1967 Plymouth Belvedere A automobile for the mythic father. It’s a Plymouth Belvedere – Wait are you sure we haven’t done this car before? The sixth generation Plymouth Belvedere, debuting in 1965, was designed by Chrysler to give pipe occupy, hetero-family humankinds a campfire to girdle with their embering Eisenhower value systems. Welcome to the past, when a person was expected to have an insurance job, a Rock Hudson haircut, and a family that wouldn’t let you be a car guy before you were 25. Yes, the now distant past, before makeup was so expensive that your spouse travelled with a lack of sleep as a cheap alternative to eyeshadow, the glorious past, where you could feasibly extend your entire adult life without ever visualizing two people have intercourse, unless you managed to have it yourself. The twisted past, where you knew queer people existed but never assembled one in real world, hu-huh…
Welcome, then, to the Plymouth Belvahdeah, because glorifying the past entails something must be missing in the present. You’re living in Levittown, 1967, and you require a family sedan that only comes in V8′ s. Here you are! These are your engine options: a 273 cubic inch, or liter, V8, this is what this has, a 273 cubic inch, or liter, a 318 cubic inch, or liter, a 340 cubic inch, or liter, a 360 cubic inch, or liter, a 383 cubic inch, or liter, or the 426, 7 liter HEMI, and these are all Mopar LA blocks.
Sounds similar to the Dodge Coronet? Yeah. Same car. These are both Chrysler B figures. This liter V8 shapes, ehh-about 200 horsepower? I’m thinking it’s more like 190.’ Cause it’s only got a two barrel Carter carburetor. But Dana, the owner, maxed the speed out at 110 miles an hour, and this is on a modeling that has pretty much bone stock except for the CB radio he installed. This may, or may not have been a police car. Maybe a detective’s car. It’s been repainted, um, it did come with these, uh, bird-dog bowl wheels, and it does have a period siren. But … he … there is no records with this so, you are aware, i-it may or may not have been a police car.
It’s the Chrysler B organization like, again, the Dodge Coronet, but with magnitudes that were smaller than the comparable full-size Plymouth Fury, which manufactured it a common sense police car for many departments, seeming is not simply on the street but in television proves, uh, the police television show Adam-1 2. And speaking of Adam-1 2, that was the last of the “righteous cop” television evidences. This is 1967, 1 year before the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where anti-war protesters were vanquished and gassed by Mayor Daley’s blue helmeted stormtroopers … on live television. Which aimed the Andy Griffith version of the pacify, rational, fair, helpful, fatherly, and compassionate police officer … for good. Now, as the pendulum swingings, modern police are represented as self-serving, and unhinged, and modern father-gods are represented as impulsive buffoons. This is a reaction to the all-knowing early sixties family man of mythology. Anyway, the Plymouth Belvedere has a tighter turning radius than you’d expect for a vehicle without ability steering. Still handles like a boat, especially when you’re taking corners, and it also doesn’t help lighting you have to keep a firm traction on the wheel considering you’re liable to slither right across these vinyl seats, just like Tom Cruise gliding across the floor in a sock, so…
You’d better utilization those lap belts. It’s a automobile that not only has decent sizing, but it moves … okay. It’s a cruiser, there’s no real bother get up to speed eventually when you need it to. I symbolize, you get an initial flow of influence, and then it just sort of plateaus that’s, we’ll got to get that carburetor situation in a minute, and you have to stand on the brakes because they’re not ability. They’re four rotation drums, there are still no booster. And it also has the best heater I’ve ever experienced in a classic automobile. This was the coldest killing period in RCR history, with a windchill of negative 6 degrees Fahrenheit, and we were comfortable inside this auto! and in fact Dana daily’s this thing, he has to because his Acura needs either one rotate standing, or two wheel bearings, and with day plus, uh, upkeep that outdoes the cost of his used Acura, so he’s just gonna save up and buy something new, and in the meantime, well, he said, “look, people drove these Belvedere’s in the winter back in the day, I can do it now, ” and he does.
He’s the hero the work requires. So, two-barrel Carter carburetor. It operates penalty, but it doesn’t really save on gas. I suppose a four-barrel would be more efficient than a two cask, and your mileage would go up because you wouldn’t have to MASH the throttle to accelerate hard-handed, and deemed there, the whole way down, until you reach your desired rapidity. It’s only a three quicken vehicle, and, uh, the room between the gearings is quite generous. I’m guessing the phase of this two barrel, and two barrel intake, was just a base engine option, made to sell the four-barrel performance engines. Which is weird because this is a Belvedere II as opposed to only a plateau old-fashioned Belvedere. The Belvedere II was supposed to be the upper trim pack, and yet it still has the basi locomotive. Which may dedicate more credit that this was a police vehicle, because if it only would have been, uh, like a fleet vehicle, like a detective’s vehicle or something like that.
But you know what after been doing RCR for, this is the fourth time of RCR, uh, severely, I hear a lot of people say “it was a detective’s car, “* breath* Ehhh … I’m thinking when I “ve learned that”, I-I’m hearing shenanigans, because if there’s no real paperwork, patrol car in the 50 s, 60 s, and 70 s weren’t heavily up-fitted. I signify, modern police car today are totally cut up, they’re more augmented than JC Denton. But, you are aware, back in the 60 s, a patrol car, what did you need? You needed a single light on the top, you needed a region to put your clip book, you needed a radio…
That’s it. And you can still buy all that period equipment. So when I experience a classic automobile, and “theyre saying”, “this was a police car, ” I’m always extremely skeptical. And this kind of creates me back to the whole “past” argument. We’ve done plenty of classic autoes, and we’ve been blinded with deference in the face of nostalgia, for a time in which we never lived. But at some phase, something’s gotta contribute. God bless Dana for retaining this bad boy on the road, driving it literally every day to work down the Northeast Extension but you have to wonder if we worship the wrong things when we look back at the past. You don’t see the spotty ignition systems, the ghastly ga economy, you just see something stylish, and loud, and powerful, and capable of getting you laid on Friday night. You recognize Al’s Diner, and people talking to each other, and not throwing relationships in the junk because someone voted for an opposing political party, but maybe that’s how we get by as a species; It’s easier to focus on the good times.
And this still is a nice car to have, and a nice automobile to see on the road, and easy to take care of. Yes, a Plymouth Belvedere WAS participate fully in some gruesome policing in America. Yes, it DID represent an archaic house cost method that held on far too long, but wait a minute. It’s just a machine, and it still exists today, and can still reinvent itself. If you can have faith that machines can entail different things, that necessitates people can mean different things too. Plymouth Belvedere, take me back to my past, even though it’s probably not as good as I remember it as.
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