Well, we opened up a giant can of worms when we recently ran a photo of a Cadillac Eldorado-based pickup in HCC Lost and Found (see HCC #80). Since then, we’ve received plenty of responses from HCC readers who own a variety of Cadillac Eldorado-based pickups – too many, in fact, to run in the one page we have devoted to Lost and Found, so we’ll showcase some of them here.
We’ll start with the photos of the Mirage owned by Bob Flowers of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Bob sent along some information about the Mirage – built by Traditional Coach Works of Chatsworth, California – purporting it to have been a Cadillac-authorized conversion, available through Cadillac dealers, though others have pointed out that while it was indeed available through dealerships, it was not factory authorized. What we know for sure about the Mirage is that it was built alongside a station wagon variant of the Eldorado called the Castilian and that Traditional built it in 1975 and 1976. As David Grant noted in his book on Gene Winfield, Winfield worked for Traditional, and it was a Mirage that Evel Knievel bought. Note the quarter-window.
Next up, Alden Jewell sent us a circa 1976 scan of a brochure from Traditional Coach Works’ chief rival, the Formal Coach Corporation, which became the Caribou Motor Corporation of Rosemead, California. Like Traditional Coach Works, Caribou offered both a pickup and station wagon version of the Eldorado, both sold as the Comstock Pickup and Comstock Sport Wagon. According to the brochure, the conversions were available on 1974 through 1978 Eldorados.
Alden also noted that Caribou also converted Coupe de Villes into pickups, selling them as Caribous. The pair of photos that William Jesse of Victoria, British Columbia, sent in appear to be a Caribou, but William notes that this 1974 Coupe de Ville pickup was actually built by the late Roger Trudeau, also of Victoria. Roger got in touch with us back in 2007 to share a picture of an Eldorado he had converted into a pickup, so that makes at least two he did.
Finally, Tom King of Alice, Texas, sent in a few photos of the circa 1979 Coupe de Ville-based pickup that he calls a Paris. He noted that it was sold new in Los Angeles, but he doesn’t seem to know who was responsible for the conversion.
As for previous sightings here, it appears that the Cadillac pickup that Frank Ruff sent us photos of more than three years ago is actually a flower car, not a Caribou. Anybody have any more examples they’d like to share with us?