BITTERSWEET TOWNIE
One of the very first rides I featured on this blog was a beat-down 4 door Olds Cutlass in gold with a missing grill. The car looked rough and ready; capable of jumping full-speed on to the highway, devouring small children, and smashing newer cars to smithereens with the slightest miscalculation in parallel parking. Well here is the same car in lovely condition!
Indeed this is the 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass Town Sedan in the rarely seen factory color Bittersweet Poly. The Town Sedan was the 4-door body style with the chrome post in between the front and rear doors as opposed to the wide-open hardtop. Both the '71 and '72 Cutlasses had the dual rectangle grill openings which continued in form as dual prominences emerging from the hood. I love the Cutlass from this era!
The easiest way to distinguish the '71 from the '72 is to look at the taillights; in '71 you see these 2 clean rectangles of red on each side while in '72 each of those rectangles would be divided into 3 smaller segments.
This Olds is wearing its original hubcaps and looks just about flawless overall. The design manages to retain some swoopy details like the exaggerated rear fender hump even though it is the dowdy sedan. Being a GM product this Cutlass is very similar to the same year Chevelle 4-door, though the sides, bumpers, and grills were different.
The missing trim along the rear door seems to be the only lost part of this ride which is pretty good for anything parked on the streets of Clinton Hill. This is the first time I've seen this color in person; when you run across an ad for the muscle car version of the Cutlass (the 442) in this hue it is a true rarity. To discover a less valuable body style in Bittersweet Poly in good shape is even rarer! Here's to hoping this thing continues rolling the city streets for another 43 years.
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