When getting a new car, I immediately start thinking about my first road trip with it. So back in July 2024, a few weeks after picking up the Golf R, I learned about the Crazy 80’s Car Museum from an Autopian article. The moment I finished that article, I started planning the 5-hour, 300 mile road trip to visit it in Dwight, Illinois.
Crazy 80’s Car Museum
I’ve visited many car museums around the world, but I’ve never been so excited to see one like the Crazy 80’s Car Museum. This museum can’t hold a candle to the opulence of the Porsche museum in Stuttgart or the unique design of the BMW museum in Munich or the breadth of displays like the Sinsheim Museum near Heilbronn, but it has become my favorite museum of all time.
Truth in Advertising—the sign fits, although I prefer stylizing it as: ’80s.
To call the Crazy 80’s Car Museum a “museum” feels a tad generous. It’s really a bunch of cars that could have been driven in the 1980s, and shoehorned into an old furniture store by a couple of guys, Rick and David. There are maybe 30-40 cars in there, with another 30-40 more stored somewhere else.
The cars here are not what you would call “concours ready,” nor would you see them cruising up and down Woodward during the Dream Cruise. They are all, however, runners. They don’t have cherry muscle cars like a 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1, but I could see them getting a 1978 Mustang II.
What they really have are the unfortunate cars of my teen-hood.
I went to high school and college in the 1980s. That was when I started liking and knowing about cars. However, the ’80s was not exactly the high point of automobiledom. The ’80s was part of the Malaise Era, a period of bad cars.
To emphasize how low performance cars had gotten, here’s a link to a Car and Driver article about the 1983 Dodge Shelby Charger (not to be confused with today’s base 292-hp, V6 Dodge Charger, or a Hellcat). This 107-hp collaboration between Chrysler and Shelby was written up in glowing terms, although it still can’t escape observations of lackluster design. One of the best American car of the time, the 1984 C4 Chevrolet Corvette, had a 5.7L V8 that was rated at 205 hp. Good times.
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride
Heavy metal suicide
Foreign debts, homeless Vets
AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores
China’s under martial law
Rock and Roller cola wars
I can’t take it anymore
—Billy Joel
Memories Are Made of These
As I chatted with David, who was running the museum that day, he told me some of the history behind some of the cars. There’s the Datsun 810 driven by a teacher/professor for 30 years, and a Saab Sonett III daily driven by a lawyer. In both cases when these men died, their families didn’t know what do to with these cars.
That’s where Rick and David come in. In their mission statement, they don’t consider themselves car collectors, but rather car savers (unlike me, who would like to be a car hoarder).
And this is my favorite part of this collection—the stories of the everyday person and their daily driver. The museum preserves their histories.
I hate to admit how giddy these cars make me feel. As a Gen Xer, I grew up watching Happy Days on TV, but ’57 Chevys or flathead Fords weren’t my thing. In high school we drove two-tone Ford Gran Torinos painted in primer and rust or Bondo’d Buick LeSabres. My friend’s dad drove us around in his Ford Pinto for years. I had a hand-me-down 1975 Mercury Monarch that was just a horrible, horrible car.
So when I started driving a base 1984 Buick Skyhawk with a 5-speed manual transmission, roll-up windows, no air conditioning, and started every time I turned the ignition, I was on cloud nine. And when somebody pulled into our high school parking lot with a Pontiac Fiero, it was like the future, as if George Jetson (b. 2022) himself drove it.
The college I went to used to be called General Motors Institute (GMI), now Kettering University. While there, I eventually learned all of the GM code names for their platforms because over 75% of the cars from students were from GM—like Chevettes (T-body), Citations (X-body), and Cavaliers/Sunbirds/Skyhawks (J-body). Again, these were not the greatest cars (remember the J-body Cadillac Cimarron?), but they were the cars I knew.
And this museum has them all.
(Note: At this point, I’ve normalized the “daddy’s going for a long drive,” so my family doesn’t bat an eye when I take off. Also, no one wants to sit in a car with me for hours listening to ’80s music, so I usually drive alone.)
The (original) wood paneling is strong with this one, and perfectly fits the atmosphere.
The plastic stands were apparently from the original furniture store as well.
The first car I saw when I came in was a 1982 Buick Skyhawk. Karma.
Right across from the Skyhawk was a 1 of 2000 1984 Pontiac Fiero Pace Car and a 1985 Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth Conquest. My younger sister owned the much nicer 1987 Conquest.
The lawyer-owned purple Saab Sonett III in the “prep” area next door
The totally safe Mercury Bobcat, unlike the my neighbor’s Ford Pinto
The “sporty” two-seater Escort, the Ford EXP
Way before the trendy Outback was the Subaru GL, like one another neighbor had
Bonus points if you remember the Plymouth Scamp (or its sibling, the Dodge Rampage)
I have to include the Chevrolet Citation (II), owned by multiple college roommates.
How can anyone not like the cute little Renault Le Car? A classmate in high school had one.
The “fanciest” car in the place, the 1975 Bricklin SV-1
Random Spaces
Dwight, Illinois
I was actually familiar with the village of Dwight. My family had stopped there on our way to the Grand Canyon back in 2021. I had seen a sign on the freeway for a Route 66 attraction, so we took a look at the restored Texaco gas station there, manned by retirees. It’s quite amazing how many people from around the world has stopped there as they visited Route 66.
The Texaco station is literally around the corner from the museum.
Imagine—a Texaco station in 2024 with a working EV charger
What I didn’t realize then was that my wife and I stopped there way back in 2000 on our first road trip (in our new Honda Civic Si) to the Grand Canyon. We were following parts of Route 66 when we ended up in Dwight where my wife took a picture of a Route 66 sign. I tried to recreate the picture on this museum trip. This was just a block down from the Texaco. The gas station, a Marathon at that time, had apparently closed permanently the previous year in 1999, before being restored back to a Texaco a few years later as a historical site.
Dwight, IL in 2000
Dwight, IL in 2024
Kankakee, Illinois
As I was planning this trip, I realized that I was going through a town called Kankakee, Illinois. The name sounded familiar, and after racking my brain for a bit, I realized it came from a song written by Steve Goodman and recorded by Arlo Guthrie called “The City of New Orleans.” That’s the name of the train run by the Illinois Central, going from Chicago to New Orleans.
After a bit of googling, I found out that the Kankakee train station is still open, and that there’s still a train called the City of New Orleans that runs through it, named after the original one in the song.
There’s also a railroad museum at the train station run by a model railroad club, which was enough justification for me to stop by there on the way home.
…All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out of Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms, and fields…
To be honest, Johnny Cash’s version is my favorite, even though he skips a verse here.
Crankiness Rating: 
…I’ll be gone five (or six) hundred miles when the day is done.
