Click on Imperial Margarine's picture for a full story like this with lots of photos.

Due to this, the HR manager informed me that her son-in-law had an Imperial for sale. It turned out to be a 1973 LeBaron. The fuselage cars had never held much interest for me, but it was really cheap, came from a reputable source, and curiosity got the better of me.

I beat the seller to the car, which was located in San Jose and looked it over. He started it up and I drove it.

I loved it and agreed that if the car could be driven to San Francisco, that I'd pay the $1000 asking price on the spot.

I lived on Treasure Island at the time. TI is a man-made island in the center of the SF-Bay Bridge that is a converted US Naval base. The car made it to the exit as agreed, and was promptly stopped and shut down with a geyser of steam coming from under the hood. I paid the seller, who left with his buddy, and I was left to my own devices to get the car the last 3 miles home down the hill and across the island. I let it cool, replaced the coolant, and drove it home. A new radiator cap solved the overheating problem right away.

I detailed and polished the paint, which is butter yellow, and it looked great. The car was immediately named "Imperial Margarine", after the food product that my wife always jokes about, as I gave her a really hard time for buying any competing product the first time that we went shopping as husband and wife. I have decided that "I can't believe it's not butter" just does not have the same cache as a car name to it and abandoned that one after trying to make it work. Imperial Margarine it now is.

I detailed the car, new belts and hoses were installed (including the all-important power steering pressure hose), and the car was ready to go.

It had been donated to the Salvation Army by the widow of the original owner and had been garaged its whole life. It had been treated sparingly and is in great condition. The transmission failed due to a bad rear output shaft gasket that failed, dumping trans fluid out of the case and causing the unit to burn its clutches. After that rebuild and some work on the exhaust leaks that developed, I have no complaints about the car.

Literature Collection
After having sold my initial 1960 LeBaron, I pined away for another and focused much of my energy to saving for one and in planning my eventual return to the stage of 1960 ownership. It was about this time in late 1999 that I joined the Imperial Mailing List. This list has been very inspirational to me, and is a well of knowledge that I find very educational. It was at this time that I started collecting Imperial literature collection in place of being able to work on a car (renting, no garage). I must credit the volunteer organization behind The Online Imperial Club. They are so well organized and have such a good base, that the website does not look like it is 100% volunteer, and these are the people that helped me to get my ad collection transferred into the digital domain and onto the website.

Back to the ad collection:
Another club member, Hugh Hemphill, owns a 1958 and was quite good at touting the merits of 1958's, ribbing everyone about how he owned the best year ever made and all of that jazz. To prove his point, he had submitted quite a bit of material for that year on the club website. I decided that my year's web page would just have to be at least a little better (it was pretty empty at that point in time), so I set out in search of 1960 Imperial ads. I found them, but kept running across other items of interest for other years, and started looking at all years of advertising and literature surrounding the Imperial division's products.

Imperial Print Advertising

The fruits of that effort came to be my collection of Imperial -related printed literature that I collected and donated to the "Imperials by Year" pages at The Online Imperial Club, along with others' donated items. I spent the most energy on 1960 initially, and as I write this, I still think of this page as the best one. There is a 1960 ad with two cops on motorcycles flanking a parked LeBaron.

• That one was the toughest to find. Once it came up, I got locked into a death-struggle with two other collectors and wound up with a $60 ad. That's the only really tough to get item that I had to over-pay for.

The 1960 LeBaron Dream Project
May of 2002 saw the fulfillment of another step closer to my dream. My wife, Elena and I bought our first house together. While we were l ooking, she was looking for the right place to make a home, while I was humorously rating houses by their "Imperial Factor". A house that was a 4 meant that I could fit 4 imperials on the property without having to park on the street. This was more out of humor than an actual desire to populate the property with cars, but I have noticed that the other members of the Imperial Mailing List, will, more often than not also own multiple cars, so perhaps this is thinking that some readers will understand.

The house that we bought has a 1.5 car garage (just not wide enough for 2 Imperials). It also has a side yard that opens up at the back, as the property is on a cul-de-sac and the lot is wedge shaped. Anyway, this side yard was the source of many gardening dreams for Elena. We moved into the place in early June 2002 and there was one spider web that was really thick that just kept getting rebuilt across the pathway entrance to the yard each time that we broke it to walk through. Come July 4th, we went out back to shoot off some rockets at night, and there was the spider on his newly re-made web that kept trying to block the little path. The good news is that his body was huge and scary looking! He had a wingspan of about a silver dollar, which is GIGANTIC for this area. The reason that this was such good news is that Elena is arachnophobic, and the side yard was immediately given up to whatever uses I had in mind. The stage was now set.

As we had been looking and I knew that a house was in the works, I started searching for a car that I could restore. This came in the form of two cars that were potted out that had just enough to make one car out of. The 1960 Imperial LeBaron 4-door Hardtop Southampton was a rare car, with only 999 made. This makes finding one a bit of a challenge. I wasn't about to wait for a restored car to come up that would cost $10-$18,000. I just don't have lots of cash to spend. I know how to be mechanical and knew that DIY is the only way to have a $20,000 car for $8,000 paid out over time with sweat-equity.

I bought a blue, loaded car from a guy in Wisconsin. He told his wife that if she could sell the car (it was in their storage shed for 10 years) that he'd give up his plans to restore it. Little did he know that she was computer literate, and I found her ad online by coincidence about 48 hours after she posted and ad for it. I bought it and shipped it here, only to find that the seller had not represented the rust problems of the car. The floorboards were rusted through, the trunk floor was rusted through, and there were parts of the rockers that were just-gone. You can't restore what isn't there, and this was most frustrating.

Subsequent to this, I answered a local ad for a different car and was told that the car was already sold. The car that I had asked about wound up with another Imperial lover, Henry Hopkins. Henry was in the process of restoring a 1960 convertible and had bought this car for parts. The one part that he needed from it was a body panel. I convinced him to sell me the car in return for the cost of a panel from Lowell Howe, the regional Imperial wrecker. I got the car shell from Henry for a song about a month later with all panels still intact and many of the parts that I already had on the blue car stripped by Henry, so some of the work was done for me already.

At this point in time the car from Henry went onto the driveway, and was stripped to its shell and frame. I sanded the body where paint is left and have sandblasted the frame and body. The car that Henry sold me is mint green and was in a junkyard in Marin since 1976. I tend to believe the 88,000 on the odometer. That time in Marin was tough on the paint. It seems to have just oxidized away, leaving metal to surface rust, which until I figured out how well a sand blaster works, was bedeviling me. I borrowed a sandblaster and will never fear rust again. I hope.