Olds and a Longtime Devotee Call It Quits
I did not grieve two weeks ago when General Motors announced it is killing the Oldsmobile division, phasing it out over the next two or three years.
Because, really, it is not my father’s Oldsmobile anymore. Maybe that’s painful to read, but it’s true.
Today’s Oldsmobiles have names like Alero, Bravada and Aurora and the ridiculously monikered Intrigue. Give me a V-8, hump-in-the-floor, leaded-fuel break. Are these names for cars or exotic dancers?
Oldsmobiles used to have exciting names, names that evoked Earth-changing forces: Toronado. Or swashbucklers: Cutlass. Or Jetsonian power: Delta 88.
That’s what Dad had: a Delta 88. Or, rather, a seemingly unending succession of nearly indistinguishable Delta 88s. Like congressional elections, the purchase of a new Delta 88 was a biennial event in the Ahrens household. Except with us, it happened in odd-numbered years.
See, Dad had this rhythm: Every other fall, he’d go down to Royal Oldsmobile in Charleston, W. Va., where he knew the salesmen, the sales manager, the repairmen and the secretaries. After fleet buyers, he must have been Royal’s best customer. Well, the most predictable customer, at any rate. “Good” customers probably upgrade models and add options.
Not Dad. He knew what he wanted and would not be moved: a four-door Delta 88 with a white exterior and navy interior. Period. And that’s exactly what he bought, biennium after biennium, from the late ‘60s through the ‘70s and ‘80s and up until--well, we’ll get to that later.
Dad’s 2-year-old Delta 88 always had about 75,000 miles on it. (He was a traveling salesman.) So the Olds salesman would eye the immaculately kept car and tell Dad how much he would give on trade-in. Dad would say: “Drive it around the parking lot again. See if you can’t find another $50 under the floor mats.” I don’t know if the salesmen ever did, but when Dad said it, he sounded like one smooth devil to his young son.
*
I always knew when it was time to buy a new car, and I’d pore over the Oldsmobile catalogs. They were big, smooth, sleek things, the size of legal pads and nearly as thick. Filled with dreamy photographs, they were color wonderlands of American vehicular might. Here was the sporty Cutlass, usually complemented by a sexy young couple. The exotic Vista Cruiser station wagon, with the curved windows that wrapped over the roof. The elegant Ninety-Eight coupe, with a hint of tail fins and doors as long as a first-down pass. Typically, a dignified graying couple was pictured with the Ninety-Eight. They, obviously, had Made It.
The Delta 88 was the middle-class car for the discriminating family man. Even though every GM car of a particular class was nearly identical--the Delta 88 was the Chevy Impala was the Pontiac Bonneville was the Buick LeSabre--Dad was firmly an Oldsmobile man. (Except for one mid-’60s Chevy fling, but our family doesn’t talk about that. And, hey, it was the ‘60s. Everyone experimented.)
If Dad was the steady Delta 88 owner, I was the 12-year-old status seeker. Try as I might, I could never talk him up to the Delta 88 Royale--a higher trim level, with a landau roof (stippled rubbery stuff that bleached and peeled off eventually) and a brougham interior (massive velour seats that looked like sofas with loose cushions, pinned down by buttons). Oldsmobile kept piling on the modifiers, as though more names made it a better car. Perhaps the Delta 88 Royale Brougham LS town car was the pinnacle.
Oh, the excitement of bringing home the 1975 Delta 88 Gargantua! (My modifier, not Oldsmobile’s.) But it was too long to fit in our garage. So we remodeled the garage to fit its new inhabitant, like building an addition for a new baby. We pulled out hand saws and notched the 2-by-4s holding up the rear wall. The Delta 88’s chrome-plated front bumper--comprising perhaps one-third of the Mesabi Range’s annual ore output--docked neatly into the notches.
The hood, roof and trunk were vast acreages of beautiful white sheet metal. When you mashed the gas pedal, the V-8 engine actually torqued the front end of the car, as though it were being twisted by a large, invisible hand.
It was the biggest, whitest thing in the world.
It was the ‘70s.
*
A decade later, things started going badly for Oldsmobile and, by extension, Dad.
First, Oldsmobile made its big cars not big. Then, front-wheel drive. In 1985, it replaced the V-8 with a V-6. In 1988, Olds stopped calling it the Delta 88, opting instead for 88 Royale. Sales plummeted. The ‘90s were bad. In 1999, the company simply euthanized the emasculated, truncated, V-6’d, de-Delta’d 88.
The last 88 Dad bought was a 1990 model. He has maniacally refused to trade it in on something smaller, smarter, more efficient. His 88 now has more than 300,000 miles on it, which is 60,000 miles more than the average distance between the Earth and the moon.
In the go-go, black-lacquered ‘80s, the brand name had become a problem--it started with the word “Old.” The company tried to hide it, marketing “The Aurora by Oldsmobile.” No one remembered that the Olds was once a hep car: “Rocket ‘88,’ ” which many musicologists consider to be the very first rock song, was a 1951 paean to the Oldsmobile.
Same thing with Dad.
A confident, good-looking 6-footer, he had been a hotshot industrial salesman from the ‘60s into the ‘80s. Which is about the time the Rust Belt bust hit the Southern coal fields--Dad’s best territory. His Midwest-based employer made some changes, and, well, it just wasn’t his company anymore. When he looked at the new Oldsmobiles--the Alero, the Intrigue--I bet he thought the same thing.
Instead of re-engineering to fit the sleeker, postindustrial American economy, Dad decided it was time to hang it up.
Just as Oldsmobile did Dec. 12.
