Sensible style.( The Mercury Monterey )

Byline: JOHN MATRAS

Somebody somewhere flipped a giant page in 1960, closing the chapter on the '50s and opening the '60s. The gaudy, flamboyant decade that ended matured into a more serious era. The Baby Boomers soon would turn the country upside down, but for the moment, the Greatest Generation was grown up; with families to raise and increasing responsibilities, they turned to a more sensible-shoes kind of automobile. The Mercury Monterey was one such car.

The Monterey sedan was introduced in 1952 as Mercury's premium model, but by 1960 it was reduced to Mercury's bargain basement of big cars, positioned below the Montclair and Park Lane models. Nevertheless, except for that upstart Comet, it was the division's biggest seller, offered in two- and four-door sedans and hardtops as well as a two-door convertible. Of these, the four-door sedan sold the most, but the two-door sedan was the least expensive, with a base price of $2,631.

The two-door sedan had a curb weight of 3952 pounds and was longer than Kansas in summer. Inside there was a back seat that meant business, with enough foot room up front that when Jim Wickel of Ewan, New Jersey, bought his two-door sedan in 1967 for $100 and a 1959 Ford, his preschool daughter had space to play at her mother's feet on long trips. The car was Wickel's daily driver for a dozen years before it was put out to pasture to be refreshed; restoration being too radical a word for the minimal work it needed.

The Monterey came standard with a 312-cubic-inch V8 rated at 205 hp, which was 5 horsepower fewer than the same engine in 1959, but the newer engine would run on regular gas. Mercury boasted that it was like getting one of every 10 gallons of gas free. Also new in 1960 was a suspension that Mercury said, in perfect ad man-ese, boasted ``Road Tuned Wheels.'' By allowing the wheels to move backward slightly as well as upward when meeting an obstacle, to ``roll with the punches,'' it would ``practically eliminate steering wheel flutter.'' Bragged Mercury, ``Annoying vibration and irritating road noise are things ...