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Lamm bought his 1967 Camaro just after New Year’s in 1969. He owned it for 31 years, and it served as his daily driver for 17. Text and photos copyright Michael Lamm 2012
I stopped smoking on New Year’s Day, 1969. It’s the only resolution I’ve ever kept. I had two principal motivations.
The first came from my three sons. They were all enthusiastic viewers of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Cleverly sandwiched between the cartoons were public-service TV ads inveighing against smoking. (Much cleverer to target smokers’ kids than the smokers themselves.) One day, Robert, my then-nine-year-old, came to me and said, “Dad, if you keep smoking, you’re going to die.” That hit me pretty hard – a powerful imperative from the mouth of a babe.
My second incentive came from my wife, JoAnne, who, about a week before Christmas 1968, told me that if I quit smoking I could buy any car I wanted. Any car? Yes! Visions of boattail speedsters and modern exotics began to swirl around in my head.
At about that same time, out of the blue, a friend offered me $500 for our family sedan, a bland but friendly and well-kept 1962 Buick Special named “White-Bread Ralph.” Taking JoAnne at her word, I gladly sold White-Bread Ralph and began to look for a replacement. I’d recently checked out a gorgeous 1966 Jaguar E-type roadster being offered by a young woman at our local university, but Jo brought up a good point: “Where will we put the kids?”
One Sunday about a week after New Year’s, I happened to be driving Jo’s station wagon through a neighborhood near our house in Stockton, and there in a driveway stood a pristine, butternut-yellow 1967 Camaro convertible. It didn’t have a for-sale sign on it, but I thought, “What the heck, I’ll ask the owner if he wants to sell it.” I stopped at the house, knocked on the front door, and someone inside yelled,”Come in!” I walked in and found two couples seated at a table in the living room, playing poker.
I introduced myself and asked, “Who owns that Camaro in the driveway?” One of the men said he did. “Do you want to sell it?” The owner told me he’d been thinking about trading it in on a newer car, so yes, it was up for sale.
“How much’ll you give me?” he asked. I ran some quick numbers through my mind and blurted out, “$2,500.” “Okay,” he said, “The car’s yours. I’ll pay off GMAC.” And that’s how I came to be the owner of a two-year-old, 38,000-mile Camaro convertible.
The Camaro, it turned out, had the RS trim package, Custom interior with console, two-barrel 327 V-8, two-speed Powerglide, power top, Delco AM radio, heater, tinted glass and power steering. I wasn’t in love with the Powerglide, but my Buick Special also had a two-speed automatic, so at least I was used to the laid-back nature of that transmission type. The Camaro became my everyday driver for the next 17 years (yes, I said 10 years in earlier chapters, but when I finally sat down and figured it out, it came to 17 years).
Most cars I don’t modify, but the Camaro I did. I didn’t care for the butternut yellow, so first chance I got, I took off all the emblems and brightwork, sanded the body and took the car over to Bob Wade’s bodyshop. For $100, he painted the car with one fairly thick coat of gloss-black acrylic enamel. Black made the Camaro look smaller, and I liked that.
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The Camaro was originally butternut yellow, but Mike had it repainted gloss black, with an apple-green pinstripe. He also dyed the interior apple green and bought the fold-down rear seat out of a wrecked Firebird.
Before I delivered the car to Bob Wade, I stripped out the interior, and while he was painting the body, I cleaned the seats and door panels extremely thoroughly with 409 and rubbing alcohol and dyed everything apple green. The seats had had white accent stripes, and I painted those black by hand. The dye job held up amazingly well, although I did have to do a little touchup every couple of years. Finally, after everything went back together, I had the beltline pinstriped in the same apple green as the interior, using the original black pinstripe as a pattern.
Tranny Swap
A couple of years after I bought the Camaro, another 1967 convertible came up for sale here in town. It needed body-work, but what attracted me was the fact that it had a Muncie four-speed transmission. I bought this second Camaro, brought it to a local garage and asked the shop owner, Don Peirano, to swap transmissions. He ended up exchanging not only the trannies but also the bellhousings and one crossmember, the pedals and the linkages.
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The original Powerglide gave way to a four-speed Muncie transmission, and that’s the J.C. Whitney FM/TV tuner ahead of the shift lever. Mike took the instrument cluster from the same Firebird that had donated the rear seat.
Don asked me what I planned to do with the second Camaro once he’d made the swap. I told him I’d sell it, and he said he’d like to buy it for his daughter, who was about to go off to college. She needed a car at school, and a Camaro convertible with an automatic transmission would be just the ticket. So we worked out a deal that paid for the transmission swap, and everyone drove away happy. Last I heard, Don’s family still owns that second Camaro today.
Among the 1967 Camaro’s inherent weaknesses, I soon discovered, were the little nine-inch drum brakes that Chevrolet had carried over from the Chevy II. One hard stop from 80 MPH and the brakes faded to zilch. Even in town, they tended to get hot and tired, so in May 1972, I decided to add front discs.
I priced a set of new discs at our Stockton Chevrolet dealer, and he wanted $300 without hoses or fittings (about $1,300 in today’s currency). Instead, I bought a used set at a local wrecking yard. These were off a 1967 Chevelle and, including the vacuum booster, master cylinder, equalizer valve and all lines, the tab came to $44. Installation cost another $100 plus $20 for a set of 14×6-inch Rally wheels with “Disc Brake” spinners. I now had a car that would stop.
The Camaro’s second major weak point turned out to be its rear suspension. The single-leaf rear springs again shared Chevy II parentage. With any weight at all in the trunk, my Camaro’s rear bottomed out on even the gentlest of speed bumps and grade crossings. I finally bought a set of heavy-duty Monroe air shocks, pumped them up to normal ride height, and that solved that problem. The car was becoming quite civilized.
Gadgets and Gizmos
In the 1970s, J.C. Whitney sold an FM/TV sound receiver that hooked into any car radio. In other words, if you wired this receiver into the radio and then plugged the car’s antenna into it and ran a stub antenna into the AM radio, you could pick up FM broadcasts plus the sound from local television stations. I bought the receiver mostly to listen to classical music on FM radio, but I soon got hooked on the TV sound as well.
The entire system worked like a charm, but the TV receiver provided just the sound, of course, not the picture. The remarkable thing was that, for most TV shows, you really don’t need the picture. The sound alone provides enough of a mental image so you can “see” about 80 percent of what’s happening on the screen. I believe the entire FM/TV receiver cost $15, and I enjoyed it thoroughly for many years.
One day I happened to be at Kalend’s Auto Wrecking, one of my favorite junkyards, and they’d just taken in a wrecked 1967 Firebird coupe. The coupe had the factory fold-down rear seat, so I bought that, and in the process of removing it, I noticed that the Firebird instrument panel had all working gauges, not just the warning lights that were native to my Camaro.
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Most Firebirds came with working gauges, while Camaros had warning lights. The speedometer also came out of the wrecked Firebird.
The instrument clusters in all early F-Cars (Camaros and Firebirds) are interchangeable and very easy to remove, so I took the panel out of the wrecked Firebird and, at home, installed it in my Camaro. The gauges used all the same sensors and wiring as the idiot lights, so suddenly I could read what was happening with oil pressure and the electrical system.
In late 1974, Motor Trend asked me to do an article about my Camaro as part of a used-car series (MT, 2/75, p. 80). I’d kept a tally of all my expenses, including fuel, insurance, licensing, parts, repairs and maintenance. The total cost for five years and nearly 40,000 miles of continued driving came to $4,318.12. That averaged out to 11 cents per mile or, in current dollars, 46 cents a mile. Average fuel economy was 14.5 MPG.
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Mike tried to raise and lower the top only once a year, down in April and up in October. Bad weather occasionally made him break that rule. The car still had its original top when Lamm sold it in 2000.
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The original top boot remained in place whenever the top was down.
As with all my cars, I compulsively over-maintained the Camaro. I changed the oil every 1,000 miles and the oil filter at 5,000 miles. The car was always garaged, and I was very careful with the original top. I lowered it every year at the beginning of April and raised it again in October. When putting down the top, I stopped the process in midair, straightened any wrinkles along the sail panels and placed flannel cloths on both sides the plastic rear window to keep it from chafing. Even so, I did have to have the rear window replaced once (the top shop changed the plastic without removing the entire top).
During several years when I owned the Camaro, I worked as West Coast editor for Popular Mechanics. PM would regularly send me items to install and test for the magazine’s new-products section. Manufacturers would ship these goodies to PM in New York, and the auto editor would pass some of them along to me. None of this swag had to go back, but I was expected to write up an evaluation of each item and give some indication of how hard it was to install.
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The 210-horse 327 V-8 remained stock, right down to the smog pump. The first time the heads came off was when Mike ground the valves at 130,000 miles.
I dreaded doing new products and tried, as often as possible, to install them on JoAnne’s car. For one thing, I didn’t want to make holes in the Camaro, but eventually I did install certain gadgets and gizmos on the convertible, some of which were good enough to leave on the car.
I tested several different brands of electronic ignition, and the last one was so good and so simple that I never removed it. Another worthwhile item was a see-through distributor cap. And one of the more useful items was an aftermarket cruise control that also became a permanent fixture.
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The trunk mat was likewise original, and when Mike sold the car, its Chevrolet Protect-O-Plate was still in the glovebox.
One source of income in those days was to cover for West Coast magazine staff members (usually managing editors) who were out sick or on vacation. I’d get a call from Motor Trend or Car Life, asking whether I could come down and work for a couple of weeks while so-and-so was in Bermuda or at home with the flu. The pay was good, so I’d hop in the Camaro and head down Highway 99 from Stockton to Los Angeles or Newport Beach, distances of 350 and 400 miles, respectively.
On one such trip, I was galloping southward on 99, doing about 80 MPH, when a fellow in a gorgeous 1965 Pontiac Grand Prix passed me. He was clipping along five MPH faster than I was going. I sped up to 85 and figured, “Great, I’ll let him be my lightning rod,” reasoning that the CHP would more likely want to catch the guy ahead than the one behind. I cruised along maybe half a block in the Pontiac’s wake.
Just before we hit Chowchilla, 90 miles south of Stockton, a cop car appeared behind me out of nowhere, went lickety-split around me and started flashing his lights at the Pontiac. I thought, “Whew, that was close,” and I slowed down. But as I was tip-toeing past the Pontiac, the CHP officer waved me over and made it clear that I’d better stop. I did, and he gave us both tickets. So much for lightning rods.
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This photo, taken in 1975, shows the car with its original black California license plate.
In 1986, after I’d driven the Camaro for about 17 years and nearly 100,000 miles, I bought a 1980 Rover SD1 five-door hatchback and made that my daily driver. The Rover had air conditioning and a five-speed, so I retired the Camaro and parked it in one of our back garages. There it sat until the year 2000, when I had my grand putsch and sold it along with three other cars. The Camaro was still in great shape, right down to the original top.
The kid who bought the car lived on the next block and worked at a local Wendy’s. His dad paid me $10,500 (roughly $13,700 today) for the Camaro and assured me that his son would take good care of it. A couple of weeks later I saw the car out beside Wendy’s with golden anodized alloy wheels instead of the stock Rallys I’d put on it. I thought, “Well, okay, it’s not my car anymore.” Mercifully, the family moved away a few months later, and I never saw the Camaro again – probably just as well.
Michael Lamm grew up in South Texas. He has always loved cars and, after graduating from Columbia University in New York in 1959, took a job as editor of Foreign Car Guide, a magazine about VWs. In the mid 1960s, Mike became managing editor of Motor Trend and, in 1970, he co-founded Special-Interest Autos magazine in partnership with Hemmings Motor News. In 1978, Mike began to publish his own line of automotive books. For more information, go to www.LammMorada.com.