Junkyard Find: 1972 Mercury Marquis Brougham
You really can’t experience the joys of broughamism without a big chrome-plated heraldic crest on the C pillar, and the ’72 Marquis delivers in a big way.
There’s the silhouette head of the Roman god Mercury in the shield; the Mercury Division had been moving away from images of the Messenger of the Gods for a decade or two, so it’s interesting to see one in vestigial form here. The really disturbing part of this emblem, however, is the crown-wearing lions— or are those hyenas?— with tormented monkey skulls for faces. LSD in Dearborn’s water supply?
Up front, we’ve got a 208-horsepower 429 engine (due to Communist infiltration of American institutions in the early 1970s, Detroit was forced to list horsepower ratings using net horsepower figures instead of ludicrously inflated —except when they were ludicrously deflated to fool insurance companies— gross figures; also under notorious nanny-state liberal Richard M. Nixon’s watch, compression ratios dropped in ’72), down from the 320 horses the same engine made in ’71. The intake manifold on this engine weighs more than your Commie vehicle of choice, by the way.
Right. So there’s no point in calling it a Brougham if you don’t have the kind of interior that, say, Superfly would feel comfortable with.
The interior of this car is still in pretty good shape, but scrap-metal prices mean that most less-than-perfect 5,000-pound Detroit barges are worth more in steel than they are as cars.
These maddening separate shoulder belts appeared in a lot of cars during the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the manufacturers figured out a way to make three-point belts that retracted as one unit with the lap belt. Blame Nixon!
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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Murilee NEVER kids.
From the look of that crest, I somehow get the impression it was never meant to be dissected into its most basic counterparts. Case in point, the ghoulish crowned monkey skulls on the "lions". Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that seat fabric is referred to as brocade. Brocade appears often in GM car brochures of the early 70's, particularly Cadillac.