Junkyard Find: 1976 Ford LTD Brougham
Just after I wrote that non-Country Squire Ford LTDs were rare Junkyard Finds (we’ve had three so far: this ’69, this ’71, and this ’72), I found this majestic yellow four-door hardtop in a San Francisco Bay Area wrecking yard. As an added bonus, it’s a Brougham!
We laugh at Malaise Era big Detroit cars now, with their overwrought heraldic crests and laughably fake wood and leather, but I spent much of my childhood in cars like this and they actually seemed pretty nice at the time.
The 351M V8 was big on torque, not so great for horsepower or fuel economy.
This one got a lot of use over its 38-year lifespan.
There is no way in hell this generation of LTD managed to get 22 mpg on the highway, even with the not-so-strict tests of the time. It was comfortable, though.
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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The last car my great uncle drove before the cataracts took him out was like this. Not sure of the year, but his last LTD was a dark blue four door with a 400 c.i. engine. Always driven under 30 mph, and usually with the right tires on the shoulder. I shudder to imagine how far that thing would have gone through a building had he suffered an "unintended acceleration" event. He had been a Ford dealer for years, and had bought himself a brand new V-12 Lincoln Zephyr. Tragically for me, he was not a hoarder.
AHHHH the good 'ole days when if the ENGINE light came on, you stopped because it really meant something was wrong with the ENGINE and you didn't know if it was low oil pressure or high temperature and no amount of duct tape could help if ignored long enough. But surely LTD drivers would just call a tow and not try to do any diagnosing themselves.