Junkyard Find: 1975 Ford LTD Country Squire
The big Fords of the Malaise Era don’t show up in the wrecking yards much these days, after several decades of being commonplace. The Taurus has replaced the LTD as the most common Ford product in high-turnover wrecking yards, and will likely hold that honor for another decade or two. Still, you see members of the full-size Ford family in The Crusher’s waiting room every now and then; here’s a Country Squire in Northern California.
I was 9 years old when this car was new, and the Country Squire was the standard family hauler of the era. Imagine all the SUVs and minivans you see dropping kids off at school and replace them in your mental picture with Country Squires and you’d have a fairly accurate image of 1975… except, of course, that most kids back then braved a daily gauntlet of murderers and molesters and got their own damn selves to school. My own family never had a station wagon, instead relying on an industrial-strength ’73 Chevy Beauville van with red-plaid-cloth interior for family-road-trip duties, but I rode in plenty of Country Squires on Little League trips and so forth.
The Country Squire name spent quite a lengthy period as the top trim option on the Galaxie wagon, with Country Sedan badges slapped on the lower-level full-sized Ford wagons. By 1975, however, the Galaxie name was long gone.
It appears that the last owner of this wagon added some pimpin’ upholstery to the tailgate. Note the very luxurious bottom- and side-hinged tailgate on this generation of Squire.
I’d look up the horsepower figures on the smogged-out V8 in this car, but it would just make everybody depressed. Let’s say low-triple-digit horsepower and halfway decent torque and leave it at that.
When it comes to wagons, nobody swings like Ford!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Ford brought out plain sided LTD wagons in 1973. And to the post about 'pity the 1970's Ford salesman, only had big cars to sell...' Well, they had lots of small cars to sell also, Pinto, Stang II and Mavericks. Laugh sure, but they sold well. And Ford is still in business, no bail out.
When I was about 18 in upstate NY, my folks got a used 1975 Estate Wagon, yellow with the fake woodgrain side panels. It was 1980 and the car was in like-new condition. It really looked great for what it was. However, the engine had absolutely no power. it had a 400 V8 in it. In contrast, my dad had a 1978 Ford pickup with a 400 and while not exactly a horsepower demon, it could get out of its own way. The CS wagon, sadly could not. Its performance was so bad, that the car was taken on several occasions to the Ford dealership to try to find out why it had no power. The car started fine, and ran smoothly, though sometimes when you floored it (which was most of the time when you didn't have your foot on the brakes), it would backfire through the carburetor.