Everybody talks about the Mustang, the Camaro, the Chevelle. Nobody gives the Mark III its flowers, and that’s a failure of taste on a national scale.

There’s a whole class of American car that never made the glossy magazine covers, never got the restoration budget, and never got the respect, until somebody figured out you could get a twenty-foot land yacht for three grand and have the coolest thing in the parking lot.

Chrysler built the Newport for people who couldn’t quite reach the top shelf. Nobody planned for it to age into something worth chasing. That’s the whole point.

I’ve owned a handful of cars worth remembering and a few I’d rather forget. The one that still follows me around wasn’t the fastest or the prettiest. It just felt like something.