>And the vehicle involved was an '87 Cadillac Brougham,
>in a color that was probably marketed as 'gold' but looked 'beige' to
>me.

Oh, one of the music teachers here in town had one of those. I think hers was a Fleetwood Brougham from the previous year, but they were the same thing. I always remember how nice it smelled inside. Mrs. Nash's was black on black with a license plate frame that said MAFIA STAFF CAR.

>(Also it was -deeply- confusing to me that they'd contrived to put the
>gas cap behind the rear license plate; the first time I went to fill
>the thing took me a good several minutes before my grandfather clued
>me in where to look)

Heh, yeah, that was a General Motors Large Car thing for a lot of years. The Tempest, the Malibu I've mentioned earlier, the 1977 Caprice Classic we had for a while when I was a kid, the Toronado, that Pontiac I got from my grandparents, they all had that. Pretty sure the Impala does too. I think they finally had to stop doing it because of safety regulations—it makes the filler assembly vulnerable in a rear-end collision, although the tank itself is safely between the frame rails, unlike in say the Pinto—but I've always found it a really handy place to put that. Makes it so it doesn't matter which side of the car you approach the pumps from, which I'm sure was the idea behind doing it that way.

My favorite fuel filler is on the 1957 full-size* Chevrolets. It's behind the chrome trim on the back of the driver's side tail fin. There is zero visual indication that that piece of the chrome is a door; you just have to know.

>Unfortunately,
>this suspension had a resonant frequency, somehow - a resonant
>frequency that happened to -exactly- equal the inputs from the dips in
>the US-101 between Ventura and Santa Barbara when travelling at 75mph,
>the normal speed-of-traffic in that corridor.

An unhelpful observation at this remove in time, but: It sounds like it might've needed its dampers adjusted, which was a pretty common problem with Cadillacs of that period.

>Still. I got out of it without more than a bad scare, so the Land
>Yacht's enormous mass did manage to keep me safe, and that's what
>really counts in the end, no?

In a car like that, the crumple zone is the other car. :)

--G.
* not that there was any other kind in 1957. Well, except the Corvette, I guess.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.