the rest of the staff about bail money and laughing stocks turned a West Village waiter into a San Quentin warder and veal parmesan into a sinister, tasteless, and lonely last dinner.”
It bears mentioning that when this article was written, Fox was 35 years old, and his hair wasn’t particularly long, so nobody was likely to mistake him for a hippie and try to bust his head for it. A year or so later, after the Manson Family murders, it might have been a different story, but with his British accent, I assume Fox just seemed like a harmless eccentric, especially when he said he was a writer.
So, he swallowed his reservations, slipped behind the wheel of the Mark III, adjusted the power seat and automatic climate control, and glided out out of Manhattan:
If you are running numbers or acid, if you are delivering duck eggs, one of the Routes de Guerre out of New York is the Holland Tunnel, Even if you’re about to do something a little out of the ordinary with a prestige automobile you use the Holland Tunnel.
You escape the bored, jaded oppressiveness of Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel at midnight; and you are grateful. The fast lane of the Jersey Turnpike glides under six feet of burgundy hood. No sound. Just a gentle vibration: blimp, blimp, blimp through the seat of a $9000 plum-colored leather armchair. Whispering along in the fluorescent half-light with the automatic speed control set at 70. Soaking up the sensual elegance and the peace it brings after a 16-hour workday in Manhattan. The Zoo.
Alone, and feeling unassailably aloof. To Washington, D.C., and points beyond.
(If you read the text on these pages in order, you’ll notice that I’m skipping over Fox’s capsule history of Lincoln, which is not particularly germane.)
Behind the wheel of the Mark III, Fox felt alternating waves of confidence and anxiety:
As beautiful as a snake in a new skin, the ego swelling in your chest like a self-inflating life jacket. Which in one sense is exactly what it is, because that’s what this whole trip was about. Egos. Try climbing out of a Continental Mk. III somewhere in Maryland—in a Nehru suit, with a string of beads around your neck—looking like you’re in trouble and asking for help. They’d be exorcising the station before you made it past the pumps.
But you’d have to be able to act better than Ronnie Reagan to get the focus that way around in the first place. Just sit in the Lincoln for a minute and reality wobbles. Drive it for five and feel schizophrenia softly invade the mind.
These thoughts were soon interrupted by the one reality the Mark’s various power convenience options couldn’t smooth over: a steadily sinking fuel gauge needle. The Mark III had a nominal fuel capacity of 25.5 gallons, but 10–11 mpg was about the best you could realistically expect from the 460-cid engine. Fox realized:
I was about to have to make contact with the earthlings. I’d have put off the initial encounter forever, but an empty gas tank has a way of forcing the issue. So, roll into a deserted Citgo station, park carefully right outside the office with the engine murmuring softly to itself and the lights blazing, and step inside. There he is—Joe Chudomelka, short and heavy, dabbing at the beads of sweat on his bald head.
Joe listened to how I’d lost my wallet, and money, and credit cards, and a weary look spread over his face. He has the rules set down for him, he explained. He can’t cash personal checks—it had nothing to do with me, he said. Them’s the rules. “I can give you enough gas to get off the turnpike at the next exit, but that’s it,” he said.
So gradually I lured him outside into the warm night air and the presence of the Lincoln. He stared at the car, and equally as gradually his manner changed. The air conditioner had dripped a puddle of condensation under the passenger’s door.
Joe stared at this for a while, looked at my blank check he was holding and then said, “If you’re going to make it to Washington you’ll need more than gas. There’s the tolls to think about, so you’d better have a few bucks to take care of them as well.” Looking at the passport he added helpfully, “Maybe when you get to Washington the British embassy will give you some money,” and left me to drive onward with mixed emotions.
(Although he wasn’t one at the time this was written, I think Fox, who died in 2012 at the age of 79, eventually became a U.S. citizen, or at least a permanent resident. He lived out the last 40 or so years of his life in the town of Bolinas in western Marin County, California, which, during my mercifully brief acquaintance with it in the early ’90s, quickly became one of my absolute least favorite parts of the state.)
Fox’s blank checks got a considerably less favorable reception at chain hotels in Baltimore:
They threw me out of Baltimore, Md. at 5 a.m. with little ceremony. The desk clerks at the Holiday Inn and Statler Hilton politely refused to budge. At the Holiday the car sat only 20 feet from where we talked, lightly veiled by lace curtains, but very visible. At the Hilton I had to park in the basement so I gave the keys to the night porter as I crossed the foyer and asked him to bring up my bags. “It’s a Mk. III Lincoln,” I called the magic words after him. But the clerk still wanted cash in advance. The lesson was simple enough. Underlings in chain operations, or underlings anywhere, couldn’t buy the Lincoln (and wouldn’t buy me) if they wanted to.
So I cruised down to Washington for breakfast. Unlike Baltimore, Washington, D.C. makes no effort to hide its class.
D.C. proved far more accommodating:
There was no trouble in Washington.
At the Georgetown Manor in Georgetown the manager was on his way out to join the doorman looking at the Lincoln as I walked in. Everybody smiled graciously and commiserated solicitously when I told them my problem. But it was no trouble. They decided I was some kind of famous English author. “You’d like the best room in the House?” they presumed. But I settled for a simple $30-a-day suite facing the front on the second floor, ate steak for breakfast and told them to send me the bill, which they agreed to without a murmur. The parking attendant was more thrilled than anyone else, because the Lincoln was almost too big to park in the basement garage.
Washington gas stations accepted personal checks without asking for any identification. The only problem I ran into was when the car-hop at a drive-in took my Bigburger and chocolate milkshake back after I told him I didn’t have any cash.
The Mark III was equipped with stereo tape, so Fox popped in the complimentary RCA Victor Ford Family of Fine Music tape as he explored D.C. He was not overly impressed with the musical selections, but admitted:
[J]ust driving around town—with Chet Atkins (you really copped out didn’t you Chet?), Peter Nero, the Norman Luboff Choir and the rest of Ford’s Family of Fine Musicians pouring out nauseatingly inoffensive Muzak from the magnificent vibrasonic stereo tape deck—was a trip.
As in New York, the Mark drew a lot of curious and admiring looks. (I should emphasize again that when Fox made this trip, the Mark III was really brand new, and this was very likely the first time most onlookers had seen one in the metal.) Fox wasn’t sure how to respond:
To return the stares is to admit to a degrading concern with reality, and the weaknesses of the flesh. True Lincoln owners, even bizarrely dressed true Lincoln owners, should be engrossed in lofty thoughts—having nothing to do with pretty faces or overt admiration. But for an impostor at least, not to be aware is impossible at first, so you are forced into a world of non-recognition and reflections. The car’s mirrors become adequately subtle observation devices along with shop windows and the most oblique looks. Keeping a straight face becomes as difficult as an advanced yoga exercise.
This non-involvement, which must be a true syndrome of the real Lincoln set, gradually forces the world outside to slip away to a Technicolor Cinerama production moving by in parade. Stop in a crowd of people and suddenly feel very paranoid. But Ford anticipated that, and fitted an electric control panel by your left hand. Push a couple of switches and click, click, the doors and windows automatically lock, sealing you in, safe from those breathing, sweating, staring, ugly, hostile, noisy people out there.
But what does happen if you suddenly take one of those earthlings out of his harsh environment and into the womb-like insensibility of the Lincoln?
Pondering this point after leaving D.C., Fox decided to pick up a hitchhiker as a test subject:
Sweeping up the Delaware Valley on the roundabout way back to New York I picked up an 18-year-old math major from Harrisburg, Pa., on his way back to the Pennsylvania State College campus. He made absolutely no comment, and although he looked curious he never asked a single question in 50 miles. I even kept the AM radio tuned to nothing but hard rock stations to make him feel more at home. He hummed a bar or two now and then. But he never allowed more than an occasional glance sideways. With soft-to-no-shock absorber frequency the Lincoln went through roll oversteer to pronounced understeer in fast or tight corners, but the disc/drum braking system was as impressive as the response from the car’s 460 cu. in. V-8—considering the car weighs 4738 lbs.—so I left the braking very late into a couple of corners to see if that had any effect on the mathematician. He looked as placid as the passengers examining the iceberg from the “A” deck of the Titanic. At the east end of Bloomsburg we shook hands and he walked away without looking back.
(The weight Fox quotes was the base curb weight for a 1968½ Mark III, whose standard equipment wasn’t as lavish as later editions. With its climate control, power seats, power locks, and fancy stereo, Fox’s car was likely on the wrong side of 5,000 lb.)
Heading into the Poconos, Fox encountered more resistance:
I ran into a problem with the Penn Stroud Hotel in Stroudsburg. I couldn’t drag the Lincoln into the act, so it was understandable. But up the road the Paramount Motel graciously took us in and even served a continental breakfast on the house Monday morning before I drove back into New York. Almost home.
While Fox may have felt self-conscious behind the wheel of the Mark, it doesn’t seem like anyone responded to him very strongly until he was heading back into Manhattan. Rolling down the FDR Drive, a couple of Black guys in the back of a chauffeur-driven Oldsmobile got a load of Fox’s Nehru jacket and apparently thought it was the funniest thing they’d seen all day:
They looked through the rear window in hysterics. What was this cat doing in that great big car? Putting on the world man. That’s what he’s doing. Right? Beautiful. Finally somebody understood. I wound the window down for the first time in days and let the wind blow it all away. They laughed harder. I laughed. We all laughed like hell. But as I turned off at 34th Street they waved victory signs at me. And suddenly I didn’t know whether I was down again or not.
Even back then, I’m not sure anyone in L.A. would have batted an eye; people probably would have just assumed Fox was some sort of music producer. Today, in a city littered with multimillionaire trust fund babies, venture capital fund managers, and movie or music people who routinely show up to high-level business meetings wearing baseball caps and cowboy boots, seeing an eccentrically dressed visitor pull up in a $100,000 car just means it’s another day ending in “y.” (Even so, most people still wouldn’t let them cash a check.)
The later Car and Driver test of the 1970 Cadillac Eldorado (arch-rival of the Mark III) pointed out that many buyers of these high-end cars were middle-class and working-class people. This article helps to explain why so many people were willing to put themselves in hock to own one of these boats. Not everyone Fox encountered was necessarily cooperative, but, except for the two guys on East River Drive, most seemed to assume that if he was driving a car like the Mark III, he must be Somebody, even if he was dressed strangely and had a funny accent. That, as much as anything else, was what a lot of people were paying with these cars — and at least for a while, that is what they got.
Related Reading
1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III, Inside And Out – Unsubtle But Effective (by me)
Curbside Classic: 1968-1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III – Right On The Mark (by Paul N)
My brother, the teacher, taught driver’s ed. That was his excuse as to why he subscribed to Car and Driver. One of the great Ziff/Davis magazines. Not only am I nostalgic for the cars and the writing, but also for the typesetting and graphic design process of that era — adding a line drawing to halftones in 1968 was tricky.
He “wound” the window down in his Mark?
I mean, we still “dial” phone numbers and “hang up” the phone even now, when an ever-increasing population of callers have never personally seen a rotary dial or corded handset, let alone used one. We might even “film” video “footage” when there’s no actual ribbon of film or tape involved, or “snap” a photograph when there’s no more physical shutter to make that noise.
Yeah, I guess you’re right.
We’ve got quite a few burned-in anachronisms. Just as the extinct floppy disk is apparently the permanent icon for “Save”, the sound of a 1970s Nikon with motor drive is always going to be with us when we press the “shutter button.” Unless we turn it off, of course.
What an interesting article! Pretty bizarre indeed
Aaron, this might be the same color combination, apart from the white roof. Definitely a looker (Black roof looks even better in my opinion) :
https://www.grautogallery.com/vehicles/10040/1969-lincoln-continental-mark-iii
I saw that one, but the exterior is red rather than maroon. From Fox’s description, the Mark III in this article was probably maroon, but he said the interior was “plum-colored,” and the closet I can see to that combination in the color/trim guide was maroon with Dark Red interior.
I wish I had understood this car better when I was 10 years old and my father got a new one in late 1969. It was an impressive car to me, but a 69 Imperial would have been just as impressive. But my father understood it. He had just started a consulting business and knew instinctively that this was a car that would force area business owners to take him seriously. And back then, few would have assumed that Dad got it on a 2 year lease.
I was eleven at the time this was published, and just beginning to subscribe to the big car magazines. I’ve never seen this article before, but it’s the exact kind of writing that cemented my enthusiasm: well-crafted, well-illustrated and somewhat mind-bending — for an eleven-year old. Thanks for resurrecting it Aaron; you are expert at so many things, including dis-intering the automotive corpses of our shared history.
Fortunately the author avoided calling it the Collateral Mark III!
The PSU engineering student was thoroughly familiar. They were the same 20 years later when I worked there.
Checks: when I studied in England my junior year of college, I was surprised that everyone accepted checks for just about everything. The banks (Nat West & Barclays on campus) were eager to float large overdrafts for the university students, knowing that these kids would be beholden to the bank once they started earning a living. This was when an ATM card was a new thing, one I didn’t like using back in the States. (You used one to take money out of the bank, but you didn’t use it at the register to actually pay for things.). If the driver were in England, it would be no challenge at all to get around just using checks.
Here, I used to write checks all the time at the grocery store and such. Getting cash from an ATM was a hassle (an extra stop, occasionally risky, obnoxious fees), and I didn’t want to pay for things with a credit card if I didn’t have to. ATM cards that you can just swipe like a credit card really changed that, and nobody growls at you for fumbling with your checkbook or dropping your pen.
I cannot remember exactly when (70’s I think) Alpha Beta grocery stores in SoCal had machines that approved your check before you got to the checkout line. This was before ATM cards and when people wrote checks for cash back.
The machines were usually next to the soda vending machines. Upon application, Alpha Beta issued you a plastic card. Before you got to the checkout line, you inserted the card and your check into the machine. You specified how much cash back you wanted, and the machine clacked away and then printed the approval on the back of the check. At the time I thought it was the most amazing technology ever.
I pretty much paid for everything in a department store and grocery store with a check. For gas I had my first credit card, Shell, when I was 18 so that was taken care of from 1971 through the 80’s. For cash I always had to go to the bank, on Friday, to get money for the weekend. I do remember the early days of drive up windows to deposit a check and to get cash by using tubes transferred back and forth by vacuum. ATM’s must have been after I got out of Cal in 1981 and went into the working world.
That is still a beautiful Automobile. love the interior and exterior
I vividly remember reading this at the time; it left quite an impression on me. This was C/D at its best.
Charles Fox had MS for some forty years, which meant he soon could not drive anymore. But he did keep writing.
You dislike Bolinas? Well, it might be a bit more gentrified than it once was, but it still seems pretty attractive to me.
The landscape of Western Marin is utterly gorgeous, but the people, especially in Bolinas, made me extremely misanthrophic. I dreaded every time I had to go into Bolinas — it was as hostile and cliquish as the worst high school lunchroom. The way the locals drove was also just flat terrifying, and had a high casualty rate.
I have no idea what the other fellow was talking about concerning Western Marin. Pretty darn rural back then and not terribly different today. Central and Eastern Marin, though, is another matter
I would sure like to have been in that editorial meeting.
I am just a little too young to have read this, but Car and Driver in the 1970s pulled all kinds of cool stunts. Who can forget their Cannonball Run articles or totally candid road tests. Back them, if they didn’t like a car, they darned well said so. Now they love everything, afraid that they will lose advertisers.
By the time I was thirteen I had a subscription to CD and I continued to get for years. I even had it sent to Japan for me.
Like Canucknucklehead says, I was just a few years too young to have caught this article when it originally came out. Still it exhibits the stylistic DNA that endeared me to many later Car and Driver pieces. The Paul Coker Jr. artwork was immediately recognizable as in 1968 I was much more into furtively reading my uncles’ Mad Magazines than I was car magazines. Both of my uncles still lived at home with my grandmother in 1968, and thus their Mad subscription was delivered there…which I devoured every time I was at their house. My mother did not approve of Mad at all and I could only sneak the mags in the bathroom or when I was standing next to my older uncle, handing him tools and otherwise reading his Mad magazines…which in deference to his little sister, he pretended to not notice that I was reading.
I do have to admit that upon seeing the lede photo for this article, I had to double take before I realized that that wasn’t Leonard Nimoy – who was known to sometimes wear a Nehru suit back in the day. Like the circles you will find, in the windmills of your mind…
In honor of Charles Fox, I wrote a check today at the grocery store. In fact, I still regularly write checks and don’t give a damn if the cashier rolls her eyes or laughs at me. And in fact, I happen to possess skills in the ancient arts of handwriting, so I can actually fill one out just about as fast as other customers tap their plastic repeatedly and unsuccessfully on the terminal. 😉
That car is a stunner (I like the one you found better than what Fox probably drove).
Really enjoyed this, thanks.
My mother scribbled out checks for everything! Finally started surrendering to writers, cramp about “1988”. Didn’t slow her up too much though. The color combo on the early “Mk III”, here is beautiful. Don’t recall many this color. A “69 Polara”, or “Monaco” this color was a long time fixture in my hometown. Was still around/about in “84ish”. (4dor hrdtop)
This and the 1967-70 Eldorado may be the last American cars to fit the definition of “classic”. Safety standards seem to have put an end to timeless styling. The pictured car is outstanding but the linked red w/white top looks too much like a pimp car. The color isn’t fitting and the wide whitewalls do it no favors.
I remember reading this article in the magazine. The USA was still doing well in the late ’60s and people were more trusting, especially of those who looked successful. These days, the author would be disdained as a member of the bourgeoisie and called out on Reddit as someone responsible for others being unable to pay the rent.
I see the face of this Mark III and I see how it impressed Chrysler when they made this New Yorker my son in law owns.
I remember Charles Fox well, a gifted author IMO. Decades ago of course, but I recall one in particular, IIRC the title was, “And by their Movement, Kings” Which was about watching his son ride a bicycle or motorcycle, I can’t recall which. But the Father/Son interaction was great, a mix of pride and fear watching his son. Not many columns I recall the name of 40+ years later.
Checks. I still pay bills with them, but I charge everything else. Over the course of the years I’ve written thousands of them. In one small town I lived in in Northern California I was asked for ID for a check at one store only, a Safeway. And trust me, I wrote plenty, but Safeway was the only one worried.
Harrisburg and Bloomsburg are in the Susquehanna Valley, not the Delaware Valley, but it’s a bit late for C&D to publish errata on this article.
These days, the author and the hitchhiker could have taken US 220 to Penn State directly. Technically they could back then, too, but back then it was a fairly treacherous stretch of two-lane with a reputation for dangerous accidents. In the late 90s and 2000s they turned the road into a four lane expressway; but as I recall, the project hit a snag for years, when one of the mountain cuts hit a huge mass of rock that when weathered released acid into the water. I don’t recall when exactly they worked around it in one way or another. But I do recall that causing the completion of the road to be delayed by quite a few years.
That said, even today, that would be a bit out of the way if the driver was heading to NYC. If there was hitchhiking anymore, they might have still been dropped in Bloomsburg. Plenty of folks driving between there and PSU when college is in session.
It makes me sad when I remember this movie Dead Presidents & The French Connection. I remember when Isaac Hayes was driving this car. As well as James Brown. I just have a dream about Isaac Hayes record this song Walk On By in 1969 with this car The Mark III.
What a GLORIOUS automobile .
I’m so glad I grew up with thee sort of cars, not to my personal taste but wonderful none the less .
-Nate