This ’61 Chrysler Newport Convertible Was Virgil Exner’s Last Hurrah

Probably every car guy can relate to the American Graffiti scene where Richard Dreyfuss spots an apparition—Suzanne Somers in a porthole T-Bird—but never meets her. Back in 1977, though, I did meet an apparition, this Alaskan White 1961 Chrysler Newport convertible, sitting disused on a California side street. Just 16 years old, it was already stylistically and technologically a dinosaur compared to the Civics and Corollas buyers craved after the ’73 oil embargo.

Lenny Schapira answered the door of the nearest house. Owning other collector cars, he and his wife didn’t need the Newport, and we struck a deal—barely a dollar per cubic inch of the 361 V-8. Four glorious features made my heart race. First were the soaring tailfins, comprising half of the car’s length. Coupled with the unique canted headlights and trapezoidal grille, they represented the zenith of Chrysler styling honcho Virgil Exner’s masterful “Forward Look.” Third was the spectacular AstraDome instrumentation, a three-dimensional electroluminescent display that obviated traditional gauge clusters. Lastly, the top went down.

A tendency to overheat in warm weather, a front brake that locked randomly, and a cranky power window required interventions as the Newport toured Canada, the Grand Tetons, and the High Sierras. All got solved (more or less) with nascent skills en route. Then, a year later, the convertible was a hard sell; fins were nearly two decades out of date, but off it went.

I went hunting for the Newport decades later, querying Walter P. Chrysler Club members with ’61 Newport ragtops. It seemed long gone, however, and eventually I bought an Alaskan White hardtop as a surrogate. One Sunday, I spontaneously drove it to the supermarket. While exiting the Chrysler, I heard a voice. “I had a car like that,” said a man in a newish SUV. He’d seen the Newport, obviously, and had stopped while exiting the lot. “Only mine was a convertible.”

“What, really?” I answered. “You had a white ’61 Newport convertible?”

“Yes.”

“So did I. Where did you live? I bought mine in ’77 in Santa Monica, somewhere around Colorado and 12^th Street.”

“I lived in West LA, on 11^th Street, near Santa Monica,” he said.

“Was your house on the north side of the street with concrete steps leading up to the front door?”

“Yes.”

It was Lenny Schapira.

The timeframe where we could’ve intersected—me arriving at and Lenny passing by one spot in the parking lot—was perhaps 20 seconds. That means, per my calculation, our chronological chances of crossing paths during daylight hours 43 ½ years after I bought Lenny’s Chrysler were 132 million to 1. And that’s not factoring in that the shopping center was 85 miles from where we’d met in 1977. How does that change the odds? Since we both liked the same kinds of things, more or less, I’d give it a 50-to-1 shot that, decades later, we’d still frequent the same SoCal communities and stores. So that gives our second meeting a 6.6 billion-to-1 chance.

This amazing tale resurfaced last spring when a black ’61 Newport convertible sold on Bring a Trailer for $75,000. One commenter surmised that of 2135 built, probably fewer than 50 remain. Which is why, although the BaT Chrysler cost 200 times more than mine did in 1977, the Newport convertible remains one of my favorite apparitions. I hope some reader is enjoying that Alaskan White one today.