Luxury, but not Limited
Dear Classic American,
I really enjoyed reading your station wagon special, especially the feature on Darren Grimes’ Country Squire wagon. What a car – and one that’s been cherished by one family over four generations is surely unique in the UK. How many other cars in this country have been handed down from generation to generation like that, I wonder? Not many I bet.
I particularly have a soft spot for late Sixties and early Seventies as I grew up in New England in that period when my parents worked at a university in Vermont (Middlebury) and we had a whole host of LTDs and Country Squires that me and my sister enjoyed being driven around in by my parents. The LTDs certainly seemed luxurious at the time, equipped as they were with air conditioning, eight-track stereo and Cruise Control, something that seemed impossibly high tech at the time. My father eventually moved back to the UK and, although he considered shipping back the LTD we had at that time, ultimately decided that buying a British Granada would be more sensible. My sister and I were not impressed with the beige horror our beautiful Gold LTD was replaced with!
The one thing I was always puzzled by was the fact that those Fords were called ‘LTDs’ or ‘Limiteds’ when the number of them on the roads at the time suggested they were anything but limited; in fact there seemed to be more LTDs than Galaxies or the other lesser ‘Plain Jane’ models! Matthias Bruener
Virginia Water, Surrey
Darren’s story struck a chord with a lot of readers, especially the fact that Ford wagon had been enjoyed by four generations of the same family and its remarkable original condition. Amazing that almost half a century later it’s still being used for what it was originally designed for: taking families on fantastic road trips! As for the LTD designation, there is a school of thought that believes the LTD moniker is just an abbreviation of ‘Luxury Transport Division’ or some variation thereof and doesn’t refer to limited production numbers at all…