My first car was a 1954 Dodge Meadowbrook, 2-door, Club Coupé. I bought it from my neighbor, who bought it new with almost every available option (and it came with all its original paperwork, sales slips, window stickers, etc…). The special option was the “Red Ram” Hemi V8 engine (not the huge hemi, but a “baby hemi,” 241 cu in, rated at 140 HP. It came with a three-speed, column shifter, with a Hydrostatic clutch (Fluid Clutch…) that worked like a torque-converter. You could let the clutch out in any gear and it acted just like an automatic with just one-gear. But to shift to any other gear, you had to use the clutch. Other options were the AM radio (with 7-buttons…), a heater, a defroster (both the heater and the defroster had different cores, and blower motors to push air through the heater or the defroster). It even had an air conditioner installed in the trunk, the compressor was powered by an electric motor and it ran vents under the seats and alongside the drive-train hump to cool the front. I miss that car…
I actually bought this car in 1965, a year before I could get my driver’s license. It belonged to my neighbor and he was selling it because it never started in the winter (we lived in Upstate New York) especially when it got to 20 degrees below… He wanted $100 for it (minimum wage was about $1.10 an hour, cigarettes cost about 25 cents and gas seldom hit 30 cents a gallon…). I only had $50 or so and he let me have it, with the balance due before I turned 16. It was about a month before I turned 16 when I paid it off. The next day he came over to the house with an old oil can. It had been cleaned out and it was stuffed with one-dollar bills (100 of them…). He told me that when he found out I wanted the car; he decided to give it to me. I asked why he made me pay for it then and he said it was to ensure I appreciated it, especially when I had to work so hard to earn the money. He also told me that he accepted the payments so I would learn that when you have an obligation, you meet that obligation…
I got my driver’s license one week after turning 16-years old. I passed the learner’s permit test the day I turned 16, but had to wait a whole week to schedule the driving test, it was perhaps the longest week on my young life…
I drove that wonderful beast for about 2-years before I “upgraded” to a '56 Chevy Belair, but that’s another story. I ultimately “sold” it to my neighbor’s nephew who made payments to me the same way I had; and I paid it forward with the same oil can when I returned the purchase price to him…
By the way, I never had any problem starting that Red Ram on the coldest winter day; after I changed the oil, I used 10w30. I found out a couple of years after I bought it that the mechanic at the local garage that my neighbor took the car to for all his service used straight 30-weight oil in the Dodge, since my neighbor would called him out when he needed a jump and it was one of the mechanic’s ways to pump up his business by “cheating” his customers…
Thank you for letting me trip down memory lane. Below are images I scanned from the original sales brochure that I still have but found decades after the Dodge was long gone… Photos of that Dodge are somewhere…
