For all its embarrassments (just think Mercury Grand Marquis), we’re sure the U.S. car industry considers the late ‘70s a time ripe for some Stalinist revisionism. Here was the era when formerly broad-shouldered U.S. cars first sought a cheap way of competing with their Japanese counterparts by adopting bizarre aspects of their nipi-zoid styling. It was also an era when GM diesels smoked and chattered like tipsy mahjong groups, and every make in the General's lineup from Chevrolet to Cadillac sported a model big enough to fit a heli-pad on its rear deck. Not that Ford was any better. Nor Chrysler. Remember the Lincoln Versailles? Or the Corinthian-leather-lined Chrysler Cordoba? “It’s amazing how well your 1979 Ford Granada compares to our Mercedes-Benz,” said the German engineers in a FoMoCo ad. Maybe – but just try getting some hot girl in bed because you drove one. Small wonder then some of us chose this time to remember what cars used to look like by going to antique car shows.

Of course, antique car shows have their own set of trim levels, the most famous being the Concours d’Elegances traditionally held on lawns not unfamiliar with polo ponies. These are generally held at automobile shows or after racing competitions. Notable Concours d'Elegances include the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, the Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance, the Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance, and the Louis Vuitton Classic in midtown Manhattan. It’s at these where you’re most likely to see a blindingly perfect maroon-on-black 1954 Facel Vega FVS, a surpassingly mint postwar MG TC or a 1961 Maserati Quattroporte looking as it might appear in the mind of God.

Then there the far more familiar antique and classic car show  that the rest of us flock to at raceways, speedways, county fairgrounds, or – as we recall the last one attended – the parking lot of a strip mall.

This thing came and went like a summer storm, or some  evanescent, internet-generated meet-up. We don’t know whether or not the fact that this was a strip mall with a strip club had anything to do with it, but here the cars seemed to flaunt their work-in-progress states of imperfection while the sun glinted off chrome-plated cylinder heads and furled tail-pipe extensions. Here was a bathtub Hudson (rather than one of the old Porsches you'd find at a true concours bearing the same lavatory-related sobriquet) with an interior as ramshackle as depression-era pool hall, and there a roll-bar-equipped Chevy II Nova still spotted with primer.  On the far end of the lot stood a vehicle that looked like it resulted from an abomination occurring between  an AutoCar Diesel and a Dodge LaFemme. Needless to say it was waay ugly; but this was no Concours – and we weren't there to judge.