Now that many newspapers are digitizing their archives, people have been searching for and finding old dealership advertisements for muscle cars.  I knew the history of my car including that it was sold new in Mandan, North Dakota.  Bismarck and Mandan newspaper archives are not yet digitized so I had to wait until I was back in the area to search the old fashion way – microfilm.  Microfilm searching is one of those things like typing in the entire NASCAR VIN list – you can only do a couple of hours at a time.  After about 10 hours of searching, I found the advertisement below.  I was stunned.  That is my car, in the dealership showroom before it was sold new.  This answers a number of questions I had including the quarter panel decal color issue (my car had no quarter panel decals on it when I got it).

But wait, then it got better.  The North Dakota Heritage Center has a research library and they have many original newspapers from the day they were printed.  It took a little searching because they were in the process of moving their archives but they found the original Mandan Pioneer from 1970.  And they were able to scan it for me.  Amazing.

I searched a bit more found a similar advertisement for Al Wald’s green Superbird in the Bismarck Tribune.  The two cars were photographed at the same time – you can see the nose of Al’s car on the right side of the photo.  When I receive scans of Al’s car I will add them to this page.