I bought this car from a student at Concordia University in River Forest, Illinois. She would baby sit for us from time to time, and arrive at our house in this car. When she graduated, I asked what she was going to do with it, and she said, “sell it.” It had been purchased literally from a little old lady in her home Lutheran church by her father, the pastor. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity, and bought it.
The very interesting thing about this car was that even though it was a 4-door sedan, and not an SS model, it had a 396 V8 big block Chevy engine, with a 2-bbl carb on it. So, it ran on regular gas quite well, and got fairly decent gas mileage… and it had plenty of horsepower. I was a lot of fun to drive.
I took this car to Road America one summer with a couple of my boys to work as “corner workers” at the Alpha Club of Chicago time trials and races. During the lunch hour breaks, they let us corner workers drive our cars on the track. We had a blast barreling around that track for a half hour or so. I think I got it up in the 90′s on the straightaways but had to slow down sooner than other cars because of the cars weight and that it only had disc brakes on the front and drum brakes on the back!
I put on Cragar mag wheels and BF Goodrich Radial TA’s, which were popular back in the 60′s when muscle cars were so popular. Everything else was still original: paint, interior, radio, trunk, etc.
I eventually sold it to a friend at church who used it as a project car for himself and his sons to work on.
1969 Chevy Impala
1969 Chevy Impala
