As much as I’d love to, I can’t recall ever seeing a lavender LeBaron out in the wild, so I think this just may be a combination of poor color printing fidelity, scanner color fidelity, age, and, oh, Mercury being in retrograde or some shit. If we look at the list of available colors, I don’t see any that look like a metallic lavender. Even if we look for colors that may have been poorly reproduced, it’s still hard to figure out. The white? Ehhh, I don’t think so. Maybe that Light Heather Gray Metallic – actually, that’s probably the one, but I’m going mostly by name and brightness, as it looks like a bruise-green here. But, none of this can stop you from imagining a lovely metallic lavender – perhaps even periwinkle – LeBaron if you so choose. But there’s something else really weird about this Diplomat. It has both the wraparound side marker lights of the Diplomat up front…but also the separate side marker light of the LeBaron. I did notice this in the brochure as well, but not on any real pictures of an ’80 Diplo. Maybe like this sidelight, that color never made the final cut. Chrysler did have a sort of lavender in the late 50’s / early 60s. My grandmother had a ’59 New Yorker 4-door hardtop exactly like this one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1959_Chrysler_New_Yorker_%2818855386109%29.jpg THIS is lavender: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ebayimg.com%2F00%2Fs%2FNjAwWDgwMA%3D%3D%2Fz%2F6noAAOSw1-5bCA~h%2F%24_86.JPG&f=1&nofb=1 Okay technically it’s Ford Amethyst (ICI X-XSC2346.) Also, it’s a Dodge Diplomat, as used heavily by the cops throughout the ’80s and into the early ’90s depending on the department’s budget. Still an M-body though. But there’s something else really weird about this Diplomat. It has both the wraparound side marker lights of the Diplomat up front…but also the separate side marker light of the LeBaron. I did notice this in the brochure as well, but not on any real pictures of an ’80 Diplo. Maybe like this sidelight, that color never made the final cut. Chrysler did have a sort of lavender in the late 50’s / early 60s. My grandmother had a ’59 New Yorker 4-door hardtop exactly like this one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1959_Chrysler_New_Yorker_%2818855386109%29.jpg Turns out my dad had bought it as a “project” for the two of us. It had been left in an impound lot following an accident and nobody claimed it. Upon hearing the engine run (225 slant six! Leaning tower of power baby!), and seeing the relatively low miles, my dad (who worked for the towing company) decided it would make a nice set of wheels for me and I could learn some things along the way. Boy did I. Upon first glance the car had been in a minor frontal collision. Bumper pushed in, right side fender mashed, front header panel in need of replacement. Huge spider web crack in the windshield in front of the driver. Driver side door window glass was missing, or rather there were small bits of it left from it shattering. There was some minor damage to the chrome trim on the drivers side B pillar and interior trim – a couple of holes but nothing major. The bench seat was gone, and the carpet was pretty nasty. I figured the driver put their head through the window and shattered it, and then bled all over creation. Since they never claimed the car from the impound I figured the owner might have died. I was kind of right. The first thing we did was rip out the bloody carpet and padding, and it was a shitshow. I popped out the floor drain plugs, and nearly vomited many times as I hosed out the blood and maggots from the interior. I was told the car had sat a “few weeks” like it was so I wasn’t too surprised at how disgusting it was. Once the carpet was removed and the floor pan was clean, the interior was in remarkably good condition. We then tackled the parts that needed replacing. We scoured junk yards for any similar year LeBarons, but could also use some parts off of Diplomats and Fifth Avenues. This is when I was first introduced to the you pull it concept, and it was pretty fun for 16 year old me. We replaced the front bumper, the drivers side glass, the whole grill and headlight assembly, pulled some power bucket seats out of a Fifth Ave, and got a great set of Crager mag wheels all out of the junkyard for just a few bucks. We stripped the exterior of most of the gawdy chrome trim, and did what little body work the rest of the car needed. We primed the car in our driveway, sanded it, taped most of it, then drove it 10 miles to a Maaco while sitting on a milk crate (hadn’t gotten the new seats yet) to get it painted for about $200. With a shiny new paint job, less chrome trim, and a nice set of wheels I wound up with a pretty unique car to drive my senior year of HS and first two years of college. It was a reddish color, and a Mopar, so my friends and I used to joke and call it Christine and “death on wheels”. It was never cool, but by the early ’90s these cars were pretty rare (and rare in this case does not mean valuable). I drove it for a couple years, sold it, graduated college, got married, and moved to a different city. One weekend dad came to visit us and after a few drinks decided to tell me this: “If your mom had known the truth she never would have let me bring that car home.” They were divorced at that point so he didn’t care what she thought anymore. So the day he heard that car running in the impound lot, it had been sitting there for over six months. There were blankets over the seat, so you could sit in it if you wanted, but nobody in the lot wanted anything to do with it because it hadn’t been cleaned at all. Because it was a crime scene. It turns out the owner had rammed the car into something, but didn’t hit whatever it was with enough force to hurt himself so he then pulled out a shotgun and finished the job. In the car. That’s why the drivers door window was missing. The damage to the chrome trim and the damage on the inside of the door was from the shotgun blast. I had been joking for years that the owner had died in the car, but it turns out THE OWNER ACTUALLY DID DIE IN THE CAR. The seat was out of it when I first saw it because dad had already removed it. He also apparently did his best Jules impression from Pulp Fiction and was on brain detail so all I saw of the aftermath was some blood when I removed the carpet. So that’s a thing you know now about a 1981 Chrysler LeBaron. It’s been 30 years since I got that car, and 25 since I sold it, but I’ll be still getting mileage out of the story for a long time to come. 00127 – Metallic Wonder Bread 00184 – Metallic Used PH Testing Strip 00929 – Metallic Dignity Loss 00643 – BLARGH Metal Flake 00429 – Metallic White Paternity Suit 00666 – Metallic Possessed Eyeballs 00541 – Metallic This is What All The Kids Are Driving These Days 00989 – Metallic Stereotypical TV Coroner Who Is Always Eating a Sandwich 00112 – It’s Supposed to be White. We Tried. (Sorry to ruin your tweed-painted Land Rover fantasy, but it’s not often I get to point out something technical on this site, so I had to make the most of it.)
