Old Cars Reader Story
Story and photos by Chris Strasburg
Editor’s note: Upon seeing an image of his 1980 Oldsmobile 4-4-2 in Old Cars, owner Chris Strasburg submitted the accompanying photos and further details on the rare car.
It all started in the winter of 1980. On a boring Saturday afternoon, I accompanied my mom to the grocery store in the nearby city of Fort Atkinson, Wis. Luckily, next to the grocery store was Pfafflin Motors that sold Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac. I went to look at the cars and on the showroom floor there was a brand-new, leftover 1979 Hurst/Olds in white and gold. I instantly fell in love with that car. I really wanted to own it, but I was 15 and a sophomore in high school with a paper route. The car certainly was way out of my budget, but it left an impression on me and I knew someday I wanted one.
About two weeks later, as I was leaving school for the day, that same 1979 Hurst/Olds was sitting in our high school parking lot! I learned some lucky kid who was a junior in our high school got it.
In February 1980, about the same time I was dreaming about the ’79 Hurst/Olds, the 1980 Olds 4-4-2 I now own was rolling down the assembly line in Lansing, Mich. From there, it made its way to Lokey Oldsmobile in Clearwater, Fla., where Mr. Max Hopewell was waiting to take delivery. Max, an Oldsmobile salesman for more than 30 years, ordered the car as his personal demo when, as he put it, “we heard it would be the last of the 350-powered Cutlasses.” He used the car as his personal demo, then bought the car outright when it was taken out of demonstrative service. He said he had planned to keep the car forever, but, of course, life got in Max’s way and his wife eventually wanted a different car. So, Max sold the 1980 4-4-2 in the late ’90s with 9,000 miles on the odometer.
A smaller Olds 4-4-2
A new, downsized Oldsmobile Cutlass was introduced in 1978 as General Motors started a new life for its midsize models, the Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Malibu, Pontiac Grand Prix, Buick Regal and Oldsmobile Cutlass. The Hurst/Olds, a beefed-up version of the Cutlass, had been out of production since the end of the 1975 model year. In 1979, the Hurst/Olds made a brief return for one model year, then vanished until the 1983 model year. However, the like-natured 4-4-2 version of the Olds Cutlass soldiered on through the 1970s. As such, the 4-4-2 option package was offered on the newly downsized ’78 and ’79 Cutlasses, but was only offered on the fastback Cutlass Salon models rather than the formal-roofed Cutlass Calais (as on the 1979 Hurst/Olds), and the Salon-based 4-4-2s of 1978 and 1979 never used the Oldsmobile 350-cid V-8 engine.
The 1980 Olds 4-4-2 is very similar to the ’79 Hurst/Olds; both were based on the Cutlass Calais, both were available in the white-and-gold or black-and-gold color schemes, and both offered the four-barrel 350 Oldsmobile V-8. Unfortunately the Hurst His/Hers shifter was not carried over on the ’80 442.
A total of just 886 of the 4-4-2s were built in 1980, and if my information is correct, they were not certified to sell in California. In my years of tracking these 1980 4-4-2s, I’ve found a majority of them were sold new in Canada.
Finding and reviving a 4-4-2
In the fall of 2003, while searching for a ’79 Hurst/Olds like the one I remembered from high school, I came across Max’s original 1980 Oldsmobile 4-4-2 at the car corral of the Fall Jefferson (Wis.) car show and swap. When I saw the car, its body was in pretty good shape, but it had an engine knock. I checked the VIN and found it to be a legitimate ’80 4-4-2. When I had gone looking for a ’79 Hurst/Olds, I never dreamed I’d find a rarer 1980 4-4-2. I had to own it.
In the glove compartment of my new acquisition was a copy of the window sticker, the build sheet and the warranty booklet that had the original owner’s name on it. Those documents led me to Max, whom I wrote to shortly after I bought the car. It was from communicating with him that I learned the first 20 years of the car’s history.
Max said that when he sold the car in the late 1990s, “you could eat off the engine, it was so clean.” He lost track of the car until I contacted him shortly after I bought it in 2003.
During that brief period from the time Max sold the car to when I bought it in 2003, the 1980 Olds 4-4-2 had led a hard life. The front header panel had been replaced, probably following a minor accident, with an incorrect header panel from a ’80 Cutlass Supreme, which uses a waterfall-type grille. The damage was minor in that there was no structural damage to any metal or the frame. The car’s biggest problem was a lower-end engine knock. I bought the car at Fall Jefferson 2003. The gentleman I bought it from had bought it off eBay and had it shipped from Florida to Wisconsin. When it arrived, the person who sold it to him neglected to tell him it had a lower-end engine knock. So he decided to sell it and that is when I bought it.
The first thing I did that fall was pull the engine and have it rebuilt over winter. I wanted the engine rebuilt to the specs of a 1970 Olds W31. Paul at Weaver Auto Parts in Madison, Wis., did all the work. He bored it .030 over and installed 10-to-1 pistons and larger valves in the heads. I had the original Quadra-Jet carburetor re-jetted to handle the bigger cam, along with other work. I also installed true dual exhaust all the way back, but had the tail pipes exit in the factory location. I also had the Turbo HydraMatic 350 automatic transmission rebuilt by my friend, Mark Walker, who was a tech at Thorstad Chevrolet. He put a shift kit in the transmission along with a higher stall converter.
Then came the body. Since the car spent most of its life in Florida, the paint was pretty thin from the sun. At first I was just going to repaint the top of the body, but the body shop I worked with talked me into repainting the entire car. The body was stripped down to bare metal and we found the metal was very solid except for some rust at the inner part of the deck lid. I found a different deck lid in a salvage yard in western Nebraska.
I also had the task of finding the original-type Calais header panel, which I finally found in a salvage yard in Florida. The grilles, wheel opening mouldings and other chrome pieces currently on the car are NOS units I found. I had the wheels refurbished, the bumpers re-chromed, and sourced a stripe kit from Stencils and Stripes.
When I originally contacted Max, he was gracious enough to send me pictures of the 1980 Olds 4-4-2. At the conclusion of the letter he had written to accompany the photos, he wrote, “Have fun with my/our car and take care of it.” Thanks, Max—I did just that.
Love Oldsmobiles? Here are a few more articles for your reading enjoyment.
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