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The Marlin Problem

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I couldn’t help noticing that the annual Twin Cities Auto Show starts this weekend.

I went through my automobile enthrallment phase at age 9, at the midpoint of the 1960’s when American cars still dominated the roads. They were big, heavy, and not very well made, by today’s standards. But I didn’t care about reliability or performance. For me, cars were design objects. If they didn’t move I would only have been mildly disappointed. I loved cars for the way they looked.

Marlin_1

One 1965 model caught my eye for its sleekness – the Rambler Marlin.

The Marlin had a roofline that swept back all the way to the lip of the trunk, if it had only had a trunk. An eye-catching feature was a big, flat elongated rear window that had to be huge so the driver would have more than a slit to look through.

Whenever we went on a family trip, I scanned the lanes for a glimpse of one of these exotic vehicles. I still remember crossing a bridge and spotting a Marlin as it sped by beneath us. The car was distinctive for its two tone color scheme – often done in red and black and frequently pictured in advertisements from above and behind.

It was a big deal to see one on the road, because Rambler didn’t sell a lot of Marlins. That was a puzzle, because to me, they were beautiful. Was it because cars aren’t usually named for fish? I can think of only one other – the Plymouth Barracuda.

Now, almost 50 years later, I discover at least part of the truth – Marlins were not all that attractive, and for a very specific reason.

The design of the 1965 Marlin was influenced by American Motors Chairman Roy Abernethy, who insisted that the company produce cars that he could ride comfortably – in the back seat. Meeting that requirement meant the sleek fastback plunge of the Marlin’s roofline couldn’t begin until it cleared Abernethy’s head, and he was 6’4″.

rambler-marlin-car

Abernethy told the engineers to raise the roofline an inch – a change imposed while the company’s design chief was traveling in Europe. The result was an oddly shaped, disproportionate profile. From the side the car that appeared so futuristic from above seemed more like a standard sedan that decided, too late in life, to act young and hip. Awkward!

Describe something that looked good to you then, but now? Not so much.

70 thoughts on “The Marlin Problem”

  1. Back when John Travolta was a hit in “Saturday Night Fever” I bought (and actually wore!) 2 pairs of tall platform shoes. The soles were about 2 inches thick; the heels about 4 inches high. Travolta wore them, so I wore them. Plus, they made me look taller. Two things trouble me about those shoes. First, I can’t believe that I ever wore something so totally weird & embarrassing. Second, why did I throw them away?! They would be collectors’ items now, or at least something to show my grandkids. The reason I thought of those shoes is because the gaudiest pair was black and red, Dale…just like the beautiful Marlin of your dreams.

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    3. Rik, did you have a fu manchu mustache as well?
      I think it’s interesting that a guy doesn’t have to do anything at all to embarrass his kids, but he’s got to dig deep in the closet to find something that will embarrass his grandkids.

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  3. Good morning. I don’t know why I don’t remember the Marlin. Like you, Dale, I was fascinated with the appearance of those cars that were made here in the fifties and sixties. I should think that I would remember one such as the Marlin. One of the big features of some of the cars from the fifties was tail fins. They were a signature feature of Cadillacs. I actually thought they looked good. As I look at them now they seem kind of ugly.

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    1. It would be hard to say which was uglier, the Rambler Marlin or the AMC Pacer, which always struck me as the car Fred Flintstone would drive.

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      1. My Grandparents always drove an AMC Rambler which was not as ugly as a Pacer or a Marlin. They liked Ramblers because the front seats could be put all the way down to match with the back seats forming a bed. They slept in their car when traveling and had a tent-like enclosure they attached to the side of the car as a place to change their clothes.

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      2. Another AMC car I remember is the tiny two seater called the Metropolitan. It was a very small box shaped car with barely enough room for two people and no back seat. A high school friend of mine owned a Metropolitan which we decorated for use in a parade.

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        1. I do remember the Marlin and the Metropolitan. I kind fo liked the Metropolitan: Like Mr. Bean, I have a thing about tiny cars. Love the new little “town cars.” I don not think I would really drive one. They look very unsafe at any speed. But my wife could not get in and out of it, so it would not happen.

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      3. The only cars I ever really coveted were an Amphicar- those little vehicles that would drive on land or water- or a bullet- nosed Studebaker. Never even came close to owning either one. I’m sure that both would have been a major pain in the butt, but there you are. A Metropolitan would be a close second, though.

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        1. I was car shopping once and looked at a ‘LeCar’. Opened the door and a chunk of paint about 4″ square popped off the bottom corner. That was warning #1. Then I looked at the spare tire tucked under the hook on top of the engine (Warning #2) and I thought ‘What the heck are you doing Ben?’
          Didn’t buy the LeCar…

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  4. I was never much for fashion (which is ludicrous understatement), but I had a party outfit in 1970 that was iconic: grey polyester bell bottoms (tight in the butt, flaring wildly at the hem) and a form-fitting printed shirt that looked a lot like the Sergeant Pepper album, with hundreds of little figures. I think I wore the top two buttons of that shirt open to show chest hair. My hat in those days was a Navajo Reservation sort of thing with a big feather in the band.

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    2. Back in the early ’70s, I made and wore my own western-style shirts. Loosely styled on the shirts worn by the cowboy stars of ’40s and ’50s movies and TV, they featured all the usual tropes of western styling- shaped and piped yokes and cuffs, curved slash pockets with little arrowheads at the ends, and mother-of-pearl snaps. The ones available at that time were mostly shiny satin and not at all ironic. Mine employed unorthodox fabrics and colors, like Hawaiian prints and odd overall patterns of carrots and eggplants. I had a red and green Christmas cowboy shirt that was stolen right off the clothesline.
      The thing is, if I still had any of them, and if they still fit, I’d probably still wear them.

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      1. Too bad you don’t, bill, I’d love to see them. They sound like quite the fashion statement; to have one stolen right off the clothesline, what better compliment could anyone pay you?

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        1. The key word, then and now, is “ironic.” I can’t seriously countenance fashion except ironically.

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      4. Bill, you may have just given me an inspiration for something to stock an Etsy shop with….

        Peas and carrots cowboy shirts, strawberries and cream 50’s style housedresses.

        I promise to give you credit (or a free shirt) if this makes me rich 😉

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        1. MIG, you are welcome to exploit the idea any way you can. Good luck with making your fortune doing piece work. On the other hand, there are many more interesting prints now than there were in the ’70s. Maybe you can develop the patterns and fabric combos and farm out the construction.
          I’d like a robot print for my cowboy shirt…

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      1. OT- sort of. I’d like to suggest that baboons dig out a couple of old photos and bring to the book club meeting at Steve’s to prove either past glory or former weirdness. Somehow I can envision much hilarity ensuing.

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    4. I work with a fine young man who claims he was born too late, and laments that he was not alive in the ’70’s. I told him today that he didn’t miss much. I wonder – if I show him this conversation thread, will it convince him?

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      1. The hair was atrocious. The clothes fussy and uncomfortable. (Ugleeeee) The students unteachable, but they were dynamic and passionate. My best former fb friends are all from the 70’s. We did some wonderful special things in school, learning-based things, no one would do today. But the kids were unteachable, kind of like today.
        And by the way, the 70’s ended about 1977.

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  5. Morning all! My very first car was a Datsun 610, purchased used when I was living in Northfield. She was old when I bought her and within a couple of years had some pretty good rust on her. My wasband sanded down the spots and painted some gray colored primer over the spots. Then, for reasons I can’t remember, he didn’t paint over the gray spots with light blue to match the rest of her until about 8 months later. I drove this car all over. The kids in the youth group I was working with said the car looked like she had blackheads. Ick. And no, I don’t remember why I didn’t take things into my own hands and do it myself — I haven’t a clue what I was thinking.

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  6. Morning–
    It was my older brother that had the platform shoes and silk shirts and I thought he was pretty cool looking.
    I was the one who asked for red pants. Wore them once I think… except for the fact I looked ridiculous they were OK!
    Oh, just remembered I also wore them as a costume in a play. We were all supposed to wear red shorts and I was more embarrassed about my white legs then the red pants.

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    2. Wow!
      So, even during the wedding ceremony, you looked over at Wasband #1 and thought … Eh? That sounds like a very sad place to be.

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  8. Ah, the 1980s, that fashion slough of despond. I actually owned one of those Flashdance sweatshirts, a Thriller-era Michael Jackson inspired asymmetric shirt (red, with silver pyramid studs), a couple of neon t-shirts (which is a real “what was I thinking?” now, since I rarely wear anything but black), and then there were the heavy metal t-shirts, which I didn’t always get away with wearing at parochial school. I was an Iron Maiden and Judas Priest fan in those days. Fairly recently the lead singer of Judas Priest came out as gay, which made me a lot happier about my taste in musicians, if not in music. Oh, yeah, and then there was the entire genre of cyberpunk. “Max Headroom” is out on DVD and still fun, but most of the novels are so painfully dated and in retrospect so clueless about what technology is really capable of. Some people are trying to revive cyberpunk, and to them I say, it’s over, just let it go.

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  9. Dale, can we have a photo gallery day for photos of all these? Photos of the Clothing (!) or you with your Car…
    I’d help if you need people to send them to me first or something.

    I can remember wearing 3″ high heels when in college and maybe first year out in the world. Now I can’t even imagine walking in them.

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  10. Most of the clothes in my closet! I really don’t enjoy clothes shopping, and rarely go. Most of what’s in there is at least 15 years old, and hardly any of it fits. Maybe it’s time for a purple muumuu and a red hat.

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  12. When I was a child, highly decorated sheet cakes from grocery store bakeries always seemed to hold such promise, but disappointed with the first bite.

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    2. I don’t think I ever got the Barbie cake I thought I should have…..

      Grocery store frosting is such a let-down-wonder how Barbie would look with a dress made of the 7-minute frosting my mom always used for birthday cakes……

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  13. Ah…the Marlin…the ‘pre-Javelin’…love it! I’ve always been a fan of style over horsepower. Karmann Ghia’s had only a tiny little VW engine in them but they look(ed) soooo cooooo! The Amphicar! Goofy looking thing but it’s a car that’s a boat…you can even see the propellors under the rear bumper…how cool is that?!

    I had a bout of ‘geez, this was cool when i was a kid but, wow, it’s bad now.’ When I was a kid in 1972/73, there was a television program on NBC that I thought was the coolest thing ever. It was a show called, “Search.” The premise was that there were detectives that were hot-wired with a little camera gizmo to a fully computerized research team. They had a rotating lead (like the NBC Mystery Movie) of Hugh O’Brien, Tony Franciosa, and Doug McClure with Burgess Meredith being a constant as the head of the computer team. I LOVED this show. I recently found that the pilot is now available from Warner Bros website. I couldn’t order it fast enough. It was a fond trip down memory lane but it was dated and plot holes really took me out of the moment. I guess some things are better remembered when you’re 6 years old…

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        2. I didn’t remember much about the Hawk myself. I checked on it and found that it’s was not like the Karmann Ghia in one way. It had a very large engine. I liked it for it’s styling which was ahead of it’s time.

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      2. My grandfather had a Karmann Ghia (never knew this was how it was spelled). He raced it (amateur racing) and I remember it had lots and lots of chrome. This car got polished and polished… even the engine was clean and polished (Pappy had a little OCD. OK maybe a lot of OCD.) None of the grandkids got to ride it in ever – not even once!

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        1. My sister’s first wasband (who happened to be our next-door neighbor when we were growing up) came to visit Hans and me about 28 years ago. He was a carpenter and had been working construction jobs in various places in the U.S. for a few months. Before returning to Denmark (before he subsequently emigrated to Tanzania) he came to visit us for a couple of weeks. When he left, he left behind a Karman Ghia that he had purchased somewhere along the line. He expected us to sell it for him, and forward the proceeds to him. (We had had the exact same experience with two other Danish visitors who purchased cars here, and then expected us to get rid of them after they left! I’m still scratching my head over this. How did that happen?) Anyway, we managed to sell Kurt’s Karman Ghia to the third person who came to inspect it, a middle aged man looking for a car for his daughter, for considerably less than Kurt had expected for it. After we sent him what little was left over after we had deducted the expenses incurred putting ads in the paper and whatnot, he never spoke to us again. A few years later Kurt died suddenly in Tanzania, apparently poisoned by the wife of his business partner. My sister went to Kurt’s funeral, a very formal and lengthy affair, complete with Masai warriors, made longer by the fact that when it came time to lower the coffin into the ground they discovered that the hole dug for the coffin wasn’t long enough. Why am I telling you all of this? Blame it on the Karman Ghia! Kurt is resting, I’m assuming, peacefully in Tanzania now.

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  14. Speaking of clothing, there’s this jacket.
    I’ve had this jacket for years. It’s the jacket I grab 90% of the time. Perfect from 50 degrees to 10 degrees.It even has my name on it. It used to have a business logo on the back but that wore off years ago. It was comfortable, shed water and had the perfect collar to clip a bindler clip to so I was like MacGyver; ready for anything!

    I got this jacket when I bought my first tractor. The dealer threw it in. That was 1987. So this jacket has seen better days. But still, fall rolled around, I grabbed this jacket without thinking too much about it.

    And then one day this winter I took it of at work and couldn’t find it again. And I mentioned to a coworker that I couldn’t find my jacket. And he said ‘you mean that old ripped one?’ And that was it. It was tainted.
    I still loved this jacket; still wore it all the time. But now I was self conscious about it. Because now it was “…that ripped jacket”. And I tried different jackets over the years. I have several others in the closet. But none feel or fit like this one; the ‘ripped’ one.

    And now I traded off that tractor. And it was time to take off the jacket. But I wasn’t happy about it. I burned it in a little ceremony. Had a pyre. A pyre of fire.

    And now I just wear a coat.

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    1. Great memorial to a fondly remembered garment. As I read it, I was fully expecting that the ending would be that your wife had “accidentally” retired it. I’m glad you got to say goodbye in your own fiery way.

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    2. Ben, I had a favorite jacket that worked well for me for many years. I got it while I was an Explorer Boy Scout. It was a heavy red wool shirt/jacket that I wore for a very long time and I still have it stored away. I wasn’t too heavily involved in the Explorers and didn’t have any of their patches on the jacket. It is made out of a very sturdy woolen cloth that hardly shows any wear after many years of duty. It has sort of a square cut that fits the boy scout style and is not very stylish, but not too far out of style. I probably should get rid of it because I am not as slender as i once was and it is a little too small to fit me these days.

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    3. I had a frat brother at U of Chi who for two years studied only two sets of clothes, cut-offs (when no one wore cut-offs) and TShirt. He kept them very clean, by the way. So when he graduated, we had a funeral raft/pyre on Lake Michigan at 2 a.m. We thought the cops would come along, but they didn’t. Great night, that night.

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  15. Since there seems to be a clothes theme going here…
    The blue 1″ check gingham bicentennial dress I made in home ec. Ran across that in a box from my parents’ house not that long ago.

    After all those opera frocks in my history, I have to work really hard at forgiving myself, for I knew not what I did.

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  16. Greetings! Ye gads — high school fashion in the 70’s. All those bell bottom jeans {extra long to scuff the ground}. I usually bought men’s jeans to get the length I needed. I never had the money to buy fashion clothes, but I did manage to sew a few. I remember a pair of high waisted, bell bottom, cuffed plaid pants I sewed for myself. Loved them — mainly because they actually fit at my waist and were long enough. A bright, lovely lime green plaid that I would detest now.

    In my disco days I sewed myself a sexy, black satin, zip-up pant suit for dancing. Definitely a hooker outfit today. I still don’t know how I danced all night in 2-3 inch heels as I always had bad knees. I always envied the sexy, beautiful polyester/lycra dresses all the other girls wore out to discos. Thank god we have simpler times and a more classic sense of style.

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  17. A charming OT tale: my wife and her friend Lori have a mutual friend Gert, who turns 95 this month. Gert is very sharp and lives in asenior housing independent apartment. Lori told Gert that she was going to give Gert a 95th birthday party. Gert cried and said that Lori did not have to do that, that Lori had given her a wonderful party 5 years ago. “No, No, No,” Gert said. Lori said she was going to give the party but wanted Get’s help on whom to invite. At that point Gert took a guest list out of her purse and handed it to Lori.

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  18. My previous apartment, haha. If only I had known it had leaky windows, flooded easily, and was ridiculously simple to break into. It had a great layout though.

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