Montalban, Former Chrysler Pitchman, Dies At 88

You really don't want an aging idiot like me also having to deal with
shifting gears on top of everything else. BTDT. Never again.

 

And even if the memory is correct, the probability that said "article"
appeared on April 1 or in "The Onion" or a similar paper is pretty
high.

 

Those were "downsize" midsize cars, though, and not in the same class as
the original Cordoba or even the 70s Buick Century, Olds 88, or Monte
Car-slow. Chrysler's equivalent was the 80s J-body Cordoba and its Dodge
twin, the Mirada. They sold OK, and in any other financial environment
would have remained in production. But Iacocca was busy hanging the
company future on the K-car platform, so the 2-door J-bodies were canned
after 1983. There were constant plans to kill the 4-door M-bodies (Gran
Fury, 5th Avenue, and Diplomat) but super-strong fleet sales kept them
soldiering on until 1989. Remember back in that day, Chrysler was still
THE cop-car supplier with the LTD Crown Victoria being a distant second,
and GM almost a non-player. After Chrysler left the copcar field (except
for police package Jeep Cherokees) GM finally returned with the 9C1
police-package Caprice with LT-1 power. Strangely, it didn't succeed
despite being far more capable than the Ford Police Interceptor- just
further proof that performance really isn't a driving factor in copcars
anymore. You can't outrun the radio....

 

I can't really agree there, Brent. The last truly BIG Chrysler (a
C-body) was the 1978 New Yorker. I would love to have one in the
collection- they were beautiful cars, much prettier than the last big
Cadillacs (1976) or Lincolns (1977). But the 440 was gone after 77, so
the biggest powerplant was just a 400. Not bad, but not the kind of
power big Chryslers were known for.

The R-body (a stretched B-body similar mechanically to the original
Cordoba) carried the New Yorker, Newport, Gran Fury, and St. Regis names
for a couple of years, and then a further downsize hit in 1981 when the
"big" cars were moved to the J (2-door) and M (4-door) platforms which
were both derived from the F platform (Aspen/Volare). Remember that the
F-bodies were a replacement for the A-body (Dart/Valiant) which in the
60s and early 70s was called a "small" car! This was a HUGE downsize for
the New Yorker, and a pretty substantial downsize for the Cordoba.
Especially in total weight, if not dimension- the J-body significantly
lighter (though in most ways inferior) to the B/R-body it replaced. The
M- and J- bodies were capable of low 20s MPG on the highway, which for
the time was quite good (actually, its pretty damn good compared to a
lot of cars today unfortunately). They may have been considered "gas
guzzlers" for tax purposes (I don't actually remember if they were or
not) but they weren't really excessively thirsty compared to their
predecessors, and were comparable to GMs midsizes of the time, like the
Regal and Cutlass discussed earlier.

The real reason the J body Cordoba didn't carry on was Iacocca's
determination to get rid of all the rear drives. Fleet sales (and
pretty darn strong consumer demand for the 5th ave version) kept the
M-body going all the way until 89, by which time it was truly decrepit,
still having a carburetor whereas all other 318-powered Chrysler
vehicles (trucks) were getting TBI!

 

Brent wrote:
If you

This is veering off-topic, but there's one huge, glaring exception to
that theorem that always fascinates me: the Jeep Cherokee. Its last year
of production (2001) was somewhere around the third to fifth highest
total sales year of its entire run (1984-2001). It was re-styled exactly
once (1996), and that was so subtle that most non-Jeep owners couldn't
tell a before from after remodel Cherokee at a glance. And there are a
whole boatload of people out there right now who would PROMPTLY go buy a
new one if the 2001 model were put right back into production with no
changes at all tomorrow.

 

The one I'm thinking of might have actually been one of the last Mk IVs.
I just remember that godawful color combination (which also appeared on
Thunderbirds at that time- another car that had gone from fantastic to
horrible, by the way.) I don't really even remember a Mk VI. I remember
Mks III-V and then the VII, and I liked each of those successively less
than the previous.

Then the Mk VIII came along round 91 or 92 and I actually *liked* that
one, radically different as it may have been. It hasn't held up all that
well stylistically, but at least it was true to the original Lincoln
Mark formula of sporty unusual styling and lots of power.

 

What he really should do is acknowledge that he's judging an entire
class of vehicle based on worn-out, clapped-out, neglected, and abused
examples. This is when a time machine would be handy- I'd love to drop
any modern critic of "70s boats" behind the wheel of a brand-new,
factory fresh 440-powered Cordoba and watch them just *try* to wipe the
big shit-eating grin off their face the first time they put the skinny
pedal down to the mat.

Practical in today's world? No. Fun in its own way? HELL YEAH!

 

A Prepuce? PRACTICAL? For commuting, yes. For cross-country travel with
a family, no.

There are many definitions of "practical."

 

So says the guy who drives a Prepuce. The collector car market says
otherwise- virtually ZERO demand for 4-doors, while 2-doors continue to
appreciate in value.

 

You read that in the Enquirer, or the Star?

 

That was the first downsizing for the first round of CAFE. CAFE
requirements came in steps.

 

The exceptions are the few vehicles that can do it. That's why I wrote
'most'. When these vehicles are finally going to disappear many people
who have kept replacing like with like decide to get one of the last
ones so they can keep on going for as long as possible.

 

Mk V was expanding on the Mk IV themes -- very long, knife-edged
angles. The Mk VI was some halfassed attempt to do those same styling
themes on some sort of midsize platform. Mk VII was the one that
looked a lot like the "new" rounded Thunderbird.

I think you're thinking of the Mk VII. The Mk VIII carried the Mk VII
themes further, and sank without trace.

 

On the other hand, I am convinced that our history does get re-written
in subtle ways. And as ironic as it sounds, the internet makes some of
that re-writing fairly easy (there are companies that, for a fee, will
clean up - i.e., make disappear - negative information on your company
that would come up in a Google search). There are certain recorded
versions of songs that were popular in their day but that all traces
have disappeared. Another example: I know damn well that I used to see
documentaries about the McCarthy hearings that included film footage
showing Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General sitting immediately behind
McCarthy whispering advice in his ear as he conducted the hearings. Yet
- today - without making a political statement one way or the other, I
challenge anyone to find a trace of evidence that those films ever
existed. How does something like that ever get written out of history
as if it (not the hearings themselves, but the explicit presence and
participation of Bobby Kennedy in them) never happened?

 

I always regret not getting one of the last(1981) Newports/St. Regis
sedans with the 225/Slant 6/TorqueFlite. My wife wanted a wagon,
however, and insisted on a 1981 Olds Cutlass Supreme that, in 1980
cost $11K! I could have gotten the Chrysler Newport a a dealer in
Biloxi for $6700! I'll never forgive her for that, that plus the
divorce!

 

In message Bill Putney

McCarthy served from 1947 to 1957.
Kennedy was AG from 1961 to 1964.

 

Oops - you are correct. Who's the revisionist now! he said holding up a
mirror. LOL!

This is what I saw in the documentary films (as described in the article
on Robert Kennedy on wikipedia - I incorrectly assumed it was in his
role as AG): "In December 1952, at the behest of his father, he was
appointed by Republican Senator Joe McCarthy as assistant counsel of the
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He resigned in July
1953 but 'retained a fondness for McCarthy.' After a spell as an
assistant to his father on the Hoover commission, Kennedy rejoined the
Senate committee staff as chief counsel for the Democratic minority in
February 1954. When the Democrats gained the majority in January 1955,
he became chief counsel. Kennedy was a background figure in the
televised McCarthy Hearings of 1954 into the conduct of McCarthy."

From the wikipedia artticle on McCarthy: "Robert [Kennedy] was chosen
by McCarthy as a counsel for his investigatory committee."

I guess they still need to purge the wikipedia articles.

 

It's because the government licensed media was in total control for a
very long time and the government itself just siezes it.

The footage is destroyed or hidden away and then anyone who remembers
seeing it is branded a kook.

It's easy to be branded as a kook just for remembering the news stories
from a few years prior.

 

Well, no. Mis-remembering a news story will do it; so will paranoid
claims like you make above. As for Kennedy and McCarthy, I didn't
find them on youtube, but I did find a still photo that could well be
from it at pbs.org (of all the horrible gummint-controlled places).

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/gallery/g_05.html

 

Paranoid? You might want to know we were damn lucky to even see the
Zapruder film.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapruder_film

Your lack of knowledge of even this important bit of history doesn't
make me paranoid. And by calling me that you just proved my point.

Maybe in 2012 we'll get to see the footage from the pentagon security
cameras... maybe.