Eulogy for The Goat: Shutting Down Pontiac
Gonna save all my money and buy a GTO
Get a helmet and a roll bar and I’ll be ready to go
Take it out to Pomona and let ’em know, yeah-yeah
That I’m the coolest thing around
Little buddy, gonna shut you down
When I turn it on, wind it up, blow it out, GTO
Yeah-yeah, Little GTO —Ronnie & the Daytonas, 1964
The Goat is dead. In its memory I now solemnly lift a glass of 98 Octane Ethyl and mix it with a chaser of STP.
Technically, the GTO died in 2006 when Pontiac dumped its 3 year-long revival of the classic American Muscle car. But now it’s really over. GM is expected to announce any moment that its 82-year old Pontiac division will be forever shuttered.
I take this personally. I have owned three, count’em three GTO’s in my life and frankly there’s just nothing like the roar, shake, rattle and rumble of a gassed-up Goat (except maybe for the nasty purr of a hungry ‘Vette).
The Vette predated the GTO by a full decade, but it was really the latter — the 1964 Tempest Le Mans GTO– that defined itself as the first of all American Muscle cars. Here was a machine with 389 cubic inch V-8, tri-power carbs, 4 on the floor Hurst tranny and pipes that roared.
Something was clearly wrong with my parents, as the first car I got when I was 16 in 1967 was a brand new silver and black Goat. It was a bit more refined than its 1964 prototype. This was a sleeker, less boxy bullet with a one four barrel carb and an automatic transmission. It still cranked out over 300 horses and who could forget those signature General Tires with a thin red circular line instead of a white wall? Throw in a reverb on the rear radio speaker and an after-market 8 track player and it was quite literally heaven on wheels.
A certain penchant for burning rubber wore out the tires after a mere 10k and shortly after that my tranny dropped out in the Disneyland on the night of my 17th birthday. When gas started to nudge over 20 cents a gallon, the 8-10mpg I was clocking seemed obscene even to a teenager and without a prompt and in a rather saintly move, I surrendered that GTO back to my Dad and we bought, instead, a six year old Alfa Romeo spyder for $750 (and then poured about a billion lira into unanticipated repairs until, six months later, it threw a rod right through the aluminum block on the Santa Monica Freeway).
I went two more decades pining for another Goat and in 1984 I bought a fire engine red 1968 automatic (as pictured above) and drive it as a daily car for 5-6 until it was a rattling bucket of bolts and I had to sell it off.
When it late 2003 Pontiac announced it was reviving the mighty GTO (repurposed from its Australian Holden models) I knew another purchase was inevitable. Waiting lists and bidding wars budded. I convinced a local dealer to sell me the first one off the truck on New Year’s Day 2004 for one dollar more than sticker price. It’s a 350 hp 5.7 liter black beauty with anthracite interior and right now, 79,000 miles later, it’s sitting in my driveway. It’s been mostly a second car now though the arrival of my daughter from NYC this week means it will probably pass into her hands. It certainly isn’t leaving this family. Nev-uh!
It’s actually one of the finest cars that GM ever produced. Extremely powerful, all torqued-up, understated in its design, its interior with a tad too much American plastic but refined and detailed enough to pass itself off as Euro-import. And, hey, if you keep it throttled under a 100 mph, it might even get 20 mpg on the road and 18 in the city.
But you don’t buy a GTO for fuel efficiency. You don’t buy one for driving but rather, as Mort Sahl used to like to say, you buy it for motoring. With it you don’t save the world. You challenge it.
Turn it on. Wind it up. Blow it out.
Long Live GTO!
My essay on GTO’s from a few years back.
April 26th, 2009 at 4:40 am
My parents drove nothing but Pontiacs; my mother took me to the library in our 1949 green Pontiac when I was becoming a voracious reader at the age of 8. My own first car was the 1955 Pontiac they handed down to me, and my second car was a 1955 Pontiac too when the first one finally conked out. You can take the boy out of the Pontiac, but you can’t take the Pontiac out of the boy.
April 26th, 2009 at 6:42 am
This is genuinely sad.
My last four cars have all been Pontiacs. Three GrandAm’s in a row, and then a GrandPrix when the G6 replaced the GrandAm. The GrandAm’s were all standard transmission cars. The GrandPrix is the first automatic transmission I’ve owned, literally, since I’ve owned a car.
Other than a short stint with a Subaru, all the cars I’ve owned have been American cars. Although, in these days of multi-national corporations you can’t even particularly claim that your bicycle is American made.
In my experience, the GrandAm was a great car for the money. I loved driving it. And, for those years when I had to commute 150 miles a day – everyday – I was grateful for it’s handling ability in all kinds of road, weather, and traffic conditions.
I always wanted a GTO. Could never quite afford myself the luxury. But, with my little GrandAm I could pretend and dream.
April 26th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Oh, lordy. I always looked down on anyone who drove those things. Tacky.
The coolest ride I ever had was in an original Willys Jeep. Back in maybe 70 I was up in Squaw Valley. Met a biologist/mountain climber who had been part of the gang that walked the Dalai Lama out of Tibet. He lived in Mexico and spent summers in the north and hauled his old Willy’s Jeep with him.
Before the snow came we took the jeep literally up the mountain all along side the ski path up and down over terrain only a goat could manage. It was awesome.
Now THAT was a goat!
April 26th, 2009 at 8:22 am
My dream vehicle would be the old Land Rover or the utility vehicles used in Australia.
April 26th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Nice little article on the Pontiac, Marc (the LA Weekly essay pretty good, too). Have you ever attended this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodward_Dream_Cruise
Upon moving to California in 1986, second car I ever owned was one of these:
http://www.familycar.com/Classics/69Camaro.htm
Mine was baby blue. 350 hp V8. Holley carbs. Very quick; swallow-you-up-in-the-bucket seats quick. Topped out at 130 mph. You’re absolutely right about the throaty roar of those machines. Mesmeric.
As a midwestern immigrant to L.A. I was always in awe of how easily one could find these old beasts. One could get a 60′s model GTO, Camaro, Mustang, T-Bird, etc, and the bodies weren’t rusted through to the chassis. A buddy of mine loved his ’69 Fastback so much, he drove it out to California from Ohio. But when you rode in it, you could see the payment below your feet from the rusted out holes in the floorboards. L.A. was like car heaven. It was where these cars could have an extended life.
But you know, those good ol’ days were never as good as we’d like to remember. One fine spring morning while playing some full court basketball at a local park, I collapsed with a pain in my chest that felt like my lungs were on fire. Even though I was a freshly minted US Army Vet in A-One physical condition. I was a mere 21 years old, yet I was gasping for air and heaving wildly. The next morning the doctor I visited said I was completely fine. Just going through an acclamation-like process to the smog. Thank god for catalytic converters and standardized automotive smog testing. Otherwise half of L.A. would have lungs like coal miners.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter
April 26th, 2009 at 8:35 am
Essential links for this post:
http://www.gto.vg/
http://www.sundazed.com/audio/SC11046-1.rm
April 26th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
On the one hand, I appreciate the unabashedness with which Mark celebrates his bad taste in automobiles.
The GTO is not only ungainly in appearance, it handles like an oil tanker. Its “muscle” is a joke on the street, in that it’s designed for drag racing. It can be driven fast, but only in a short, straight burst. The rest of the time, the GTO driver is defined to lumbering along well under the speed limit, quaffing gas and thinking how cool he must look behind the wheel. Or, as Marc ‘fesses, deliberately destroying your rear tires while pumping extra noxious fumes of burning rubber.
Were you to race, say, from Sunset and San Vicente to Westwood, or certainly from Westwood to the beach, you’d be better off behind the wheel of a late model Volkswagen Jetta, or indeed, the vintage Porsche that killed James Dean on that same road. Unless, of course, you happened to be Richard Petty, in which case just about any vehicle would do.
On the other hand, it’s disappointing that Mark doesn’t let us in on the mysterious appeal of lumbering around L.A.’s crowded streets and freeways in a noisy, overweight beast. The Freudians would make the obvious assertions about compensation, but I feel safe doubting that’s where it’s at for Marc.
Given the gluttenous environmental impacts, there must be a pretty strong emotional appeal to keep a guy like Marc driving a car like the GTO.
April 26th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Best car I know of was the VW Jetta my dad had the third time he went to Germany for the Army. The kids were grown and they lived in a village near Heidelberg.
He bought the Jetta in 1981 for US$10,000, had a neighbor who was a VW master mechanic who tuned it for the cost of the parts. He sold it in 1984 for US$10,500.
April 26th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
I also owned a GTO back in the day, when I blew the original engine, I went to the junk yard and bought a 400cu. in. motor from a Firebird ($150.00). The GTO six pack carburetor setup bolted right to the 400 cu. in intake manifold.
The brakes on this car were non-existent, I remember blowing the transmission and it took about five minutes to come to a complete stop.
When I bought a Datsun 240z, I learned what handling and brakes really are. American muscle cars are fun and provide great memories, but American automobile engineering sucks.
April 26th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
btw-here’s the preferred song of subversion by my pa’s line mates: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDU8Gku7q-w
April 26th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
@bb:
James Dean died on an open highway ‘way north of LA closer to Paso Robles. You could look it up.
I get the nostalgia for those old beasts – used to drive a 73 Olds myself. I test-drove some cars from the sixties era about a decade ago. It turns out they pollute like crazy, handle like shit and are obviously unsafe. I bought a civic instead. Love it.
April 26th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Michael: I’m shattered. I’ve grown up thinking “dead man’s curve” on Sunset was where the James Dean legend ended, or was it where it began? either way, i bought the urban myth hook, line and stinker…
April 26th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Nah, deadman’s is the steep curve that goes alongside the UCLA athletic fields. At one time, they were banked the wrong way (probably to provide for drainage or something) and this didn’t help all those novice drivers who didn’t know how to go into a curve.
April 26th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Very sad. An iconic American brand gone forever.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:19 am
James Dean died in a Porsche. ( I think, if my memory is not hazy)
And read Alec Guinness’ memoir. Seems Obi One had the gift of “seeing”. He met Dean for an instant and saw he would crash.
Just out on the wire…Ayn Rand is the new Right guru. Her cracked love of free markets and unfettered, dumb, capitalism (which is why auto industry is failing and Pontiac closing) has become the new down the rabbit hole philosophy of the reality challenged.
Yes! lets sing the praises of unregulated industry to get us out of the mess from having had an epidemic of unprecedented failures because industry has been unregulated.
boggles the fucking mind.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/04/27/ayn.rand.atlas.shrugged/index.html
April 27th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
I loved my 1973 Opel. So a decade or so later I tried to get another one, and ended up buying a true hybrid car, part 73 Opel GT, part 69 Opel Kadett, part go-kart, I think. Anyway, after a couple of months I had to stop it by slowing down gradually so that eventually I could stop it with my feet skidding along the ground. A mistake, pretty much.
My iconic American car was the cherry-red 66 Plymouth Fury convertible. About this time last year (at the apex of the gas price scam) I got a ride from a friend who, unbeknownst to me, had a 66 Plymouth Fury convertible [color indeterminate] she had been driving since she was 16. It was pretty great. Plus, she has the thick mane of red hair that looks amazing in a convertible. I would have been in heaven were it not for the fact that we were returning from the funeral of a good friend–a 40 year old script-writer who had drunk himself to death.
April 27th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Two notes to the above post. (1) it was only my left foot that wore the “brake shoe”: and (2) the 66 Fury (known as The Mouth) was my cousin’s, then my future brother-in-law’s, but never mine.
April 27th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Never owned a Pontiac – never wanted to.
GM has been losing $$ for 50 years – something has to give.
December 8th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Yeah it’s a sad state of affairs. I was so hoping for a retro Goat. You telling me that wouldn’t sell? I would plunk my money down the day it was available.
December 11th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
With Pontiac gone I’ll never own another GM vehicle unless of course it’s an old Pontiac. I’d rather drive a 5, 10, 15 or 50 year old Pontiac than be given a free top of the line BMW.
January 28th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Morning I have a habbit of browsing the web, looking for some knowledgable blogs to browse and found your site.
January 21st, 2011 at 8:44 am
Covered up channel surfing, a little on the board side :/