Classic-car owners love to recount how they came by their prize possession, whether in a dusty old barn, inherited from a long-lost uncle or buried in the classified ads.
Few can top Charlie Merando’s tale. Acquiring his 1965 Chevy Corvair Monza 110 Sport Coupe got the Cold Spring resident reported to the police — by his wife.
Merando bought the car from a co-worker in Poughkeepsie 30 years ago, paying just $200 because it had a bad gas tank.
“I had another ’65 Corvair I bought from Nelsonville Mayor John Meyer, so I used its tank,” Merando said.
He actually had eight Corvairs in his yard at the time, which upset his wife and his neighbor. “So, they called the cops!” Soon after, he scrapped the surplus vehicles.
The car he purchased from his workmate had its original black paint, brown interior and about 65,000 miles on the odometer. He later painted it Nassau blue, converted the interior to light blue leather, and upgraded the air conditioning.
“Everything else’s original, including the push-button radio,” Merando said.
The aluminum, 164-cubic-inch, flat-six-cylinder engine is turbocharged and produces 110 horsepower. “The cylinders are opposed; they go sideways, not up and down” in the air-cooled engine, he explained.
He has taken the Corvair up to 75 mph; it was rated at up to 115 miles per hour in 1965. “When a car’s that old, I don’t doubt something’s going to fall out,” he said.
He estimates the vehicle gets 20 to 25 miles per gallon, just as it did 58 years ago. Gas cost 31 cents a gallon when it was built.
“It’s nice to drive; it has a two-speed automatic,” Merando said. “It floats a bit because with the engine in the back, air gets under the front end; people used to put sandbags up front.”
The rear-mounted engine meant good traction in snow. “I used to drive it to work in winter and it was excellent,” Merando said.
Now the car is stored each winter. The rest of the year Merando only takes it for Sunday drives and to car shows. Before modifying it, he brought home trophies two years running from the Corvair Show in Wilton, Connecticut, and has done well at shows in Cold Spring, Beacon and Bear Mountain State Park.
The Specs
Assembly: Ypsilanti, Michigan (plus five other North American cities)
Production period: 1960-69
Total production (1965): 235,500 (including 88,954 2-door sport coupes)
Engine: 110 horsepower, turbocharged, 164 cubic-inch flat six-cylinder; 140 horsepower, turbocharged, 230-cubic-inch flat six-cylinder
Transmission: 2-speed Powerglide automatic; 3- and 4-speed manual
Top speed: 115 mph
Gas mileage: 20 to 25 mpg
1965 Price: $2,671 ($26,098 today)
Merando is the car’s third owner. The original invoice shows it was purchased from Cochrane Chevrolet in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and included features such as a padded instrument panel, no-glare mirrors, two-speed windshield wipers, retractable seat belts and a spare wheel lock.
The Corvair broke ground when introduced in 1960. Sometimes called “the poor man’s Porsche,” it was the first production car with a turbocharged engine. Its sleek, wrap-around-the-body lines were Chevy’s answer to European compacts many considered sexier. Curbside Classics described the 1965 Corvair Monza as “the best European car ever made in America.”
Consumer activist Ralph Nader was less enthused. His 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, claimed Corvair’s swing-axle rear suspension was flawed, making handling difficult and the car more prone to rollovers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration later found no such handling problems, but the criticism went worldwide.
Although Chevy had redesigned the rear suspension before Nadar’s book came out and sold 235,500 of the 1965 model, his assertions and the advent of affordable muscle cars such as the Mustang, GTO and Camaro took their toll. By 1969, production had fallen to 6,000 units, spelling the end of a 10-year run that put more than 1.8 million Corvairs on the road.
I was 10 years old in 1965 when my parents bought a Corvair as their second car for mom. (Our first car was a 1962 Chevy.) It wasn’t the Monza, just the basic four-door model. We loved this car and ended up sequentially owning used Corvairs — 1967 and 1969 models — after that first one moved on.
Mom was a member of the Corvair Club for years, receiving all their catalogs and mailings. I learned to drive in those Corvairs in the early 1970s, then drove them all around Westchester and New York City, and sometimes borrowed them for trips to our upstate SUNY colleges (and associated Grateful Dead shows) throughout the decade.
The Corvair was a really fun car to drive, “sporty” and “peppy.” As mentioned in the column, its rear engine made it sure-footed in the snow, and with its light front end, it steered easily without power steering. Since the 1965 and later models had corrected the early axle (etc.) problems, we never had any of those issues.
The one Achilles’ heel of the car was its single fan belt and its complex path around the engine. We once missed getting to a wedding on time because the fan belt broke. We were carrying a spare — you had to — but getting it mounted correctly was a challenge.
My folks sold their third Corvair in the mid-1980s. After they’d downsized their commercial photography business and moved it into their house, and my sister and I had moved out, they no longer needed two cars. But those great Corvairs were the cars of my teens and 20s, and they remain a treasured memory.