By Jim Hagarty
In the early ’70s, our neighbour on the farm who had moved to town, died. His widow did not want to keep the car she and he husband had used. So she sold their 1966 Chevelle Malibu to my Dad for $400 and he gave the car to me. It was a lighter shade of blue than the one shown above at a classic car display in my hometown this week, but identical in every other way. I loved that car. It had a very peppy engine and as most four-door sedans in those days, a bench front seat. The bench had so many advantages, a major one being that on a date, proceedings did not have to be relocated to the back seat where there was more room. And in the days before seatbelts became the law, a young man could drive down the road with his date sitting tight beside him, one arm on the steering wheel and the other around his girlfriend. The worst thing to happen to car-inspired love was the bucket seat. How sexy is it to sit in a bucket? One thing that amazes me is how this car, bigger than most full-size American cars on the road today, was considered almost a compact, much smaller than its older Chevy cousins such as the Impala. The Chevy Nova (at first also called the Chevy II), in fact, was even smaller than the Chevelle and I believe was actually referred to as a compact. To see one today makes that classification laughable. It is huge.
