Junkyard Find: 1977 Dodge Aspen Station Wagon
Published: February 16th, 2016
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Everyone loves station wagons, right?We saw three junkyard station wagons last week (a 1980 Toyota Corolla, a 1982 AMC Eagle, and a 1984 Ford Escort), and now we’re going deeper into the Malaise Wagon Era with this San Francisco Bay Area Dodge Aspen
This one has a decade-old City of Berkeley residential parking permit for Area G, which happens to include the famous Chez Panisse restaurant.
Berkeley may be the most parking-ticket- and tow-away-happy city in California, with vast fleets of revenue-enhancing personnel searching around the clock for ways to turn parked cars into sweet, sweet money (many dollars of which are used for such city services as a sister-city program that links Berkeley with Uma Bawang and Mathopestad).There’s an excellent chance that this car ran out of luck, got towed, and was not rescued by an owner who didn’t have the hundreds or thousands of dollars needed to get it out of Car Jail.
Most of these cars came with Slant-6 engines, but this one has a 318- or 360-cubic-inch V8.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I grew up across the street from a white Aspen coupe, with T-tops. I thought it was kind of cool. Just needed a powerful V8. It was driven into the early 2000's, when the owner died and his daughter got rid of it.
Plymouth also offered a 2 door version in Duster trim. Most likely because the Duster name still had decent catche and they were one of the best selling cars of the 70's they decided to keep it. The louvered rear quarter windows gave it a nice non-landeau, malaise era flair. In the late 80's my family picked up a base model Aspen wagon in white with this same blue vinyl interior at the town auction. You figure the fleet cars would have the V8, HD suspension and the 15" slotted wheels but this car had the slant-6, a/c, AM radio and not much else. It was used by the building and water department for several years but had fairly low mileage. I welded up the hole in the rear quarter from the two-way radio, gave it a quick touch up and sold it to a friend of the family who was learning plumbing and needed a wagon type vehicle. They got a few years out of it which considering it was a Aspen above the norm.