68 Chevelle Malibu

Hey, I love your site!

Attached are the only known photos of the '68 Malibu I bought for $250 in 1975 and sold in 1978. At the time, I lived in Hastings, Minnesota USA.

When I bought the car, it was ready for the junk heap. The previous owner had attached the muffler with a short length of flexible pipe. There wasn't anything else to the exhaust system; it ended under the front seat. The first or second time I took the car out to see what it would do, the muffler fell off and started a small fire in the ditch (we were on a country road, and the ditch was filled with tall grass).

The dome light lens was cracked when I bought the car. In one of my first euphoric visits to local junk yards, I found a matching dome lens (in an Oldsmobile, I think), but somebody had spray painted the inside of the lens red. I bought it and put it in place, and my car was forevermore known amongst my friends as "The Cathouse".

It had a factory 327HP and 3 speed automatic (TH350) floor shifter. I spun a bearing on the engine within 3 or 4 months of buying it, and dropped in a 283. After throwing a rod in the 283 a few years later, I sold it (sob) and have missed it ever since. When I threw the rod, the tow truck driver who came to get me - who happened to be the owner of the junk yard where I had bought the "Cathouse" dome lens several years earlier - stopped with me at a local bar and, um, convinced me to sell it to him for $300. One of the worst decisions of my life.

Tom Dobrick