A steady stream of classic Cadillacs drive into Oak Bay’s Windsor Park, to show off their hot rides at a big Cadillac and vintage GM summer show and shine.
“Once you own a Cadillac, and we’ve owned them since we got married, you won’t go back,” says Cadillac owner Hazel Widenmaier.
Widenmaier’s had 12 caddy’s and says she and her husband are known as Central Saanich’s ‘Cadillac Queen and King’.
“People would come up to us, especially kids and say look at that back seat!” Widenmaier says. “They just couldn’t believe it’s so big. It’s a chesterfield back there!”
And that’s not the only thing in the back seat.
A mafia-themed 1968 Coupe DeVille was on display with replica Tommy guns in the backseat.
The ‘mafia caddy’ even had a skeleton driver named Guido, who went swimming with the fishes.
“Each one of my cars has a special motif and this one here I kind of labelled it the mafia mobile so it’s got all the Al Capone, Jimmy Hoffa,” says owner Bruce Bouvet.
For Sue Griffin, her love of Cadillacs comes from her father.
She displayed her mint condition vehicle that was his car and has been in her family as long as Queen Elizabeth has reigned.
“It’s such a heavy car to drive because it has no power steering and I’m getting older and it’s getting harder to drive,” laughs Griffin. “But if you get it out on the highway it’s like riding on a cloud it’s so smooth.”
Tess van Straaten
