What stuck me about this particular Mercury wagon is the name: Meteor Montcalm. Something just feels weird about that combination. A Meteor and Mount Calm? It sounds like a strange fable about a a little sleepy Swiss town on a mountain that’s about to get wiped out by a meteor but they’re all too calm and lazy to give a shit and they end up a smoking crater except for like a little shepherd girl and her sheep. Is it just me? It’s a weird name, right? The thing was a tank, which explains why I inherited it when I got my driver’s license. It was actually reasonably fast with the 400 under the hood, though it handled like a large, fat, out-of-shape bovine. It wasn’t as cool as a Camaro or a Cutlass, but I could haul all my buddies around in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Joseph_de_Montcalm “However, he has also been much memorialized, especially in France, Quebec and parts of New York and Lower Michigan.” Meteor was a Ford brand in Canada. They made the Meteor Montcalm. Ford got rid of the Meteor brand with Mercury and just made Meteor a model and Montcalm a trim. Giving you the Mercury Meteor Montcalm. Today I Learned that Meteor was a brand in Canada. Thanks Yara! For Mercury, the Meteor brand was the cheaper option, and generally based on Ford models. It kind of phased in and out of being a separate brand – Ford was very much inconsistent on this front – but in general it was there to get Ford buyers in the Mercury dealerships. Because it was exclusively Canadian, you’d get names like Montcalm and Rideau to align with things Canadians had heard about, though they were annoyingly fixated on French places. For Ford, there was the Monarch brand, which was meant to get people in Ford dealerships to spend more money. These were based on Mercury models, so they had nicer trim than Fords and were more expensive. They were briefly replaced by Edsel in the market and then brought back after nobody liked Edsel. They sometimes had unique styling as well, I particularly like the rear end of the ’61 Monarch Montcalm. Ford was eventually able to combine them all – I think in the ’60s, since that seemed to be when the brands got discontinued and wrapped into existing model lines – and in the late ’90s got rid of Mercury in Canada, which happened before the end of Panther production, so you technically had the Ford Grand Marquis which still had full Mercury badging. This also resulted in weird Canadian Pontiacs which also had French names before the two chains were integrated – while Pontiac was a step up from Chevrolet in America, in Canada it was basically Chevrolets, but for people who had a Pontiac dealership. At one point in the ’80s America got one of these models – the Parisienne – because American Pontiac dealers wanted a Caprice and it was a quick and dirty way to get it. The Marquis de Montcalm was a French soldier who died in Quebec during the French and Indian War, so there’s a lot of stuff named after him. And I assume the Rideau was named after the Rideau River in Ontario. Still, juxtaposing “Meteor” and a word that includes “calm” just sounds weird. And the Rideau reminds me of the old Soviet Russia jokes: “In Soviet Russia, station wagon rides YOU!” There are weirder. Montcalm seems quite…umm..calm to me, to waft along sitting on a sofa watching the traffic in the distance over the length of the hood. Cheers! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKb9MWo67VE He sounds like the sort of guy who can pull off something like, “Hello. My name is Antonio. I will treat you like shit and you will love me for it.” My father traded it in on a 1973 BMW Bavaria. Surprisingly, the BMW dealer tried to sell it themselves and it sat on their used lot for months. We’d wave at it every time we drove by. Adam on the Rare Classic Cars YouTube channel did an explanation of these cars: https://youtu.be/rkF8cjH1vmY
