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Junkyard Gem: 1957 Buick Special Riviera Sedan

While I find plenty of 1950s Detroit cars in quick-inventory-turnover self-service wrecking yards during my travels, they tend to be the ordinary post sedans that were built by the millions during the heyday of the three-on-the-tree manual transmission and nuclear-attack symbols on car radios. The more sought-after convertibles, coupes, and four-door hardtops are tougher to find in such yards, which makes today's 1957 Buick Special Riviera in a yard in northeastern Colorado an A-List Junkyard Gem. During the late 1950s, the Special ranked at the bottom of the Buick prestige hierarchy just below the more upscale Super and Century. Of course, this was the era of Alfred Sloan's "Ladder of Success" and the lowliest Special outranked even the nicest Olds Ninety-Eight on the Swank-O-Meter. If you were the Buick-driving Joneses and your neighbors had proletarian Chevrolets, aspirational Pontiacs, or petit-bourgeois Oldsmobiles, they were failing to keep up with you… but then you'd see a new Cadillac and feel intense envy for your victorious rival. The Ladder of Success collapsed later on, when the top-trim-level Chevy Caprices began to compete against their Cadillac Calais big brother, but it was still standing tall in 1957. The Riviera name ended up being used for its own distinct model starting in 1963 and continuing nearly into our current century, but in 1957 it was a trim level designation, used to indicate a Century or Special sedan with the then-radical pillarless hardtop design. This car listed at $2,780, which comes to a cool $27,630 in 2021 dollars. That price included the 364-cubic-inch (6.0-liter) Buick Nailhead V8 engine, rated at 250 horsepower and enough torque to peel 1957's rock-hard bias-ply tires right off their rims. The Special had a three-on-the-tree column-shift manual as standard equipment, but the original buyer of this car sprang for the extra $220 ($2,185 today) to get the Dynaflow transmission. While the shift indicator looks just like the ones on GM cars equipped with the two-speed Powerglide, the Dynaflow was an odd beast used only in Buicks; while it had gears for two forward speeds, the driver had to select low gear manually. Otherwise, a complex torque converter rig provided an experience something like today's CVTs (though with better smoothness and much more wasted power), in which the car stayed in high gear all the time and used the torque converter to multiply as needed.

Junkyard Gem: 1978 Buick Skylark Sedan

Around the time that OPEC shut off the oil taps, The General realized that it was time to sell more small cars from GM divisions not previously known for such machines. The logical candidate for this project was the Chevrolet Nova, a rear-wheel-drive compact that shared much of its chassis design with the Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird. The Nova-based Pontiac Ventura came out in the 1971 model year, and the Buick and Oldsmobile Divisions began producing their own badge-engineered Nova siblings for 1973 (Cadillac was late to the party, but eventually created the Nova-based Seville for 1976). At first, the Buickized Nova got Apollo badges, but the better-known Skylark name was applied to these cars for the 1975 through 1979 model years. Today's Junkyard Gem is one of those Nova-based Skylarks, found in a Denver self-serve yard. From the 1964 through 1972 model years, the Skylark lived on the A-Body chassis and was sibling to the Chevrolet Chevelle/Malibu, Pontiac LeMans/Tempest/GTO, and Oldsmobile Cutlass/442. After the 1975-1979 rear-wheel-drive X-Body phase, the Skylark name then went onto the unrelated front-wheel-dive X-Body chassis developed for the Chevrolet Citation. It's a Nova, sure, but Buick made sure that it had a bit more swank than its Chevy counterpart. Checked seat fabric with big square buttons! The base engine in the '78 Skylark was the 3.8-liter Buick V6, rated at 110 horsepower. GM had invested in a new crankshaft design for this engine the year before, so it no longer had the "odd-fire" cut-down V8 crankshaft that shook the fillings out of so many drivers' teeth in earlier years. An assortment of low-compression V8s from Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Buick were available as optional equipment as well, eventually leading to the "Chevymobile" lawsuits of a few years later. The base transmission in this car was a three-speed manual (I'm not sure if you could still get a three-on-the-tree column-shift manual Skylark in 1978, but a three-on-the-floor manual was available for sure). The very last three-on-the-tree car Americans could buy was the '79 Nova and its Olds Omega/Pontiac Phoenix siblings, while the final three-on-the-floor cars were the '81 Malibu and siblings. This car has the optional three-speed automatic.

Junkyard Gem: 2002 Buick Regal Joseph Abboud Edition

Ever since we saw that snazzy green 2000 Buick Regal GSE last month, with its supercharger and Monsoon Audio speakers, I've made it my junkyard-searching goal to find a genuine Joseph Abboud Edition Regal among the not-so-interesting Luminas and Vues in the GM sections of my local car graveyards. While this publication once stated that the Joseph Abboud Regal was "the low point of the brand" (in my view, the nadir was achieved with the Iron Duke-powered Skylarks of 1980-1985), my great love of designer-edition Detroit cars overrides any so-called rational opinions on the subject. It took less than three weeks of walking the aforementioned junkyard GM sections to find a Regal with the mark of the famous menswear company on the fenders. The heyday of designer-edition cars came during the 1970s, when Lincoln offered Continentals co-branded by Bill Blass, Givenchy, Pucci, and Cartier. At the same time, American Motors teamed up with Levi's and Oleg Cassini, and fashion-industry players continued to work with car manufacturers here and there after that time. It appears that the Abboud package got you nice leather seats with these monograms, plus the stylish fender badges. Otherwise, it was just a nicely-equipped but unspectacular late W-Body. For you GM trivia fans out there, the W platform stayed in production for an impressive near-three-decade span, from the 1988 Pontiac Grand Prix through the (fleet-only) 2016 Chevrolet Impala Limited. The final W-based Regals rolled off the assembly lines in 2005. This car has the 240-horsepower supercharged 3800 V6, so it's the GS version. You could get the Abboud package on the non-supercharged LS Regal as well. If you did, you got the better tires and suspension used on the GS. These Roots-type Eaton M90 blowers are by far the easiest superchargers to find and extract from a junkyard car. In fact, there's such a glut of these things at swap meets that the going price now hovers around 50 bucks. This car looks to have been in decent shape when it arrived in the junkyard. The original owner's manual was still in the glovebox when I found it. The 240-horse supercharged engine was Harley Earl's idea, turns out. He'd been dead since 1969, but that's a technicality. Some tips for selling the new Regal.