When I Was A Kid, I Thought A Lincoln Was Exotic

In my boyhood, I liked to collect things: Hot Wheels cars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures, cheap plastic watches, Lego City sets, basketball cards, and diecast model cars. There also was one thing I collected that didn’t cost anything or take up space: car counts. When I was in middle school in the 1990s, I kept a mental tally of how many vehicles from a certain brand I saw. For some reason, any model from Lincoln was a rare sight, so even though they weren’t V-12-powered Italian supercars, they were exotic to me.

Looking back, it somewhat makes sense. My collecting mentality has always been to grow the collection; even though the cars I spotted weren’t mine, I could add to the tally in my head. Fords and Chevys were easy to come by. My parents drove a series of Toyota Cressidas and 4Runners, so they were familiar to me. One family in my neighborhood had two 1980s Audis in their driveway. The more I counted, the more I became aware of which brand had no marks on my mental chalkboard: Lincoln.

As much as I looked out the windows of the bus on the way to school, I just couldn’t spot a significant amount of Town Cars, Continentals, or Mark VIIIs. I had more luck when I was riding in the car with my parents and they passed by a Lincoln dealership — I had no idea how many cars were inside, but my go-to number was 300.

Then, one day after I got off the school bus to take the short walk home, I had an opportunity to see a second-generation Lincoln Town Car up close. Someone had parked it on the street in front of a house close to my bus stop. I can’t recall which exact model year it was from, but history shows that that version of the Town Car was built between 1990-97 and powered by a 5.0-liter V-8 for 1990, then a 4.6-liter unit every year after that. I approached the Town Car with a combination of excitement and paranoia: I wanted to ogle its gentle lines and cushy leather interior from every angle as much as possible, but I also didn’t want anyone to think I was some young punk that was going vandalize or steal it.

Luckily, nobody shouted at me to step back from the car to spoil my viewing experience. I don’t remember seeing many Lincolns after that, but it was just as well because seeing one as a blur on the highway wouldn’t have compared to my solo walk-around of one anyway. It’s too bad I didn’t count Lincolns after the Navigator came out because my numbers would’ve gone way up.