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It was the favorite until I got my new Crown Victoria in 2005. This was a 1961 Lincoln Continental sedan. It was a low-mileage car at the time I got it, having around 60,000 miles on the odometer. It came to me through the dealership where my dad worked. In this case, it belonged to an elderly gentleman who decided to give up driving and he asked my dad if he knew anyone who might want to buy it. This gentleman had been a long-standing service customer of my dad's and the entire history of the car was known.
After quite a few years of fins and chrome, when this car came out in 1961 the styling was revolutionary. It was elegance simply stated. These were also very well made cars. They had a 430 cubic inch engine that guzzled gas at a rate of about 10 to 12 miles per gallon around town and maybe 14 on the highway, if you had a light foot. Gasoline was about 90 cents to one dollar per gallon when I had the car, IIRC. They had a unit body construction, but done in a way that didn't cut any corners which made for a very solid, smooth, quiet riding experience. These cars weighed close to 5,000 pounds. I had this car from about 1976 into the early 1980's. I hadn't been married for very long and we made several memorable trips in the car. At the time, I lived in the Los Angeles area. One time we drove up to San Francisco and stopped overnight at San Luis Obispo where we stayed at the Madonna Inn. On the same trip, we drove up into the Sierra Nevadas and spent a night at Lake Tahoe. The car was jetted for sea level, so the next morning it didn't want to run well in the cold at high altitude. I looked at the map and saw what I thought was a short-cut that reduced the travel time to Highway 395. Well, those little red lines that you see on a map don't always tell the whole story. I neglected to see the note, "Monitor Pass, 8,300 feet elevation" and it was a steep, narrow road. Once we got onto 395, it was an easy ride home.
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