Mark Oehm's 1967 Buick Riviera

My new pride and joy! This is the 3rd "67" Riviera in my life and by far the nicest.

I found this car on one of the auction sites out there about 2 months ago. It looked exactly like the 1st car I ever owned. The bid was not going as high as I've seen them before so I thought I'd put a bid in on the car of my dreams. I don't have a lot of money but my bid stood for the whole week until the last second. I want to say to all those people that sit until the last second to bid I know you don't care because its business to you but, you sure do know how to hurt a guy and crush his dreams. As you may have guessed this has happened to me before and happened again this time. I sent the owner an e-mail telling him if the high bidder backed out I would still honor my highest bid with cash. It turns out the e-mail address is a third party Internet car salesman and he said the car was still available but the owner wanted the big bucks. Well, I stewed and pouted for a few days and one night when I was just getting ready to delete the pictures of the car of my dreams off my screen saver I noticed something very small in one of the pictures. The "For Sale" sign in the window of the car had a phone number on it, now I knew the car was in the Seattle area so I tried attaching every Seattle area code with the number and low and behold, I called one of the area codes with the number and a very nice lady answered and I asked, "you wouldn't have a 67 Riviera for sale would you"? She said that would be my husband I'll let you talk to him.

We talked for well over an hour and it was more like an interview than anything. The owner was not going to sell this car to just anyone and he made this clear. As he put it, he put two and a half years of his life into this car and he really don't even want to sell it but his wife wanted him to. I passed the test and we settled on a price and I sent him a down payment check. The Riviera was mine!!!

The week prior to this I was bumped from a flight and had a free airline ticket anywhere, my tax return money was due any day, my wonderful wife said to buy the car because she was sick of me whining about it, this told me this car was truly meant to be mine.

My father in-law and I flew out to Seattle two weeks later (the longest two weeks of my life) and picked up the car. I decided to take a chance and drive it from Seattle,WA to Buffalo, NY because I had spent a little more on the car than I wanted to and couldn't afford to have it transported back.

I was very happy once I seen the car in person and gave the owner the balance on the car on the spot.

We left Seattle at 200PM on Saturday, February 24th and arrived in Buffalo on the 28th at 200PM. We took the northern route through WA,ID,MT,ND,MN,IL,OH,PA and NY. For everyone who hasn't driven across this beautiful country of ours I suggest you do it. I don't know if I would advise doing it in a 34 year old car in the dead of winter but do it. We only had one little problem in Erie, PA only 90 miles from home. The points were sticking due to driving at such a consistent speed for such a long time but other than that the trip was flawless.

I burned 177.11 Gallons of gas in a total of 2643 miles this means my Riv was getting almost 14.92 miles to the gallon. Not bad for a 455, huh?

I didn't mean to be so long winded but I've been meaning to write this all down and its a nasty, snowy day in Buffalo (imagine that) and I had a couple of hours to kill. I think you can probably tell the way I feel about this car.

A Riviera man in Buffalo,

Mark O.