Terry Luke

The start of my love affair with Cadillac Limousines

My First Cadillac: 1956 Series 75 (Limousine)

My current Cadillac represents my fourth limousine. I purchased my first Cadillac at the age of 18 for $600. It ran and everything and it was even a limousine! I drove it for a year then had to sell it to go on a mission to Germany for my church.

I wasn’t into taking pictures back then so the picture on the right is my only one of my 1956 Cadillac and me just days after I purchased it. Although the car was only 13 years old at the time, it had a lot of rust. It was a California car but from the coast. The salty ocean spray had rusted a small hole clean through the outer panel of the passenger front door about the size of a shirt button. Other than that it was in fairly good shape. The paint looked pretty shiny after a good polishing and the bumper rust was minimal after chrome polish and a lot of good old elbow grease. The interior was great.

The air conditioning didn’t work so I went to the junk yard and pulled a compressor out of a wrecked Cadillac and installed it. My local shop charged it up and it worked. Cold air blowing out of 6 vents in the headliner was a wonder to me.

The salt air had also done a number on many of the electrical connections and I spent many hours tracking down corroded connections to get the interior lights, windows and other gadgets to work. I’ve spent a lot of time on my current Cadillac doing exactly the same thing, only it was a lot worse. After all, it’s now 69 years old.

1955 Cadillac 75 Series

Three years after selling the ’56 I purchased a 1955 that didn’t run. I rebuilt the engine, painted it a root beer color, reupholstered the interior myself while going to college. I found a limo in the junkyard that had the dividing glass partition. It had been totaled in an accident so the divider window was shattered, but intact. I took it home and had a plexiglass window created from the cracked glass as a template. It took some trimming to fit the different curved headliner from the car it came from but the width and the whole regulator assembly that lifted it up and down fit perfectly down to the screw holes. I also found the rear compartment radio controls (volume & channel changer). So with the divider window and rear controls made into a full-fledged limousine. I lost all of the pictures of the car after painting it a root beer color but it was stunning for a young man in his early 20’s.

After painting the car, it was time to redo the interior, which I did myself using my mom’s sewing machine. She helped on a few of the difficult areas where I was having trouble keeping the straight seem. The blue shoe box on the package tray was the stereo speaker (one on each side) which was temporary except it was still there when I sold the car.

Besides driving it to college and to work, I drove it to Vegas, to baseball tournaments in Idaho, Yellowstone Park in Montana, Mountain Man Rendezvous in Wyoming, Harrah’s Car Museum in Nevada, on scout camping trips and ski resorts in the Utah mountains, on dirt roads rabbit hunting and just about everywhere. I put 100K miles on a car that already had over 100K on it when I bought it. I drove it all week and spent weekends fixing all the things that went wrong with it during the week.

Just a few months after I had it up and running the throttle pressure linkage to the Hydramatic transmission stripped out. The shop pulled the transmission pan and big chunks of metal were sitting in it. I was told it needed to be rebuilt and would likely not last the month. I was a college student and didn’t have any money so I paid $45 to fix the linkage and had them put the pan back on. I then proceeded to drive it that 100K miles without another transmission problem.

My First Black Limousine

My third Cadillac was also a 1955 Series 75 limo and was practically given to me by a young man who couldn’t get it running and was leaving with his cousin back to New Mexico. He sold it to me for a song and even steered it as we towed it to my house behind my own limousine. That was a scene, a root beer limousine towing a black limousine through town. A few days later I got it running and drove it now and then until I sold it, not having the time or money to support two Cadillacs. As you can see in the image on the right, I ran out of garage space as well.

My First & Only Continental Mark II

My current Continental is my first Mark II, but I have wanted one all my life. As a teenager I worked as a bagger at the local Alberstson’s grocery store. My job was to wheel the cart full of groceries to the customers’ cars and load them into it. One weekly customer was a little old lady who drove a Mark II. I had never seen one before and immediately fell in love with its styling and luxuriousness. I constantly teased her, asking her to leave it to me in her will. Well, unless more than 50 years later that little old lady is still alive, she didn’t leave it to me!

I never saw another Mark II in real life until I purchased the one displayed on this web page and it was delivered from Indiana to my home in Utah.