Jim Kennedy’s Car Collection

More than a few Plymouths I have owned were originally purchased by people seeking a new dependable vehicle in anticipation of retirement. This aptly-named Horizon is one of them.

 

Charles Burk was a self-employed bricklayer for over half a century, one of the youngest to receive a 50-year Gold Bricklayer Membership Card from the International Union of Bricklayers, Local 9 Pittsburgh. As he contemplated retirement, he sought a replacement for his 1983 Chevy Chevette. His search brought him to Tarentum Motors, Inc., the Chrysler-Plymouth dealership located, conveniently, in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, just a few miles from his home in New Kensington. On January 10, 1986, with a $3,600 trade-in allowance for the Chevette and the balance paid in cash, Charles and his wife Cecelia took possession of his “retirement car.”

 

Charles drove the car for almost 20 years and kept it parked in his garage to protect against the sometimes harsh

Allegheny Valley winters. After age and infirmity slowed him, he substituted driving with watching NASCAR and listening to Pittsburgh Pirates games on the sun porch of his home. The car remained in his garage until he died, at age 86, in February of 2012, just over a year after his wife had passed. His daughter and son-in-law inherited the car, which they stored in a salt mine storage facility north of Pittsburgh for about 10 years. In 2019, they offered the Horizon for sale online, where I found it.

 

Tarentum Motor Sales was founded by John C. Marmo, a resident of nearby Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania, who was associated with the Chrysler-Plymouth business for half a century. A member of the National Auto Dealers Association and at one time President of the Greater Pittsburgh Chrysler-Plymouth Dealers Association and Tri-State Auto Dealers, Mr. Marno was also actively involved in the commercial redevelopment of Tarentum in the early to mid-1960s. By the mid-1980s, he divided his time between Pittsburgh and Boca Raton, Florida. After his death in October of 1982, at age 72, ownership of the dealership passed to his daughter and son-in-law. Tarentum Motor Sales appears to have ceased business in the late 1980s, not long after this Horizon left the lot.

 

The Plymouth Horizon holds an important place in the history of the Chrysler Corporation, and my own family. For Chrysler, the introduction of the Horizon (and its Dodge counterpart, the Omni) in December of 1977 produced a critical and financial success at a time the automaker desperately needed both. The model was the first American-made front-wheel-drive subcompact car and a formidable competitor against the accelerating popularity of small foreign imports. Sales skyrocketed after its launch, limited in the first few years only by constraints on sourcing a sufficient number of engines. Horizon and Omni helped keep Chrysler afloat until the arrival of the Plymouth Reliant/Dodge Aries “K”-cars and the Voyager/Caravan minivans, justifying the efforts of Lee Iacocca and the U.S. Government to keep the carmaker alive.

 

For me, the Horizon model evokes a more personal memory from 1980, when my older brother graduated from college. Happy to have both a diploma and a job during what the then U.S. President called a national “crisis of confidence” (generally misremembered as Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise Speech”), my brother chose to celebrate by buying our parents the first new car they ever owned: a 1980 Plymouth Horizon Patriot Edition. Although lauded for its interior roominess among subcompact cars, the Horizon could not contain the pride our mom and dad felt in that car, and what it represented. For his part, my brother remembers the Horizon as resembling the blue-gray microcar Bob Parr drives in the classic animated movie, The Incredibles.