Dragin' Wagons! '69 Chevy Kingswood Estate vs. '69 Ford Country Squire

Motor Trend

09-05-2025

Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of MotorTrend Classic
This article is presented as a public service for Baby Boomers contemplating spending crazy money to acquire rolling touchstones of their youth. Read it and bask in the affirmation that you are not alone. Clip it out and show it to your skeptical spouse or 401k account manager.
This story starts in the summer of 1978 on a farm road in Wisconsin when Dad first slid over and offered me the helm of our Dover White 1969 Chevy wagon. The moment I'd waited 15 interminable years for was at hand. I was a driver. Ours was a sensible low-spec small-block Townsman with A/C and an AM radio, but before taking the helm I'd spent nine years upgrading it with Kingswood trim pieces from the local salvage yard in a peculiar car-geek bonding ritual that spanned that car's 170,000-mile stay with us. A few years later, we sold the slightly battered hulk to a tradesman who undoubtedly scrapped it shortly thereafter.
Three decades on, I want that new-driver feeling back and only a '69 Chevy wagon will do. The very finest example extant lives just 15 minutes from my house in the GM Heritage Collection. Its original owner did his level best to make a Corvette out of this top-of-the-line Kingswood Estate, ordering $1,939.50 worth of juicy options like hidden headlamps, sport steering wheel, and the ultra-rare 425-horsepower 427 V-8, which cost $447.65! Fortunately for my 401k, this particular car is not for sale, but rest assured that when repurchasing one's childhood it's completely natural to covet the biggest motor and all the cool options your dad was too cheap or practical to spring for back in the day, so it's going to be expensive and hard to find.
As a six-year-old in a staunch GM family (weren't most households unwaveringly allied to one manufacturer or another in the '60s?), I didn't know much about competitor Ford's wagon when we went new-car shopping in 1969 and I suspect my dad didn't either, but the Bow-Tie boys lost the wagon-sales war by almost 44,000 cars that year. Did Ford have a 'Better Idea,' or just savvier marketing? Should Dad have given 'The Wagonmaster' a closer look? To find out, we sweet-talked GM into lending us its heavy Chevy for a day and rounded up a similarly splendid Presidential Blue 429-cubic-inch Country Squire for some back-to-back tire-kicking, then set the way-back machine to the Apollo moonshot era.
Ford became the first automaker to offer a car-based station wagon on the factory order books in 1929. When retooling from the wood-intensive Model T to the mostly steel Model A, Ford's woodworks factory in Iron Mountain, Michigan, faced closure, so Henry put the plant to work prepping wagon body parts for assembly at one of two outside shops that turned Model As into woody station wagons. The Blue Oval has been a wagon-sales leader for most of the intervening decades (with fake-wood paneling offered on most models). By the late 1960s, wagons accounted for almost one in 10 car sales—879,276 of 'em in 1969, with over 60 percent of those being full-size. The SUV as we now know it was a bit player for tough, outdoorsy types willing to tolerate the truckish ride and Spartan trim of an International TravelAll, Jeep Wagoneer, or Chevy Suburban. A big wagon, by contrast, could ferry your brood in comfort with ample space for luggage inside and on the roof rack, and ample power to tow boats or campers across the country on vacation.
Car companies exerted considerable engineering effort on innovating wagon design features to grab as large a slice of that profitable pie as possible. Wayback seating solutions ranged from forward facing to rear facing to inward facing. Easing entry to those seats was a perpetual design challenge. Studebaker tried a step that folded down from the tailgate. Nine-passenger Ramblers had a side-hinged rear door and window that couldn't be folded tailgate-style. Then in 1966, Ford introduced the Magic Doorgate that (after lowering the rear window) could be opened to the side or folded down. GM resisted this superior solution until 1969, when Ford leapfrogged its own design by reengineering the Doorgate to facilitate opening it to the side without lowering the window. GM's 1971 'clamshell' wagons featured a window that motored up into the roof and a tailgate that rolled down under the load floor. This eased cargo access when a trailer was connected, but greatly reduced overall space, required a forwardfacing third-row and the egress problems that presents, and the mechanisms proved troublesome, so Ford's Doorgate idea was grudgingly adopted for GM's 1977 redesign.
Wagon options lists were also long, with each brand offering one straight-six and four V-8 engine displacements from which to choose backed by a brace of manual and automatic transmissions and a dizzying array of axle ratios and creature comforts. Our Kingswood Estate's engine was Chevy's most powerful, employing rectangular intake ports, a hot solid-lifter camshaft, high-flow dual exhaust, and a whopper carb to spool out 425 gross horsepower and 460 poundfeet of torque. It wasn't listed in the brochures or promoted in advertising, which caused the previous owner to bill it as a COPO (Central Office Processing Order) 'illegal option,' but according to research by expert Matt Weller (1969chevy.com), L72 was a regular production option on full-size cars, albeit an obscure one that found only 546 takers, most of whom probably drag raced them (see sidebar). Ford's new 429-cubic-inch V-8 replaced the FE-series 428 in 1969, and in top four-barrel guise produces 360 horses and 480 poundfeet. Ours is one of 1975 '69 Squires built with this engine.
Ford's 1969 wagon redesign stretched the wheelbase by two inches and introduced a mod wrap-around dash that put all controls in easy reach of the driver (and the radio completely out of anybody else's reach) while affording front-seat passengers enough floor space to practice yoga. The Chevy's basic underpinnings dated to 1965, and so its dash looks more conventional, but its glovebox is bigger and its ergonomics are more intuitive. One space-age innovation: Fiber-optic lightbulb monitoring (a $26.35 option) was pioneered by Chevrolet in 1967. Flow-through Astro Ventilation replaced the front vent wing windows at GM, but Ford wagons kept them until 1971. Kids sat lower relative to the windows in a Ford, which may have handicapped the young-uns' ability to play magnetic Bingo for state license plates or car makes, thereby hastening the inevitable escalation of rear-seat turf wars that were frequently settled in our wagon by taping off a central DMZ or pulling over and letting us walk a mile along the shoulder until we settled down. Neither of these loaded wagons was ordered with the third-row seat, but trust me, three kids would fuss and fight less facing rearward in the Kingswood than two or four would while facing each other in the Squire. Of course, on road trips in those days we often folded all the seats flat and sprawled out across the four-by-eight-foot deck to play board games.
For cargo hauling, the shorter-wheelbase Chevy boasts four cubic feet more space (at 100 cubic feet) and trims the rear in sturdy vinyl-covered metal panels (they were painted in our Townsman). Ford's plastic cargo-area trim ages poorly, but its $15.59 rear carpeting snaps out for messy loads or to shake off, while Chevy's $52.70 carpeting is permanently affixed with screws that can gore a hand when raising the luggage-floor cargo lid.
With all that cold, rational evaluation behind us, it's time to fire these babies up and see what they'll do. I start out in the 55,000-mile Ford, which lights instantly every time and settles into a gentle, quiet, smooth idle. Pop the C6 tranny in drive, and she pulls away smartly with little induction noise and just a bit of low V-8 rumble from the dual exhaust. A crossover pipe allows you to hear all eight cylinders from either side, unlike with the racier Chevy's segregated pipes. The ride is soft on modern radials and the power steering feels pinky-finger light, though every bump in the road translates faithfully through to the rim. The frontdisc brakes offer surprisingly solid pedal feel. More important, the windowsill and seatback are at similar heights, so it's comfy to stick an elbow on the door, herd the car down a freeway lane with that hand, and stretch the other one across the seat. Ford's woven vinyl seat fabric breathes a bit and the $388.74 Selectaire A/C produces plenty of coolth, but the faraway rectangular vents in the center don't direct it at the driver as efficiently as they would in a more conventional dash. As soon as the sun goes down, you're better off opening the lower kick-panel freshair inlet and cranking the vent wings around to full air-scoop mode.
Then, at long last, my inner 15-year-old slides in behind the Chevy's wheel, and I feel a giddy rush. Everything I see looks and feels preternaturally familiar, but the rest of the senses are disoriented. This racebred engine is profoundly unhappy idling or putzing along, requiring frequent shifts to neutral for a throat-clearing throttle blip that elicits a braaap-braaap from the open-element air-cleaner that causes pedestrians to look around for a Jim Hall Chaparral car. The cam timing that makes the idle so lumpy includes so much valve overlap that the engine never generates much vacuum, meaning you typically get one power-assisted stab at the brakes, after which they go manual. The 3.73:1 Positraction axle and 65-horse power advantage help the Chevy accelerate considerably more briskly than the Ford, at least within the feeble traction limits of the 41-year-old 8.55x15-inch bias-ply Goodyear Polyglass Power Cushion tires. This wagon longs to don lightly inflated drag slicks, brake-torque to its higher-than-normal stall speed, and wheelie itself off the line in anger. Air conditioning was not available with the L72, and the car probably wouldn't even idle if someone tried to add it on. Little is known about the original owner, but given its apparent California emissions gear, I envision some Hollywood big-shot sauntering in, demanding the most powerful Chevy wagon money could buy, dismissing the salesman's warnings out of hand, then receiving the car and parking it upon discovering what a feral beast it is.
MotorTrend reviews praised the Ford's refinement and build quality in terms of road noise and freedom from rattles, and this test confirms those opinions. Our nearly new Chevy's entire front-clip moves around more than the Ford's does on bumpy pavement and it rattles about as much. It pains my inner child to acknowledge that Ford may indeed have earned its wagon sales leadership back then. The day's drive may have cured me of my longing to own this Chevy, but a fully domesticated air-conditioned 390-horse 427 in Dover White over blue—well, that might be worth a midlife-crisis 401k raid…
Our Take
Then: With 427 inches, there's little doubt about acceleration performance, which turned out to be, like fast, as was expected. Ride and handling are primary among 'plus' features.—Staff, Motor Trend, November 1968, of an Impala 427 coupe.
Now: That this wild pit-bull of an engine was available for sale in a woodgrained station wagon is as unimaginable today as Toyota offering its NASCAR Craftsman Truck motor in an Avalon. Those truly were the days!
Ask The Man Who Owned One Of Each
C. Van Tune, former MotorTrend editor-in-chief, grew up in a Chevy wagon household and eventually located a 335-horsepower twin of our Kingswood, but only after purchasing the very Ford covered here.
Why I like them: 'Of all the classic cars I've owned, these were two of my favorites. It's the way they rekindle the greatest family memories that makes these cars so special and, I think, a great investment.'
They're collectible because: Baby Boom families wore these cars out on long road trips, then sold them to painters or plumbers who finished them off, making nice original wagons highly sought—big-blocks are the crown jewels.
Restoring/maintaining: 85 percent of the parts are shared with mass-marketed sedans, making most parts readily available; avoid cars with rear-end crash damage, as that's where the rare bits are.
Beware: Keep the three-way tailgate mechanism well lubricated and adjusted, or the various latches can come undone out of sequence.
Expect to pay: Concours-ready: $23,700 Solid driver: $12,500 Tired runner: $6,900
Join the club: American Station Wagon Owners Assoc. (aswoa.com), Int'l Station Wagon Club, Vintage Chevrolet Club of America (vcca.org)
Our Take
Then: If you dig your comfort, pay a few bucks more and opt for Ford's big 429cid engine, and, shazam, the LTD gets into the atomic-jet age with class and style.—Staff, Motor Trend November 1968 of an LTD 429 coupe
Now: With functional A/C and some sort of surreptitious iPod/satellite radio hookup to the stereo, late-'60s disc-braked big-block cruisers like this still make marvelous road-trip-mobiles ideally suited to towing less comfortable or roadworthy cars to distant shows.
Ask The Man Who Owns One
Jay Rutili serves as assistant to the Cook County (Chicago) Sheriff and owns an alarm security company. His diverse car collection features several other spectacular wagons, including the Mercury twin of this one.
Why I like it: 'I learned to drive on a green 1969 Country Squire just like this one and it brings back fond memories of family vacations with my three sisters and a friend or two.'
It's Collectible Because: A Country Squire with high-spec options like this one cost more than a loaded Galaxie 500XL convertible when new and cherry, low-mileage examples like this have survived in smaller numbers but sell for less.
Restoring/Maintaining: Is a breeze. Jay still services his Squire at the local Ford dealership, as most normal-wear parts are widely available.
Beware: Damaged interior door trim and cargo area panels, as these can be expensive to reproduce to NOS appearance.
Expect to pay: Concours-ready: $18,300 Solid driver: $8600 Tired runner: $4200
Join the club: American Station Wagon Owners Association (aswoa.com), International Station Wagon Club, Ford Galaxie Club of America (galaxieclub.com)