My personal oddballs: The Driver

I'd like to take you on a tour of my two cars. Both I purchased for the sole reason that they are different from what you typically see. Let's start with my daily driver, her name is Gertrude and she is an all-original 1969 Buick LeSabre 400 4-door sedan!

By all-original, I really mean it! Aside from white painted top and the usual wear items, Gertrude is as she left the Wilmington Delaware factory in July of '69. The Lime Mist Green paint is all original! The white top isn't original. She left the factory with a black vinyl top instead but at some point, I'm thinking quite soon after the car was bought, it was torn off and the roof was sprayed white. Everyone loves the green/white color combo and so do I!

The '69 LeSabre came with 3 flavors of engines, 2 of which were 350s. The base one was topped with a 2 barrel carb that pumped out 230 Horsepower, while the mid-range one came with a 4 barrel carb which boosted power to 280. And the top of the block was the 430 Wildcat V8 which was an absolute rocket from what I've been told.

This motor is the 350 with the 4 barrel and it has just 59K ORIGINAL MILES! Thats right! Not 159, 59! This engine has never been apart and nothing other than hoses/plug wires have been replaced.

But the real gem here is the interior. Its absolutely mint:

These brocade benches look like they've never been sat in. No tears or discoloration to speak of. Infact when I first bought it, there was still plastic on the bottom half of the front seat(however it was very yellow and cracked from storage so I removed it).

Options? Well not as many as you'd expect from a luxurious make like Buick. Aside from things like power steering and power brakes, the only other options are A/C, an AM radio, and a funky option called "Speed Alert"

If you look at around 45 on this speedometer, you'll see a little yellow dot. That is the needle that controls speed alert. There is a small knob on the dash that you turn to move the yellow needle to a speed you wish to not exceed. If the regular red speed needle goes over the speed alert needle, a buzzer will sound to let you know to back off the gas! What a feature!


No power windows or power antenna to speak of in my car either. The AM radio is the base radio available(good luck finding a '69 buick with radio delete). An AM/FM unit was available. Having an AM only radio is hard where I'm from because we have a lack of AM stations that still play music! I guess I'll just have to settle for baseball games and self-help radio shows for now.


Now for a little history on the car! She was built in July 1969, possibly only a few days before the moon landing! From birth, she was destined to be a PA car. The original selling dealership is Martin H Heine Buick-Cadillac located in Huntingdon,PA. On September 19th 1969, Frank and Mary Haulman purchased the Buick off the lot and didn't drive it much except for vacations. Beneath the backseat I found a receipt from the Vajda Motel in Blind River, Ontario. It was dated 1976.

I was told that Frank Haulman drove a 1960 Ford Truck and that was primarily the vehicle him and his wife used. That explains how the Buick accumulated so few miles during it's life. I know that as of 1994, Mary and Frank still owned the car because of a receipt for a new battery I found dated 6/8/94 that has Mary's name on it.

In 1995, Mary's nephew took ownership of the Buick and drove it for about a year. He even got it licensed as an antique. He worked at a fiberglass company in town and kept the Buick in one of the company's storage buildings. He never drove it after 1995, but he did occasionally start it up and let it run to keep things moving.

Flash forward to 2010. The nephew is moving and cannot take the Buick with him, his friend by the name of Andy buys it from him and immediately puts it back up for sale alongside the main road in Huntingdon. This is where I found it in September 2014. Sitting outside for 4 years had caused some slight imperfections in the paint. But Andy drove the car around town once every few weeks.


I bought it September 2014 and drove it 35 minutes back home to where I live. Even on some very old mismatched tires it drove just fine! A rebuilding of the leaky brake system was probably the biggest thing that needed done. Other than that, the usual wear items like hoses and ignition points were replaced along with a set of new whiteline radial tires.



I consider the Buick an oddball solely because how often do you see a big full-size car out and about anymore that ISNT a Chevrolet Impala? Hundreds of these beautiful full-size luxury barges met an unfitting end at a demolition derby and tons more had their big block hearts torn out for some other project car. There just aren't a lot left, especially in this kind of condition! And I sure am glad to be preserving a piece of history!

It rides like a cloud and has some gusto if you need to get out of a tight spot! Everywhere I take it I get complements from people who talk about their parents owning one or having not seen one in 30 years. It makes me feel good to bring an otherwise unappreciated piece of automotive history out for people to enjoy!


I hope you enjoyed reading about Gertrude the '69 Buick! She'll make several more appearences I'm sure!


   -Boris

How do you define an "oddball" classic car and why should I even care?

The dictionary defines oddball as being strange or eccentric. I think that the way they word it, it comes off as sort of negative. I think a term like "unique" or "one of a kind" would define the term a lot better. Being odd simply means that you're not running around trying to be part of the crowd. You've got something special that people aren't familiar with and you should use that gift to give new light to something in the world, to give people a new perspective on an old topic. It can mean you break tradition and have your own way of doing things, your own way of achieving happiness. Quite simply, it means being yourself and not trying to fit the mold.

 Now despite that first paragraph, I'm not really here to write a self-help blog. I'm a car guy instead of a motivational speaker. I do consider myself however to be an oddball car guy, and here's why.

Go to any local cruise night or car show in your town and what do you see? Unless you got a show that says ONLY UNMODIFIED CARS ALLOWED, then youre likely to see the same thing over and over again. Endless rows of Mustangs, Camaros, Corvettes, lifted or slammed Pickups, etc. You probably have a good idea of what I'm talking about but in case you don't heres some examples:

I actually had a hard time digging those pictures up on my computer because I've gotten so bored with cars like this that I hardly photograph them anymore.

Now I should make it clear, I don't hate Camaros or Mustangs or hot rods in general. I love big block powered pavement-bashing muscle cars as much as the next guy! And I do realize that the people who build these cars do put a lot of hard work and time into customizing it to their tastes. However, I do believe this creates an issue, because of this, we are losing original cars faster than we can even find them.


Let me give you an example:

This is a 1966 Dodge Coronet 2-door sedan. Its done only 37,000 miles in its life! Under the hood is a boulevard bruising 426 cube HEMI motor. However, this car did not start out as such.

I spoke with the owner who informed me that this car actually started life as a slant-six powered car driven by an elderly lady who always kept it dry and in the garage. Even after a minor accident up front that bent up the bumper and scratched the fender she kept it locked away and out of the elements with only 37,000 on the clock!

When the current owner bought the car, he gave in to the mentality that the car community seems to have fallen into "No one will want to drive a six-cylinder coronet! Lets tear this very original car apart and shove a massive motor into it!"

I find this point of view disturbing, and I could give you many examples that would make you cringe more than this one does. I've seen ads advertising PRISTINE, near-new full size cars from the 70s as "demo derby cars." Ive seen the same full size cars have their motors torn out and shoved into some rusty old dodge dart while the immaculate body of the car is sent to scrap. Odd optioned cars like our coronet have had their character stripped out of them just to make a "tribute" car. Lots of beautiful 4 door sedans have had parts robbed from them to restore a 2-door of the same model. The list goes on and on!

The result of all this is a car show chock full of performance cars or cars that are so rodded up, you can hardly tell they're old except for their shape! Because of that, people are in disbelief when I tell them that in 1969, not EVERYONE had a Camaro SS! Few people did really! They were about as common as a new camaro is today! Or that in 1957, Chevrolet offered more cars than a fuel injected Bel Air Convertible. What is happening is that we are losing history and it is distorting people's views of the past!


And thats not all either, it gets worse especially for amateur hobbyists like myself. Have you watched a telecast of Barrett-Jackson or some other high-profile car auction? People are paying hundreds of thousands or more recently, MILLIONS of dollars for a car! Yet people are buying pristine Lincoln Continentals and Buick Electras for peanuts. The result of the buyers with endless pockets bidding on a nut-and-bolt restored 1965 Mustang is that it drives the overall price so far out of reach, that people who might want to get their hands on such a car won't be able to with their 40-hour-a-week job! I often refer to this as "Barret-Jacksonitis". Heres what I mean:

Lets say you really want to fix up a 1970 Dodge Challenger. You scour the web looking for a project challenger that you want and finally find the one for you! It's the right color, has your favorite motor and some cool options to go along with it! However, in the ad, the pictures show a car thats covered in rust and being devoured by tall grass in a field. It hasn't been started since at least the early 1980s. You were well expecting this and are ready to tackle a restoration. So you call the owner, explain your interest and meet up with him at the cars location.

After a look around the car, you decide it's the one you want. So you pop the question to the owner, "How much were you looking to get?". Now this is a Dodge Challenger, you're well aware that they're quite hot on the market and are expecting to pay 10, maybe 15 thousand for an example in rough shape. You try to catch your breath as the owner says "I'll take $150,000 for it". You can't even begin to speak, and barely manage to push out "Where'd you come up with a figure like that?"

This is where it gets ugly

The owner smiles and says "One just like it sold on one of them TV auctions for $175,000! Im giving you hell of a deal!"

So you can see, now that cars are selling for astronomical figures, everyone whos got one thinks that they have their retirement fund sitting in a barn or sinking into the yard. Which not only means that no one can buy it, but it also means that the car will continue to rot until it's basically unrestorable.

So to sum up, original and rare cars are being chopped up and made into something they aren't, car shows are becoming mindnummingly repetitive, and the price of those cars at the shows is getting further and further out of reach for the car guy with a full-time job at the office.

So all this is why I'm an oddball car guy. At car shows I flock to stuff thats different. I'll walk past a row or frame-off restored mustangs to check out an AMC rambler. I'll talk to the owner for 10-15 minutes at a time about the cars life and how its too bad we don't see more of them around.



The purpose of this blog is to introduce my thinking to the rest of the hobby. I know I can't be the only one who thinks like this! My goal is to make the underappreciated, appreciated. The weird outcasts, the gifted one of a kinds.


What I will be doing is mainly combing through classic car ads and sharing the ones that stick out to me with you as well as showing off any cool cars I find at car shows among lots of other stuff! I encourage anyone who reads the blog and thinks like I do to e-mail me anything THEY find that they consider an oddball and I'll gladly post it! I'm always glad to meet like minded folks.

Here's to the oddballs!

       -Boris