My Favorite Ride: This old-car mystery is not so hard to solve

This week's My Favorite Ride car mystery was an easy one to solve, nothing like the recent weeks-long debate about a rusted pile of metal in Yellowwood State Forest that turned out to be a 1950 Plymouth Super Deluxe.

Casting aside fanfare and doubt, I'm identifying right up front the car featured this week. It's a two-door, 4,700-pound, 19-foot-long 1978 Lincoln Continental Mark V. It's stored inside a closed car lot showroom near Bloomington.

Reader Frank Coffin has observed the car for years. One day, he stopped and took a picture, which he sent in an email challenging me to find out more.

Previous My Favorite Ride:Car mystery in Yellowwood State Forest solved. Did you guess correctly?

"So whose is it? Why is it there? Why has it remained there? Is it driven? What is its history? Is it for sale? There has to be a story. I know of no one better to find out than you."

I went to see the car, took a few photos through a plate-glass window, noticing the landau vinyl roof and cool oval opera windows in the back. I started checking around.

Before long, I was on the phone with Andy Long, the 38-year-old general manager and resident historian at Royal Chevrolet.

Turns out the car belonged to his great-grandfather, a man he never met but is connected to via a four-decades-old vehicle Hemmings Auto News said "was among the last of the no-holds-barred, full-size luxury cars, representing the pinnacle of American motoring at the time."

Ford Motor Co. produced the Mark V just three years, from 1977 through 1979, manufacturing 228,262 of them. The car is 230 inches long, with a front end that extends way out ahead of the driver.

On May 16, 1978, Charles Royal Sr. of El Paso, Texas, became the owner of one of them. His son, who owns the Royal car dealerships in Bloomington, arranged for the sale. They traded in a four-door 1978 Chrysler New Yorker Brougham with just 1,996 miles on the odometer for the new Lincoln. 

Under "salesman" on the bill of sale, the name is "Bettie B." Not many women were selling cars at dealerships in the 1970s.

Earlier:My Favorite Ride: Grandson hopes someone knows the whereabouts of a certain 1959 Impala

When Charles Royal Sr. died in the 1980s, his son brought the car to Bloomington. It's been in storage since, along with other cars that have caught the eye of Charles Royal Jr., known as Charlie, since he opened his Bloomington car sales business in 1969.

"Over the years, when he's seen a car come through he was interested in, he'd tell the general manager he wanted to keep that one," Long said.

An eclectic collection of trade-ins that didn't get parked on the lot for resale began.

The practice violated a tenet of Royal Jr.'s sales philosophy, one he often repeated to employees: "This ain't a parking lot. They're all for sale." 

Long sighed. "Everything's for sale except the ones where he breaks his own rule. If he said he wanted to put a car in storage, that was that. Old cars, cars that are money pits," he said.

This year, Long is overseeing a project to refurbish the cars his grandfather has stashed away. "We're going to spend some money, show these cars some love and get them back on the road," he said.

A 1967 Oldsmobile Cutlass, taken on trade in 1980 for a new Chevrolet Citation, was the first. It's light blue, on display at the dealership and not for sale.

His great-grandfather's Lincoln may be next in line.

"Of all the cars we've got, and we have a lot of cool stuff, that car has the most nostalgia for us," Long said. "I put a high value on these connections to our past, and this one is generations deep. We may say there's always a price, but not for this one."

Got a story to tell about a car or truck? Contact reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com, 812-331-4362 or 812-318-5967.