Junkyard Find: 1972 Buick Skylark Sedan
After seeing this ’72 Ford Econoline one-ton camper van on Tuesday and this ’72 Mercury Monterey coupe on Monday, how about another 1972 Junkyard Find? Here’s a ’72 Buick Skylark that I shot in a Denver yard, all the way back in 2010; I’d been saving these photos until I could come up with a whole week’s worth of GM A-body cars, but the A-bodies have become so valuable (and thus rare in cheap self-serve wrecking yards) that I’ve run out of patience. Welcome back to 1972 Junkyard Week™!
Actually, I shot these photos immediately after moving to Denver to marry my long-distance girlfriend. Hey, that reminds me of a family legend I hear every time I’m around my in-laws, about the time my future wife, at age six, got carsick and barfed all over the interior of the brand-new ’71 Skylark coupe her father had just bought the day before (in her defense, she’d warned the grown-ups that she wasn’t feeling so good). So much for That New Car Smell!
The Buick 350 was completely unrelated to the Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac 350s, but GM ensured many decades of parts-counter confusion by giving them all the same nominal displacement number and doing plenty of mix-and-match engine roulette later in the 1970s. The Buick and Olds 350s were the best for convenience-store-parking-lot burnouts, in my opinion.
Yes, I bought this dealer emblem. I sent it to a Swedish lover of old Detroit cars (along with a few license plates) for garage decor a couple of months back.
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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I had a 2-door 1971 Skylark Custom, 350 with a 2-barrel, 350 Turbo Hydramatic, power steering, no air conditioning, and non-power DRUM brakes all the way around. Getting it going wasn't a problem, getting it stopped was, at 65mph I'd have about 2-3 seconds of stopping power then all brake fade after that. It didn't need ABS because it was almost impossible to lock the brakes up unless you were on snow or ice. I bought my car around 1986, it had 57,000 miles on it at the time and was in great shape except for a crease on the fender, and I paid a whopping $750 for it. I drove that thing as a daily driver, and eventually the lack of engine compression and road salt killed it when it had around 175,000 miles on it. All the A-body cars rusted out in the same places, the rear wheel arches, the lower rear quarters, the bottom of the front fenders, the bottoms of the doors, underneath the battery tray, at the lower edge of the rear glass, at the lower corners of the windshield, the trunk floors, the floor pan near the dimmer switch and the brake pedal, and around the floor pan by the front seat mounts. It was an OK car, it really wasn't a muscle car with the 350 2-barrel setup, and the handling was poor too. With the front bench seat and me being 6'3" the top of my head was in the headliner while driving it. We actually had 3 A-body cars in the family, my 71 Skylark, my dad's 1970 Olds Cutlass S, and my brother's 1972 Pontiac Luxury LeMans.
"For the longest time I had no idea GM made these cars with four doors," "Why would GM build separate motors?" Young ones, sigh.