“In 1983, he got a divorce, took off for Alaska, and left it at his mom’s house,” Mike Lattin said. “They would come down in the summer, visit his mom, start the car, and the son would always say, ‘Dad, Dad, let’s take the car out.’
“The dad would say, ‘No, not licensed.’
“The son would say, ‘Let’s take the plate off Grandma’s car.’
“And his dad would always say nope.”
After two or three years, the father stopped coming back. The son grew up, moved back, and lives in his grandma’s house, where the Talladega remained parked. Recently the father realized he wasn’t going to do anything with the car, which brought about the sale.
Mike Lattin runs a shop called Mainly Muscle Cars in Granite Falls, Washington. He heard about the Talladega through a friend he calls “Montana Mike” in Helena.
“Montana Mike found the Talladega on a Facebook ad in a little town called Big Timber, which is in Montana.”
Before Lattin drove 773 miles from Washington State, Montana Mike inspected the Talladega. Apparently, the two doors to the garage that housed the Talladega hadn’t been opened in “forever,” from the looks of a large pile of tires and “junk” in front of them.
Montana Mike looked at the car and sent pictures to Lattin. The white Talladega was “super solid with day-two speed parts.”
Of course, the dad and son knew what they had, a 1969 Talladega, every one of which was powered by a 428 Cobra Jet driving a set of 3.00 gears through a C6 automatic transmission.
“It had been wrecked at one time, and they replaced the front door pillar, the door, and I think the fender,” Lattin said. The Talladega wasn’t running when they picked it up.
At the shop, Lattin drained the old oil and re-oiled the 428 because it hadn’t been started since the mid-1980s. He was intrigued to find a 427 dual-point distributor. He poured gas in the carburetor, which he did not even take apart.
“I just put gas down the vent, and fresh gas in the tank, and it popped like mad. We did a burnout in our parking lot, when the landlord was here. He said, ‘Well, that put some hair on my chest.’”
Lattin’s 17-year-old daughter, Taylor, seen here with a 1969 GT500, went with her dad and uncle on the Montana trip. “When my dad first came to me with the idea of the Montana trip, I was hesitant,” she said. “As a teenager during one of my last summers before the end of my high school career, there were several things I had to consider before agreeing to join them. Previous commitments and the thought that participating in the trip might leave me with major FOMO [fear of missing out.—Ed.] of the plans that my friends might make while I was away made me consider my options carefully.”
She did go, and her comments about the find are in the story’s captions.
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