Passing It Down

This ’67 Plymouth Valiant Has Been in the Shannon Family for Three Generations, and It Just Keeps Getting Better.

- Christopher Campbell

“I never really thought I would still have that car 40 years later,” Stephen Shannon said with a laugh when we asked him what was behind his four-decade journey with this ’67 Valiant. Even after pondering it for a moment, there was no clear reason for it; it had just always been there. “I guess I’ve been in that car for most of my life,” Stephen added. But that’s just how it goes sometimes. When it comes to cars, we’ve noticed that rather than the flashy ones, the keepers tend to be the ones that were always there and always dependable like a member of the family. Those are the ones that get stories, memories, and life built around them. And then it just becomes a given thing that it will be there; selling it never even comes up because it would be like selling a friend, and you just don’t do that to friends.

When Stephen was just a little guy, the Valiant was the car that his grandparents drove around and took him places in. Unlike most Valiant buyers, when they picked out their new car at Melrose Motors in Oakland, California, they picked one of the few muscled packages available for the little A-Body. Most Valiants were four-door, most were six-cylinder, and most were automatic; this car was at the opposite end of that mundane spectrum. Sadly, no data we can find breaks down Valiant production number by options, but out of the 6,843 Valiant Signet two-door sedans built in 1967, it’s a very safe bet that a fraction of them were 273-equipped, and an even tinier fraction of those were four-speeds. Exactly why they went for it, no one seems to remember, but Stephen does remember that their other car was a V-8 four-speed as well, so we’ll just establish our theory that gramps and gran liked fun cars.