Why Isn't This a Chateau Brougham?
Back when two major self-service junkyard chains were locked in throat-slicing competition for the Northern California market, Thanksgiving Day always featured the sacred Junkyard Half Price Day Sale. Alas, Pick Your Part has pulled up stakes— which means that Pick-N-Pull has spurious “15% off all door panels” sales instead of the real deal— but in honor of the memory of Half Price Day we bring you some junkyard goodness from Denver.
Here’s a Malaise Era Ford Econoline Chateau, which hauled six-generation extended families in bouncy, trucky comfort many years before the ’92 Chateau Club Wagon won Motor Trend‘s Truck Of The Year award. Just the sound of the name seems so vanlike: Chateau!
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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"but its 40 fricken degrees in LA this morning!!!!" [shakes head] Pull a starter motor out of a V6 S-10 (hint: you have to go in from the botom, around the cross memeber) in an Alberta wrecking yard at -30 and talk to me. The Pick-Your-Part in my town used to have "all you can carry for $X" sales when I was a teenager. You only had to carry it about 20 feet, but it all had to be carried by one man. Going down there for the show was amazing. It was like the World's Strongest and Cheapest Man competition.
Curiouser and curiouser, Perhaps it is a MW thing, but there are about 10 self-serve yards within 20 miles of me. No matter where I have lived, I have found that any yard was self-serve if you actually knew anything about taking cars apart...