Omega watch customization: why not more of a thing?

Yikes...

Top Cutlass convertible is a '68 as well. Or, was that a typo.

Had a friend who had a '69 Cutlass. Paint was called crimson, but it was maroon with a white vinyl top, just like this one, except for his had no striping on the hood. Had a "grocery getter" 2-barrel 350 V8 rather than a real fire breather engine.


That '68 Cutlass convertible on top isn't completely original, but could be forgiven for having custom color coordinated wheels, something not introduced on the Cutlass until sometime in the 1970s.

Still ... you're right! that bottom Cutlass convertible is ugly to the bone.


Oh no!

With all this Cutlass discussion I feel a story coming on.

One of my best ol' high school buds had a '67 Olds Cutlass 4-4-2. Black with a black vinyl top and burgundy interior. Had a 385 horsepower 400 V8 with an automatic transmission. Had factory tilt steering wheel; first car I ever saw with that. It had been his grandmother's car. She bought it new and gave it to him when she got a new Olds.




As an aside, Ronnie's grandmother was the original "Little Ol' Lady From Pasadena" and that's the way she drove her cars ... everywhere she went. And, she never stopped driving 'em like that. Perhaps a decade later after I married, but BC (before children) we were up visiting the family who had all moved back to their home state. Ronnie and his brothers all married up there and were settled down. Mrs. noelekal and I went to her house to pay her a visit (she knew I was coming and always made great cinnamon rolls when I came) . It was a Sunday afternoon and she invited us to go to a special church service being held. We agreed to go with her. By then she had a more sedate blue Oldsmobile sedan of some sort, but she extracted all the performance that engine, suspension, and brakes could muster on that four mile trip down into town.

Our high school was a small rural town school and typical of small high schools of the very early 1970s. It had a closed campus. No leaving for the allowed 30 minutes for lunch. Only we did that which was evil. We had another friend whose sister and her husband owned a drive in burger joint on the same highway on which the high school was situated only the drive in was in the next town 11 miles north. They'd cut us special deals on burgers, fries, and shakes.

So, we'd race to the parking lot, exit as unobtrusively as possible, then undertake to drive like fiends to the drive in, place orders to go, then fiendishly eat like fiends while high speed driving back to school in order to arrive before forth period bell rang. This was far more trouble than it was worth, but it was the getting away with it that counted.

One fine sunny spring day while on our way to the burger joint we topped Wicker Hill to find Mr. Busby sitting in his black and white Texas Highway Patrol Plymouth Fury (one of those with the big ol' moose-y 440 V8s) with his window rolled down in the cross-over between twin north bound and south bound lanes of the highway. We got to pull over and had a meaningful heart-to-heart discussion with Mr. Busby. He walks up to Ronnie on the driver's side and remarked: "you just passed me so fast you liked-ta've sucked me out a' the car." Then:

" I clocked ya' at 110 miles per hour. Any good reason ya' need to be driving that fast?" Ronnie had been driving considerably faster on the long straight stretch beneath Wicker Hill and had backed out of it a bit anticipating the crest of the hill and overrunning what he couldn't see on the other side.

I recall being amazed by the size of his hands as he wrote out the ticket and handed in to Ronnie. Those hands looked like large hams with knackwursts sticking out of them for fingers.

As an aside, Ronnie's grandmother was the original "Little Ol' Lady From Pasadena" and that's the way she drove her cars ... everywhere she went. And, she never stopped driving 'em like that. Perhaps a decade later after I had married, but BC (before children) we were up visiting the family who had all moved back to their home state. Ronnie and his brothers all married up there and were settled down. Mrs. noelekal and I went to her house to pay her a visit (she knew I was coming and always made great cinnamon rolls when I came) . It was a Sunday afternoon and she invited us to go to a special church service being held. We agreed to go with her. By then she had a more sedate blue Oldsmobile sedan of some sort, but she extracted all the performance that engine, suspension, and brakes could muster on that wild four mile trip down into town.

Which reminds me of the time Ronnie and I were expelled from high school on an occasion. Happened first period. Our hair was longer than the school dress code would allow. Even a Marine Corps hair cut blocked off in back was an infraction of the dress code.

Got home expecting my mother to eat me up one side and down the other for being expelled over my hair. Instead she called the principal and chewed him out for allowing me to be expelled. You see, Ronnie's father and mother were my parent's best friends and he was the high school principal as well.

My mother even let me leave again in her car to go back to town to the burger joint and hang out with my other long hair miscreant friends. Her car was a Dodge Polara four door sedan with a 330 horsepower 383 V8 and one of the fasted cars on the school parking lot. That's a reflection on the puny-iness of small town hot rodding more than on the performance of my mother's Dodge.