Hey Bill, that is a very Willow Glen-ish looking street scene. When I was a little kid, neighbors had a similar Plymouth wagon (early '50s, I'm guessing) in dark forest blue-green. They replaced it with a metallic sandy beige '60 Chevy wagon.
I loved our '97 Passat GLX wagon with 5-speed. It was fun to drive when not commuting in stop & go traffic on I-680/280/SR 17 from San Ramon to Los Gatos.
Sam, the neighbor around the corner from our previous home is still driving one of those Tercel wagons. I remember when they were new, a friend of mine said the rear hatch looked like an ATM. Friends a few blocks over had a white '60 Buick wagon until around 1972. The kids had all grown by then and they got a bathtub of a POS Plymouth sedan, a '70 or so in copper with black vinyl top, that had been a driver's education car with an extra brake pedal on the passenger's side.
Eddie, we fell victim to the FOMOCO transmission flaw too. My dad's '69 Continental Mark III was in a fast idle on the driveway after a cold start and suddenly took off backwards, swung across the front lawn and struck the Mulberry tree in the parking strip. If not for that tree, it would have made it into the street and to who knows where from there, backwards and on wheels, to paraphrase Ginger Rogers.
We never had a wagon growing up. My sister and I were the only kids. Neighbors had them, though. A beige (Fawn Tan?) '62 Country Sedan, a beige '66 Country Squire, a light green '59 Plymouth, and a white/wood paneled '57 Mercury with red interior to name a few.
I remember the '55-56 Ford as being the most common wagon for transporting nuns back in the day. At St. Leo's, their two-tone blue & white wagon was replaced by a new beige/fawn '62 Country Sedan, courtesy of the Dad's Club.
Getting back to more modern times, Dave got a green '76 Audi Fox wagon shortly after I met him. I ended up with that car, which got totaled in 1989 (easily accomplished at almost 14 years old, not my fault, no serious injuries). We got a silver '84 Audi 5000S wagon in 1988 when they were cheap due to the acceleration issues Audi was having. That one got rear-ended and totaled fairly quickly (whiplash for both of us even though seat/shoulder belted) because the roof buckled. It was replaced with a darker silver '85 5000S, which got driven until there were over 160K miles on it. The next wagon was a silver '96 Passat GLX. Dave stupidly leased that one. He returned it and that's when we ended up with the black '97 Passat GLX with 5-speed, which had been a company car and only had 12K miles on it. I ended up with that one because Dave was murdering the clutch and transmission. He traded it in at 140K for a dark silver 2006 Audi Allroad. That thing was a huge gas hog, barely breaking 17 MPG on the highway. We dumped it as a trade-in on a brand new 2011 MBZ GLK 350, which is sort of a wagon. It got better mileage than the Allroad and was a pleasure to drive.
