Rick Glickman has been making an annual pilgrimage north from his Skokie, Ill., home to the Iola Old Car Show in tiny Iola, Wis., for about 35 years now.
So it’s somewhat fitting that the Oldsmobile-loving Glickman found his favorite car — a 1972 Cutlass Supreme convertible — during a visit to the show nearly 20 years ago. Since then car and owner have been constant companions and neither shows any sign of an impending breakup. Glickman vowed he’ll be back again in 2016 with his Olds ragtop, which now shows more than 220,000 miles on the odometer.
Glickman already had a Cutlass when he stumbled across his ragtop. The one he owned wasn’t exactly what he wanted, and he wasn’t convinced he would ever find a car that would check all the boxes.
“I had a ‘72 Cutlass convertible that belonged to a friend that I went to high school with in Louisville, Ky.,” he recalled. “I had it for a while and it had a bench seat and I was always on the lookout for another Viking Blue bucket seat car. So one time we were walking around in the Iola Swap Meet with some friends who always come with us and somebody said, ‘Hey, there’s a Viking Blue Cutlass’… but I didn’t see it. I was looking around, and he said, ‘No, right in front of us.’ So I looked up and right in front of us was this sandwich board with pictures of a blue Cutlass on it. So I tapped the guy on the shoulder. I found out it had bucket seats and a nice console, air conditioning. I said, ‘Hmm … does it have a Sport wheel?’ And he said, ‘Not a Sport wheel, a Tilt Sport wheel!” I said does it have power windows? He said, ‘And locks.” I said, OK, I wanna see the car.
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