Would you expect to see a solid and complete late-1960s mid-size American hardtop coupe, the top trim level with lots of pricey options, and equipped with the biggest V-8 available for its model year, in the inventory of your local Ewe Pullet? Of course you wouldn’t, not nowadays, but that’s just what happened at the Denver U-Pull-Pay with this Kenosha muscle car.
Over in Michigan, muscle car madness was in full swing by 1969. The Detroit manufacturers were locked in an ever-escalating arms race, bolting big V-8s into their mid-size coupes and then slathering them with racy-looking stripes and badges. Most car buyers stepping into a Pontiac or Dodge dealership weren’t going to roar out in a new Judge or Super Bee, but those cars made the LeMans or Coronet that they did buy seem a lot cooler.
It was a lucrative game for Ford, GM, and Chrysler, but the much smaller American Motors Corporation didn’t have the money needed to buy a full seat at that table. The Rebel, based on a shortened Ambassador chassis, competed against the likes of the bread-and-butter Chevrolet Chevelle and Ford Fairlane by being presented as a better deal on a sensible yet sporty mid-size car.
That means that while you can expect to pay real money for a restorable late-1960s Buick Skylark or Plymouth Satellite hardtop coupe with factory V-8, their AMC Rebel counterpart doesn’t have the very valuable Golden Age of Muscle Cars aura and isn’t worth nearly as much… despite being equally handsome and available with respectable V-8 power.
AMC created the Rebel Machine— essentially a Rebel SST with a 390-cubic-inch V-8 and crazy graphics plus an evil-looking hood scoop— for the 1970 model year, but sold only a couple thousand, and even that car is worth far less than its rivals today.
Such values trickle down to the junkyard world, of course; the last time I saw intact examples of genuine late-1960s Detroit muscle cars in a pull-your-own-parts yard was about 1982, when the now-long-defunct U-Pull in East Oakland had a very nice Buick GSX right next to a first-year Dodge Charger. I wish I had photos of the old U-Pull, a biker-club-owned establishment in a burned-out factory on 85th Avenue near the Oakland Coliseum (right around the corner from the current location of Pick-n-Pull), but I was in high school at the time and never thought to shoot any. The best I can do is the still (above) from a Super-8 movie I shot in 1984.
What really hurts about today’s Final Parking Space is that anybody with $2199 (or, probably, a lot less) could have bought it in the “good barn find” condition you see in the photo above. The employees at the Denver UP&P couldn’t bear to just dump this car between a Mercury Milan and a Chrysler Cirrus in the regular inventory, so they parked it right by the entrance with FOR SALE signs. It was there for months, pleading with the thousands of car freaks who walked by to rescue it; I shot the above photo in February.
Here’s where it parks now. I think this car would have been saved, had it been available for two grand on the West Coast or in near one of the big cities of the Midwest, but Denver is isolated by mountains to the west and the High Plains to the east and it’s at least a two-day tow to big population centers. Most of the classic car aficionados here have all the projects they can handle (which is my excuse for not buying this car, though I was tempted), so machines like this end up getting eaten by the crusher.
I’m a little startled that the folks from the nearby Rambler Ranch didn’t grab it, but I always think that when I spot interesting Kenosha iron in junkyards along the I-25 corridor (just in the last few years, I’ve documented a 1953 Hudson Hornet, a 1954 Nash Ambassador, a 1955 Hudson Rambler Cross Country, a 1962 Rambler Classic, a 1965 Rambler Classic convertible, a 1965 Rambler Classic 660 sedan, a 1965 Rambler Cross Country, a 1967 Rambler Rebel sedan, a 1969 AMC Rambler 440, plus lots of AMC Eagles and too many AMC-era Jeeps to list here). I think all of us need to become AMC fanatics, for the availability of affordable project cars alone.
This car is a top-trim-level SST, so it includes such snazzy touches as armrests and ashtrays for the rear-seat passengers. Its list price was $2496, or about $22,539 in 2025 dollars. The cheapest possible 1969 Chevrolet Chevelle hardtop coupe with V-8 power was the $2611 Chevelle 300 and its boat-anchor 307 engine; the nicer Malibu version started at $2690, plus $68.50 more if you wanted a 350 instead of a 307. The Rebel SST was a lot of car for the money.
This is a 343-cubic-inch (5.6-liter) AMC V-8, the largest-displacement engine available in the 1969 Rebel (though I’m pretty sure an AMC shopper with enough money could have persuaded a dealer to have a Rebel built with the 390 meant for the Ambassador/Javelin/AMX).
This one has the two-barrel carburetor, which (if it’s original) means it’s the base 1969 Rebel SST engine and was rated at 235 horsepower and 345 pound-feet. A premium-gas version with higher compression and a four-barrel carburetor was available as an $80 option ($722 after inflation), and it made 280 horses and 365 pound-feet.
AMC was losing sales due to power restrictions in its engine designs by the late 1960s, so its entire V-8 family got a thorough redesign for 1970. These engines included the mighty 401 and proved so successful in truck applications that Chrysler kept building the 360-cubic-inch version (for use in the Jeep Grand Wagoneer) into the 1990s and years after buying AMC. This confuses parts-counter employees with the completely unrelated Chrysler 360/5.9 Magnum engine to the present day.
The base transmission in the Rebel, even the SST, was an old-fashioned column-shift three-speed manual (an overdrive version was available). The original buyer of this one paid $223 ($2014 in today’s money) for the “Shift-Command” three-speed automatic, which was a Borg-Warner M40 three-speed. Sadly, a four-speed floor-shift manual was offered only in the Rambler, Javelin, and AMX for 1969, not in the Rebel.
This car even came with air conditioning, a $376 option ($3395 now). It has power steering ($100/$903) but not power brakes, an interesting combination.
By the time the dust settled on the original purchase transaction, the final price tag on this Rebel and its many options would have approached that of the much bigger and swankier “Kenosha Cadillac” Ambassador (which came with A/C as standard equipment).
1970 was the first model year in which locking steering columns were required by the federal government, and most American vehicle manufacturers had them in place by 1969. The Rebel’s underdash ignition switch let AMC avoid redesigning the entire steering column (for 1968, the Rambler Rebel had the ignition switch on the dash).
This car appears to have spent many years in storage before arriving here. The reasonably intact interior and lack of rodent nesting material suggest that it was indoors for at least part of that time. KAZY 106.7 went off the air in the middle 1990s, so this well-preserved bumper sticker suggests that the car got parked for good around that time.
A Wisconsin Rebel is just what a Western cowboy in “Rebel country” needed in 1969.
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