Tah-Dah!!!!
What? You’re under whelmed by the glory of the mid 1980’s Mercury Topaz? Okay, okay, I’ll admit, these cars weren’t anything spectacular, but I spotted this in a parking lot last week and realized that I hadn’t seen one in an even longer time than it had been since I had seen a Mitsubishi Starion or a Chrysler Conquest prior to that week. Though, who knows, perhaps there have been a whole bunch of Topaz’s around that I just didn’t see -after all, the ancient Greeks thought the topaz (the stone, not the car, of course) had supernatural powers that could render its wearer invisible if need be. They also thought it possessed medicinal properties that changed depending on the phase of the moon, treating ailments ranging from insomnia to severe bleeding. It was also thought that a topaz could aid in the detection of poison by changing color in its presence. The Topaz stone may be mythically powerful, but rest assured, a Mercury Topaz compact sedan is most likely capable of none of these things…. Well, maybe it can aid with treating insomnia -many a time I fell asleep while riding in the back seat of the Topaz my mother had when I was a kid.
The Mercury Topaz is the mechanical twin to the Ford Tempo, but had some better options. As my father used to say when there was still a Mercury brand in existence: “A Mercury is a Ford with the bolts tightened”. The Topaz debuted in 1983 as a 1984 model and was produced up through 1994, at which time it, and the Tempo were replaced by the Mercury Mystique and the Ford Contour (I have profiled a Contour in an older post if you care to dig that up). They are front wheel drive -though starting in 1987, could be had with AWD -compact cars, and were kind of like mini precursors to a vehicle that made a huge splash for Ford just a couple years later: the Ford Taurus and its twin with the bolts tightened, the Mercury Sable.
The Topaz had a couple of engine options. Usually, you’ll see the 2.3L I4 under the hood. In 1984, that 2.3L was tuned for 84 HP and 118 lb-ft of torque, which wasn’t anything to brag about, but pulled down decent mileage 27/41 city/hwy, and could scoot around the roughly 2,600 lb car with relative ease. For today we’ll concentrate on that 2.3L gasoline engine. Aside from what was under the hood, the Topaz featured 4 wheel independent suspension. In 1984, you could buy one for under $8,000. Check out the ad I found in that same Motor Trend magazine from yesterday’s post that had the Starion on its cover.
Here’s another ad from an old Car and Driver magazine I pulled from my library.
It was in 1985 that I first made the acquaintance of the Mercury Topaz. My father had been away on business in Granite Falls, MN with my mother’s 1971 Ford Torino coupe in green with black vinyl top, and came scooting home with a little red Topaz sedan. My dad had been out and about when he saw the brand new red Topaz with dealer plates on it zip past him and pull into the Ford lot. He thought the Topaz was a neat looking little rig and followed it into the Granite Falls Ford Mercury dealership. He approached the sales guy who had been driving it back to the dealership and made a deal. My dad got about $1,000 in trade in allowance for my mother’s ‘71 Torino with 171,000 miles on it -but a remarkably well maintained body -my mom and dad are at odds over how well the engine ran -my dad insists it had a consistent misfire, while my mom dismisses this claim and asserts that it ran like a top. My father made a tentative deal for the car, pending my mother’s reaction to the trading off of her Torino, which she loved enough that she traded in the 1968 Ford Fairlane 500 2 door in green with black painted roof that she bought brand new when she was just out of her undergrad years of college to get it.
I asked my mom what she thought when presented with the Topaz in lieu of her Torino. She said there were mixed emotions. She liked the Topaz well enough, and it was a nice little car to get around in. The fuel economy was certainly better than what her old Torino had been getting -as it should have been. She went from having a 302 V8 with 210 HP and 300 lb ft of torque to having an engine less than half that size with less than half the horsepower and torque. She did gain 2 more doors, and while my brother and sister and I were still little, we all fit pretty well into the back seat of the compact Topaz. Apparently, she liked it well enough that she didn’t send it back, though she did figure out who bought her old Torino from the Ford dealership and for a few years knew where it was and how it was being maintained -my mother is like me, she bonds with her cars.
This may be part of the reason why the prospect of getting married has never appealed to me. Aside from having to deal with inconveniences that go along with allowing a man to share the same abode, like toilet seats left up, I can say with certainty that I would have blown a gasket if a guy I was married to came home one day and announced that he traded off my car without consulting me. My dad probably thought he was doing the right thing, getting a new, safer, more economical car for his family…. and after all, he didn’t finalize the deal until after my mother approved of it…. But still, the Torino was my mom’s car, and to my thinking, she should have been the one calling the shots about if and when to trade it off. This trade did signify a nearly two decade long shift from Ford to Mercury products for my mother, though (not that there‘s much difference -aside from the whole bolt tightening thing my dad likes to joke about). After my siblings and I grew a bit, and the Topaz had racked up around 130-150,000 miles, my mom traded her little Topaz off for a brand new jet black Mercury Sable, which she eventually traded off for a newer green Sable some years after that before making the shift to a Jeep product for her daily driver. I’m glad to see that after the Topaz incident, my mom took more control in deciding what vehicles she drove.
For my part, I liked the Topaz when I was a child. I thought its red paint job looked sportier than the green Torino’s paint -I hadn’t yet developed my affinity for green cars-yet another thing I seem to have inherited from my mother. I remember the cloth upholstery had a red on red checkerboard pattern that gave me the impression that it was some type of race car. The noises that would come from the engine compartment contributed to that line of thinking as well, because the little 2.3L 4 banger had a higher pitch when it revved up to gain speed than the Torino had exhibited with its low growl -and it seemed like the Topaz required more revving to match the speed and acceleration that my mom was accustomed to with her Torino.
My mother’s Topaz had the 3 speed automatic in lieu of the available 5 speed manual that one could get. I’m at least partially to blame for the decision to get an auto instead of a manual thanks to an incident that occurred when I was 4 or 5 years old and spent an afternoon playing race car driver behind the wheel of a rusty little yellow Subaru coupe my dad had sitting in our driveway. When I wasn’t busy smooshing wads of Play-Doh into the lion design that was embossed into the plastics on the steering wheel hub to create my “commendation medals” - prizes I was awarded along with accolades of praise and admiration by various heads of state and important officials after winning races, defeating bad guys, and whatever other feats I could dream up doing in a race car; I spent my time that afternoon monkeying around with the various controls inside the vehicle, pretending I was piloting the 1982 Trans Am known as K.I.T.T. (Knight Industries Two Thousand!) from Knight Rider. At the age of four, I had enough imagination and ability to suspend my disbelief to get to the point where I could envision a rusted out yellow Subaru as a shiny, new black Trans Am with a red laser light bar on the front of it -those were good times -If only I still had the ability to transform junkers into hot rods for the benefit of my own perception.
During the course of what was no doubt an action packed imaginary car chase whilst behind the wheel of the Subaru/K.I.T.T., I managed to undo the emergency brake and slip the shifter into neutral, which caused the Subaru to roll back out of the driveway and across the street into the neighbor’s yard. I was only 4 or 5 at the time, my head barely topped the belt line of the car from my place in the driver’s seat to see out the windows. I can recall peering out the windshield through the negative space at the top of the steering wheel that crested up over the dashboard and seeing the scenery change as my car moved for real. At least that was a better view than the look on my parent’s faces after they watched me roll down the drive and into the neighbor’s yard in my dad’s old Subaru -they were not pleased with me.
I suppose the most remarkable thing about the Mercury Topaz for me is what it represented in terms of gender roles and the divide of decision making power within my own family structure. When I was a kid, I was aware that my mother hadn’t been expecting the Topaz, but being so new and shiny, it seemed cool enough to be a nice kind of surprise. The fact that it was a deep, glossy red made me shift from childish playtime fantasies of my parent’s cars transforming into K.I.T.T. to thinking that this one, this red Topaz, looked like the type of car Wonder Woman might get to go with her whole ensemble once she got sick of the whole invisible jet thing -and really, why the hell couldn’t Wonder Woman have a cool means of conveyance that could actually be seen? I may have been watching reruns of the old Wonder Woman show by that time, but let me tell you this: nobody gets to marginalize Wonder Woman and get away with it, reruns or not! That whole invisible plane business and what it might mean with regard to a woman’s significance; how it places its operator in a position on the periphery in terms of perception and regard, and what that might mean on a grander scale as it relates to the role of women in general is something for another post, perhaps. Wonder Woman was one of my childhood heroes, and I’m still a fan today. I have a pair of red suede sneakers that I wear on occasion when I think I can pull off the shoes with the other things I’m wearing, and when I feel like I need to go out and kick some ass - they’re my Wonder Woman shoes, and I feel powerful when I wear them.
I wonder though, how having the car she chose for herself before she ever even knew my father taken away, and having the little red Topaz imposed on her made my mother feel. I wouldn't feel powerful in that situation regardless of any intentions behind the trade. The best I could expect would be to tolerate and eventually accept and grow to appreciate the little car, I suppose, but I don‘t know if I‘d ever be comfortable with the way in which it was acquired.
This brings me to a little side tangent that’s important. A friend of mine, fellow member of Jean Jenning’s G7, and fellow car blogger, Motorista, has teamed up with another member of the G7 to start “Project Keychain”. It’s a venture designed to shed light on the fact that right now, Saudi women do not have the right to drive.
If you’re like me and would have gone into a “Hulk Smash!” mode of rage over some guy deciding what kind of car you would drive, just try to imagine how you’d feel if some group of guys decided that you couldn’t drive at all. That’s what Saudi women are dealing with right now. Here’s a excerpt from the Project Keychain Facebook page:
“By custom not law, Saudi women are forbidden to drive. Some brave souls have dared to use their foreign licenses and driven themselves to the market and the mall. To show our solidarity with these women, we began collecting key chains on November 4, 2013.”
To this end, Project Keychain has set up a mail box where people who want to show support for Saudi women’s right to drive can send a keychain as a symbol of alliance.
Here’s the link to the Facebook page for those of you on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/letthemdrive/info
Here’s a link to Motorista’s blog post about it:
http://motoristablog.com/2013/11/04/let-them-drive/
….And here’s the address to send the key chains to if you want to give them a token of encouragement or a note of well-wishing:
4500 Williams Drive, Ste 212
PMB 258
Georgetown, TX 78633
In closing down today’s post, I want to say that it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman -or Wonder Woman, nor does it matter if you've got a the mythical powers of a Topaz stone or the 4-cylinder whine of a Topaz sedan to back you up. We all need to venture out into the world by wheel or by foot, and be powerful. Try to do something to be in control of your situation, and if there’s an opportunity, even a small one, to help another person gain some control in their own lives, do what you can to help.
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