well, on top of being an Oldsmobile fan all my life, this effects the region I grew up in as well...I grew up just 20 minutes west of the State capitol of Lansing, and it is in Lansing where the main Oldsmobile plants have been all these years

In the last 7 years, I have actually had three very cool Oldsmobiles, none of which I have anymore, but their memory lives on forever

I had a white four-door 1965 Dynamic 88, which was the predecessor to the Delta 88...the "dynamic" part of the Dynamic 88 was what was under the hood..an engine only produced in 1965, 1966, and 1967... the predecessor to the now infamous Oldsmobile Rocket 350c.i. engine...I had under the hood the Oldsmobile Super Rocket 425c.i. power plant, coupled to a Turbo 400 automatic transmission

the car measured out at 18-feet on and a half inches...yes, there are bass boats shorter in length...ha...it was a four-door model as I mentioned above, and if you sat in the front seat, behind the steering wheel, and if you stretched your right arm all the way to the left, you could not touch the shoulder of the person sitting in the passenger seat...the car would COMFORTABLY seat six people, and I have had as many as ten people in the car for a snow-bogging joy ride to do doughnuts in the snow-covered parking lots before...

all three of my mother's brothers personally made parts that were in that car...my mom's oldest brother Ted was in die manufacturing in 1965, and his department made the dies that stamped out the hood, trunk lid, front fenders, and front and rear bumpers...her next oldest brother Dale worked at Motor Wheel in 1965, and Motor Wheel was the GM division that made the metal wheels and the steering wheel for that car...and her youngest brother Robert was still on the assembly line in 1965, and he was employed that year stamping the numbers on the engine blocks...those numbers identified the make and model of the engine, etc...

my family MADE that car...

on the firewall in the engine department, there was a metal tag as an identifier, and on the metal tag it read "Made In Lansing, Michigan"

The 425c.i. Super Rocket produced 300hp, and I had the car up to 140mph on the freeway...just about NOTHING made today would catch her ... and God Forbid a damn rice-burning Jap-crap Toyota-Honda-Mitsubishi-Datsun-Nissan should pull out in front of me ... the car weighed in at 4,200lbs ... two tons of Michigan steel won the grudge match on EVERY freeway system in the country ... when the "F__" company released the over-sized-false-sense-of-security Excursion SUV, my Olds was one of the only vehicles that did not give an inch when some yuppie with a cell phone attached to his/her ear would attempt to cut me off on the freeway ... suddenly the $750 car payment would yield to the $1,400 cash-purchased 1964 monster...

my white 1965 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 (as I said) was a four-door...it also was considered a "hardtop"...that term came from the LACK of door posts between the rear seat doors and the front seat doors...you also could do something you can't do in today's oh-my-god-we-have-to-have-driver's-side-airbags-and-child-protection-seats world ... you could roll the back window all the way down...and...you could roll the front window all the way down...it also had little vent windows in the front of the front doors, and you could roll them in an out with a second little roll-down-window handle...with all four windows rolled down, you quickly learned the exhilarating term of being "Oldsmobiling"... punch the gas, and the wind in your face...and driving that car in the horsepower stripped 80's and 90's left all of the competition behind...I rarely ever found a car that could take her in a standing stoplight drag race, unless it was an obvious sport vehicle, a Camaro, or a (cough gag) Mustangle (puke), or of course the fleet ship of GM, a Corvette ... all others were left behind with the smoke of burning rubber...

all with a two-barrel carburetor to boot....

yes, a 425c.i. power plant, and a TWO barrel carb ... they also offered a 4-barrel Rochester Carburetor (made in Rochester, Michigan in case anyone wants to know...) as an option that year, and I am thinking the 425 Super Rocket equipped with a 4-barrel put out something like 400hp from the bone-stock factory engine...find you an Airstream to hook to the bumper, and you're really Oldsmobiling now... yes, I have had to tell the same story to every person born post 1983... cars like this could regularly be seen toting a travel trailer back in the day...prior to Honda Accords, cars really did do such things, to the wondering eyes of many a young punk who wondered what the trailer hitch was for on the back of my Dynamic 88

the trunk of this car was a room all to itself... there was a two-foot wide shelf just behind the backseat that gave access to the single 6"x9" monophonic radio speaker... (coupled electrictronically to a 4"x10" speaker under the dash, and an AWESOME AM-only radio...I'll tell about that in a minute...)...but back to the trunk...from the back side of that wall behind the back seat, to the very back of the trunk measured 4 feet... 4 feet front to back... then, if you measured from left to right in the trunk, it was an even-stephen 6 feet... the foot print of the trunk was 4'x6'... larger than the passenger compartment of most Jap cars nowadays ... and the third dimension, from the floor of the trunk to where the trunk lid closed, measured 3 feet exactly... so, as I sit here doing the math:

4' x 6' x 3' = 72 CUBIC FEET of trunk space ... more cubic feet of room than some Jap cars in production today, too.........

you could have EASILY layed down and stretched out in the trunk of this car...

in fact, being only 5' 9" tall, I could stretch out and sleep on the back seat without having to bend at all, in fact there was room for a pillow... many a fair maiden gave way to the comforts of that back-seat as well ... made for a nice make-out chamber to say the least... PLENTY of "leg room" in nearly all of the positions contained in the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana...ha

now, the radio...well, I have to start at the antennae...the antennae was a meager length of 3 feet long ... but that was when it was completely telescoped IN ... if you put the car in Park...walked around and pulled on the top of the antennae, it would extend another 2 full feet...so...here is an 18+ feet long car, with a 72 cubic foot trunk, and a 5 foot long antennae... (I can somehow hear that old War tune "Low Rider" playing in the background....) ...now a word about TRUE radio reception... the old man I bought this car from in California had the radio tuned to several Los Angeles radio stations ... I never once changed the setting of the push-button to the extreme left (there were five push-buttons on the front of the radio that could be set to stations...you dialed in the station, then pulled out the push button, that set the analog MECHANICAL memory locations that remembered where the station preset was on the dial...)

when I was traveling home to Michigan in 1989 (24 years after the car rolled off the assembly lines I might add)... I hit the Great Plains long about Nebraska somewhere...I decided to turn on the radio to see what I could pick up on the radio...for fun, I hit that far left button...to my wondering ears, I was astonished to hear a station come blaring in loud and clear... and then I freaked out...they were giving a Los Angeles, California traffic report !!!!!!! I was on the EAST side of the Rocky Mountains, and I was still picking up that same AM radio station that the original owner had programmed into the radio...it gave the call letters, and it was true...the call letters started with a "K"... radio and television call signs change on the west side of the Mississippi River...the eastcoast stations all start with a "W" (like WXYZ radio,...etc...etc...) the westcoast radio stations all start with the letter "K" (like KKGO jazz radio in Los Angeles) ... the entertainment console of this old and beautiful car was still able to pick up the same AM radio broadcast half way across the country...

www.mapquest.com/ puts that distance at:
Total Est. Distance: 1554.21 miles !!!!

that MUST qualify for the Guiness book of world records or something like that...

On top of all of the cool things I loved about that car, it also had Air Conditioning as an option in 1965...and in 1989, IT STILL WORKED when I drove away from the man who originally owned this car... what is the NORMAL life expectancy of R-12 refrigerant I wonder? also, once the car was warmed up in the wintertime, and the heater had had a chance to cycle the water from the engine into the passenger department... LOOK OUT... you'll be rolling down the windows before too long, (or at least cracking open the triangle-shaped vent windows) hoping for cooler air...that heater would toast your tootsies and back your bacon !!! (it did take an AWFULLY long time to get to that point, though ... if the trunk was 72 cubic feet, the passenger compartment was twice that, easily ... bigger than most corporate yuppie computer cubicles... you don't just light a match and get all warm and fuzzy in two seconds with all that winterized passenger compartment...

And in January, in Michigan ... DO NOT stick your tongue on the front or rear bumpers !!! They are/were both REAL METAL and you would be in for a call to 911 if you thought you would accept the "triple-dog-dare-you" challenge of one of the neighborhood bullies who admonished you to place your tongue on the bumper...god forbid Dad would decide to drive to the store about the time you tried that after the car had been parked all night..... he might be saying "what's that sound" as he drives off, hearing a faint pounding and a new noise coming from the back wheels or rear of the car... "Momma must have got in an accident and didn't tell me" is probably what he will be thinking as he punches the accelerator on his way to Meijer Thrifty Acres (the ORIGINAL all-in-one-store superstore, that pre-dated the SuperWal-Mart store by AT LEAST 30 years...Meijer "One-Stop-Shopping" has long been a slogan in Michigan where you only want to get out of your car one time to buy goods, and Meijer's Thrifty Acres was just that...acres of land under one roof...all equipped with a HUGE grocery department, as well as toys, clothes, lawn and garden supplies, shoes, hats, gloves, bras, underwears, cooking utensils of all kinds [ I picked up to Henckel knives there last fall...not only Chinese carp like Wal-Mart, I might add) as well as just about anything you can think of...all under one roof) ( Henry Meijer started the grocery store chain in the 1930's as a home-delivery service [with horse-drawn delivery wagons...]...that chain has developed national into all of Michigan, and stretches down into Kentucky at this time...the Wal-Mart Supercenters are much less frequent in Michigan due to the population of loyal Meijer's Shoppers...)

back to the Olds...

I actually had TWO of these 1965 Dynamic 88's... the second was purchased in 1997 right after Karen and I got back from our Honeymoon...we bought a metallic-blue version of the same 4-door, except the blue one was not a hard top, it was a coupe... the hard top did not have door posts...the coupes DID have door posts... (but you still got triangle-shaped vent windows, and the rear windows still rolled down all-the-way... (pre-yuppie-liberalism-baby-fear back windows...) (after all, you have to keep your screaming dysfunctional, suicidal kids in the backseat long enough to drop them off at the daycare center while soccer-mom goes off to work to help pay for that $350,000 house, now don't we?...might as well pass a law to prevent car makers from making windows that roll down all the way...) (they even have locking back doors that will only open from the OUTside [talk about keeping your kids captive in the back seat...I thought only police cars had doors like that.....] ... I had a 1988 Dodge Shadow that had those kind of back doors...and god forbid you actually thought you wanted to get any AIR to come in thru the back windows...NOT...)

The blue Olds had the same 425c.i. power plant...at the same time Chevy was making their 427c.i. power plant, and we are all very well educated about the wheel-burning and turning power of the Chevy version... Chevy extended the stroke a few years later and came out with the 454c.i. engine...Oldsmobile had a similar engineering addition...they extended the stroke, and came out with the 455c.i. engine...the power plant of the now infamous 1970 Oldsmobile W-30 442 two-door...Oldsmobiles entry to the musclecar era ... bucket seats...stick shift on the floor...4-4-2 stood for "4 barrel, 4-speed, with dual exhaust" ... "four-four-two"......yes, an Oldsmobile with a CLUTCH... imagine that...

I also was the owner of a 1967 Delta 88 Custom ... it was Fire-engine red, and came equipped with yet the THIRD 425c.i. power plant I have owned in my life... however, this car was a TWO-DOOR model... with BUCKET seats... and an automatic transmission...BUT...the shifter for the tranny was between the two front seats... power windows... air conditioning... it was loaded... AM/FM radio (in 1967...) ...

I finally put my 1965 buddy to rest in 1998 in Phoenix, Arizona...the Arizona heat had taken it's toll on the engine, and she was burning one quart of oil per day when I layed her to rest at Michael Turnbow's auto repair in Phoenix [and I fought Karen tooth-and-nail to rebuild the engine, but she would not give...I should have re-built that motor and kept on driving...instead, I listened to my stupid (now ex) wife) (duh...) ...I left my beloved '65 with Michael for a very very good reason... after rolling 217,000 miles across the odometer, it was refreshing to have met Michael who was an Oldsmobile FANATIC... he had several similar version on his lot, and it was the best greatest final resting place for my long-loved and well-driven 1965 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 4-door Hard Top

AMEN my old friend...

Ashes to ashes... dust to dust... they will be no more now...

I fear that now the parts for these cars will also be going into extinction as well... I have bought the brake drums for the four-wheel drum brakes at many auto parts counters across the country... this car went from California with me...to the Grand Canyon, to the Hoover Dam, to the top of Mt. Evans in Colorado (14,260 feet elevation)...she saw both oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and after sitting un-driven for four years, came to life when my brother-in-law replaced the timing chain in the 90's and I drove her on and on and on... do THAT with a Japanese piece of shit... AND spend only $25 on the alternator when she goes...do THAT with your Subaru (NOT)... AND spend $25 on the STARTER when she goes... do THAT on your Honda SUV (NOT)... and...pop the hood and see...WOW...an ENGINE !!!...and NOTHING ELSE!!!... no tubes, wires, faucets, sinks, egr's, iud's, pcp's FBI's, or any of the other liberal-yuppie-forced pollution craps... just pure American-made horsepower, with a radiator, and air conditioner, and lots' of room (you might be able to store that SEVENTH Mexican under the hood if he wears a heat-proof suit...six in the trunk, and one under the hood... plus ten passengers in the passenger compartment... you could THEORETICALLY transport up to SEVENTEEN people with this automobile ... hahahahahah (might want to install some air shocks on the back before you try this at home...)

How many people can you stuff in a Volkswagen??

Jeesh...how many people could you stuff in a 1965 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 4-door Hard Top??? The full grown male torso will fit up and behind the dash... if that gives you any hint of the capacity... I have been up in there (kind of like Scotty and Spock crawling up into one of the engineering tubes on the USS Enterprise) PLENTY of work room, bring your lunch...

God Bless my old Olds...I'm gonna miss her

Hto's 2.1