Boomer's Story: Buy an Old Jaguar; Save a Marriage

It's summer of 1973, and the euphoria of the early season (it's finally warm outdoors, and you can swim in Lake Michigan, health advisories aside) has given way to the heat and humidity of August in Chicago.  Also, everybody around you seems to think you need to buy a car.  The adventure of a 1970 Saab 99 hasn't worked out too well; the black box that controls the electronic fuel injection has repeatedly decided that the intake mixture is too hot.  When you pulled out recently to pass on a two-lane road at about 70, it shut off the engine altogether. The bicycle work commute to downtown Chicago, except for the pleasant part on the Lake Shore bike path, is fraught with hazards. So you take the train from Evanston, while your practical friends are suggesting something safe, trusty and reliable for general use, like maybe a Volvo (preferably one with carburetors)…

Naturally, you are checking out Jaguars instead.  Your search centers on the E-Type*, in coupe or roadster form.  You avoid the more practical 2+2 model, as it suggests you could be the kind of person who might compromise the romance of the open road for a trip to the hardware store, and those two tiny seats in the rear will remind people like your mom of the urgent need for grandchildren.

You drive a Series 1 roadster, an early one with the 3.8 liter engine and obdurate Moss gearbox, along with the thin-shell bucket seats (comfy if your back is contoured a certain way; yours isn't). It's opalescent blue, so pretty you almost need to look at it sideways, and about $4,000.  That seems to be the price everyone has settled on this summer.  You drive a green Series 2 roadster too, but someone has fiddled with the pedals because they were a bad fit; that owner must have been a very short person.  You prefer the Series 1; if we're going with impracticality we might as well have esthetic purity along with it...

                                     

There's an ad in the paper for a '67 2-passenger coupe and the price is a tempting $2,650, kind of an odd figure.  So you call the guy.  His name is Wally and he works for ABC TV. You go and see Wally; he lives near Lake Shore Drive in the kind of high-rise you imagine an exec at ABC might like.  The car for sale is a late Series 1 coupe in a muted, almost sleepy shade called Willow Green in the catalog, and the interior, which smells like a well-oiled catcher's mitt, is black. There's an English license plate at the back, under the Illinois plate: HKV 362E. The car's state of tidy, shiny good condition surprises you, considering the low price.  There's another E-Type parked next to it in the garage, a recent V12 roadster in yellow, and also a VW Beetle. Wally explains about the price; he's under some pressure to sell the green coupe.

                                      
"My wife drives the Beetle."

"Doesn't she like it?  Easy to park, and so forth…"

"She thinks I have too many Jaguars."

"Too many Jaguars?"  The concept is impenetrable to you; you can't think of anything to say.

"Let's go for a drive," Wally suggests.

You nervously thread your way through traffic onto Lake Shore Drive and gently ask the car for some speed; it plunges forward with a contented booming noise.  You could get fond of that booming noise and the big, wood-rimmed steering wheel. You like the gearbox better than the one in the blue roadster.  Also, it's August and the car is not overheating, even in traffic.  Wally suggests you take the exit for North Avenue Beach, and for some reason he turns on the radio, which surprises you by actually working.  The song is "Gloria", the original version by Van Morrison and Them… 

"Like to tell you about my baby
You know she come around
She's about five feet four
From her head to the ground…"

Wally speaks.  "At ABC News in London, I was the second guy to have this car.  It was kind of the date car for awhile…"

For some reason you think of the beleaguered Jack Lemmon in "The Apartment", with that fateful key.

"G-L-O-R-I-A…"

"The deal is, my wife wants it, or she wants me to sell it, or maybe that's it."

"That's it?" You picture his wife getting on a train to Omaha, or St. Louis, or someplace…Maybe she looks like Shirley MacLaine in "The Apartment."

"G-L-O-R-I-A…"
I'm gonna shout it all night…"

"The two other guys who came to drive it didn't even know how to drive it.  I'd rather you have it."

"I have exactly $2,500 in my account."

"Okay, twenty-five hundred then.  That's it."

"Gloria, Gloria…
I'm gonna shout it every day, Gloria
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah…"

Your kindly dad lends you three hundred bucks so you don't have to live on PBJ until your next paycheck.  You mostly live on hot dogs and beans anyway.  You adjust your driving habits, and your parking habits, after a short while.  It's a new experience to have a car with real stopping power.  You learn to get rid of that heavy, clunky key fob because it swings so hard in an energetic turn that it switches the engine off.  You panic when you think that you hear the sound of a failed cam chain tensioner until you stop and open the bonnet and hear just the usual peaceful humming noise.  You then realize it was the tambourine track on "Basketball Jones." These are your early memories of a very happy car...

The Boomer turns out to be the one car in your experience that has always started when you turned the key and pressed the button. Years go by, then decades, and nothing dramatic ever happens on the mechanical front. The clock stops working, but then again, nobody ever bought a Jaguar to tell time... 

In over 45 years of ownership you've replaced the tires a couple times, replaced the clutch, repainted the car once, and then repainted the nose after somebody backed into it when you were playing volleyball.  The shot of the suspended form during a tire change confirms the basic correctness of the lines...

In Boomer's 51st year in service the intake manifold springs a leak, however, and in the course of the repairs at Sportscar Craftsmen, it seems appropriate to rebuild the head as well.  All the corrosion issues have surfaced in the aluminum castings because antifreeze loses its anti-corrosion properties without frequent changes, and your changes haven't happened often enough because you haven't driven the car enough. The guys at SCC scold you about that, not for the first time...

You resolve to start driving Boomer enough, and decide that a rebuilt engine will make the experience of driving as close to a new E-Type as you'll get in your life, and so the experts at SCC plunge into that work on the bottom end too.  You hope the work will be finished by August 18, your 46th anniversary of saving a marriage by adopting a pretty good used car...

*Footnote:  The history and design of the E-type Jaguar were reviewed in our post for August 13, 2017 entitled "Racing Improves the Breed: Cunningham's Jaguar E-Types."

Photo Credit:  All photos are by the author.

Song Lyrics:  "Gloria" copyright by Van Morrison, 1965.