Starting way back in 1951 with the release of the V-8 Hemi engine, Chrysler (now Stellantis) has been building automotive high-performance cars for the motoring public. A large part of that exciting history is captured in all its automotive glory, complete with 500 color and black & white photos, informative narrative and statistics, in the large format, 320-page hardcover book titled “The Complete Book of Dodge & Plymouth Muscle Cars — Every Model from 1960 to Today,” by Mike Mueller and updated by Tom Glatch.
No doubt like for many of you, high-performance Chrysler cars played a very important role in my life as I was growing up. My dad drove them, and he instilled his love of high-performance cars in me. He put many thousands of miles on them in relatively unpopulated Western Canada, as he worked as a traveling clothing salesman, transporting his heavy clothing samples from town to town, and city to city. The one that I best was our silver, four-door, 1968 Chrysler 300 with hideaway headlights, powered by a 440 cu in big-block V-8 — and dad knew how to drive it!
Many decades later, I still can the sense of anticipation and excitement that I felt each year in the fall when Renfrew Chrysler-Plymouth (in Calgary, Alberta) used to invite dad to a private reveal of the new Chrysler and Plymouth models. Of course, I went too!
As I was growing up, Dad was out of town a lot, earning a living for us. My mother did not have a driver’s license, so when we needed to travel from our home on the outskirts of Calgary to go shopping or to appointments, we took the bus. Back then we typically did our grocery shopping far away in downtown Calgary, in the grocery department of the Hudson’s Bay Company department store.
In the long, cold, snowy Calgary winters, our shopping trips were especially challenging. When I was very young, Calgary used electric trolley buses. Spring pressure connected the ends of a pair of long poles on the roof of the bus to overhead electric wires. In winter, with ice, snow and gravel covering the roads, these poles occasionally became disconnected from the overhead electric wires, requiring the driver to get out, go to the back of the bus and pull down on the spring-loaded cables to reconnect to the wires.
After our shopping trips we needed to walk, carrying our bags of groceries, up a long hill and then a few blocks further to our house. My mother once slipped on the icy sidewalk, while carrying those bags of groceries. I was horrified when I saw what looked like blood start to cover the icy sidewalk — until I realized that a glass ketchup bottle had broken and was spilling its contents!
It would have been so much easier for us if only my mother had a driver’s license. I was eager for the day when finally, years later, I would get my driver’s license, because then dad was going to buy a second car so that I could take mom shopping, to get her hair done and everything else.
No doubt dad’s love of high-performance Chrysler products was what motivated him to buy a bright red, 1970 Plymouth Duster 340, for the 16-year-old me. That car was practical, with a huge trunk that could carry lots of groceries. I was thrilled, and more than willing to drive my mother wherever she wanted to go! It was my first car, just like it was Tom Glatch’s first car.
I wanted to see how fast my Duster 340 would go so one day I drove out of Calgary on the highway and floored it. At about 130 mph I that it seemed to be floating! I slowed back down to the speed limit and never, ever did that again.
Somehow, I survived learning how to drive in that powerful, ill-handling car, and I’ve driven mostly high-performance cars ever since.
The Complete Book of Dodge & Plymouth Muscle Cars will be released by Motorbooks on June 18, 2024 for $55 (ISBN 9780760387283).
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Copyright © 2024 by Jan Wagner – AutoMatters & More #841
