Most car shows are open to all makes and models, although some require that entries be older than a certain year. It’s the rare show that’s devoted solely to one brand. That made last Sunday’s All Oldsmobile Car Show at the Southington Drive-In in Plantsville a standout among the more than 325 shows being held across Connecticut this year.
Staged by the Wallingford-based New England Oldsmobile Club, the show pays homage to the auto brand started by Ransom E. Olds in Lansing, Mich. in 1897.
Oldsmobile lasted until 2004 when owner General Motors shut down the division; making it 20 years since its demise. A variety of Olds models were displayed, including many examples of the Cutlass and 442. The latter started as a high-performance version of the Cutlass in 1964, and was a standalone model from 1968 through 1971.
Perhaps the oldest Olds at the show was a luxurious 1953 Ninety-Eight convertible belonging to Don Jack of Stratford. The most basic was a 1974 Omega owned by Jim Savage of Wallingford. Sal Barberi of Brewster, N.
Y. brought the 1977 Cutlass Supreme Brougham that he’s owned since new. He’s immediate past president of the Oldsmobile Club of America and he recalled the end of Oldsmobile.
“The city of Lansing where most of these were made suffered terrific losses. (For) the entire Oldsmobile society for enthusiasts, it was kind of a bummer. And there were many reasons why G.
M. decided to close Oldsmobile, mostly financial,” he said. Barberi grew up in a Chevrolet family, but his affection for Oldsmobile’s was sparked when an uncle bought his daughter a 442 with bucket seats and a manual transmission for graduation.
“I always thought that car was cool and that’s when I fell in love with Oldsmobile,” he said. Oldsmobile had a niche in G.M.
’s collection of brands, which included for many years the luxury marque Cadillac, along with Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Chevrolet. “They were the experimental division. If G.
M. was going to introduce a new feature, a new option, try something new, Oldsmobile was usually the division that would do that,” Barberi said. For example, the first mass-production automatic transmission debuted in 1939 in Oldsmobile (and Cadillac) models.
Jack’s devotion to Oldsmobile dates back to the 1950s when he got his first car – a 1953 Ninety-Eight convertible in light blue. He’s had his current Ninety-Eight ragtop in maroon for eight years. “I like the way they’re designed and the way they ride,” Jack said.
“It’s a beautiful car.” It is a behemoth in size and weighs in at roughly 4,000 pounds. “I can go 65, 85 miles an hour with no problem at all if the highway is open but don’t try to stop me,” he said.
“It’s all power. It’s got power windows, power brakes, power steering, electronic eye, which is a feature that will dim your high beam lights if you’re driving on the road and there’s a car coming in the opposite direction. And then it will turn them back to high beams.
” Savage’s Omega represented the other end of Oldsmobile’s model line. It was an entry level Olds, the brand’s compact counterpart to Chevrolet’s Nova, a model that also spawned the Buick Apollo (1973-1975) and Pontiac Ventura (1971-1977). Savage bought the Omega “because that’s what I stumbled across one day.
I was actually on Craigslist, kind of looking for a Corvette, a moderately price Corvette because I had owned one when I was younger, and I came across this car. An old guy owned it and it was all souped up, and I said, ‘What the heck. It looks cool.
Let me buy it.’” That was five or six years ago. Savage is the third owner after a woman in Bridgeport and a man in Milford.
“It’s only got 22,000 miles on it, so obviously it was a car that was only driven to church on Sundays, as they say,” he said. Savage acknowledged G.M.
’s habit of doing copycat models from brand to brand. “When they came out with one body style, I guess for one division, the other ones followed suit. The Oldsmobile basically looks like a Nova with a different grille, different bumper and a little bit nicer interior, but other than that they have the same drive trains and things like that,” he said.
The same can be said of the All Oldsmobile Car Show. It’s basically like other car shows with categories and judging, but it’s a marvelous diversion from the others because of its devotion to a once-popular brand that fell by the wayside. Bud Wilkinson writes about classic cars and motorcycles every Saturday in the Republican-American.
He may be reached by email at [email protected]..
