By Brian Earnest

Jan Jordan figures there is really only one reason she every wound up with her 1969 GTO Judge. Well, make that four reasons.

“I had four brothers,” she laughs. “I had graduated from high school. I was 18 years old in 1969 and I have four bothers and they helped me decide which car to buy.”

Jordan shopped for the car on her own, though. And she made all the decisions herself. It all turned out to be a learning experience for a first-time car buyer. “After I knew what to look for, I went to the Pontiac dealer in Wausau [Wis.] and they had a ’69 Judge, and I actually signed a contract,” recalls Jordan, a resident of Mosinee, Wis. “But by the time I got my loan and went back, they had sold it to someone. And because I was so young I didn’t realize that was illegal. So I went to Cooper Pontiac in Stevens Point, because they had one. It was orange, it was cool and I didn’t care if it was fast because I didn’t speed. I drove slow [laughs].”

“My dad passed away when I was 7 years old and my mom said I could buy a car. Nobody came with me to look for the car, I just knew what I wanted and I went alone. I got a loan from the credit union of my employer. They took the payments right out of my paycheck, so they weren’t too worried about the payments getting made.”

Jordan had one little issue to solve before she could drive the car 20 minutes home from the dealer, however. “I didn’t know how to drive a stick shift,” she says. “So the salesman gave me lessons.”

Jordan wound up driving the Judge daily for about five years before she decided it was time for something different. The GTO stayed in the family, though, because she sold it to her brother, Ed. He kept the car for a few years and then sold it to another brother, Al. “Then Al took it off the road and put it in storage in 1977. And then Al moved to Alaska and he sold it to my son, Troy Hack. Troy was going to restore it, but it was just too expensive, so Troy generously gave it back to me.”

That was in 2000 — 26 years after she had last owned the car. Jordan wasn’t sure what would eventually happen to the Judge, but she knew she didn’t want the car to leave the family. “I wanted to restore it, but it was just so expensive,” she says. “So I just had it sitting in my garage, and I’d look at it, but that was about all.”

In 2010, Jordan married Roger Cook, who thought it was a good idea to restore the GTO back to its original glory. Cook had some background with the car, too. “We dated in that car back in the early ’70s,” he laughs. “She doesn’t like me telling people that, but we used to date in this car!”

“But then he went back to the Air Force and we went our separate ways … until we were married in 2010,” Jan adds.

“I always liked it, and I finally said, ‘We need the space. We are either going to restore it or get rid of it,” Cook says. “So we started looking for somebody who would take it on.”

It took about five years, plenty of hand wringing and help from a lot of different sources, but The Judge was finally back presiding over the streets of Mosinee in 2016.

De Judge cometh

Any muscle car inspired by the “Here Come ‘de Judge” skits on Rowan & Martin’s “Laugh In” TV show was sure to be a bit crazy and the GTO Judge was crazy in a very fast way. As Car Life magazine once put it, “Pontiac inspired the supercar for this generation . . . and The Judge is one of the best.”

“Born Great” was the catchy sales slogan that Pontiac Motor Division used for the 1969 GTO “The Judge.” The new model of GTO was designed to be what Car and Driver magazine called an “econo racer.” In other words, it was a heavily optioned muscle car with a price that gave you a lot for your money. It was a machine that you could take racing, pretty much “as is,” and for a lot less money than a purpose-built drag racing car cost. It was seen in many street races, too.

GTO styling was shared with the LeMans with additional standard equipment features including a 400-cid/350-hp V-8, dual exhaust, 3.55:1 rear axle ratio, heavy-duty clutch, three-speed gearbox with floor shifter, Power-Flex cooling fan, sports-type springs and shock absorbers, redline wide-oval tires, carpeting, Deluxe steering wheel and choice of bucket or notchback seats. A cross-hatched grille insert with horizontal divider bars appeared and hidden headlights were standard. GTO lettering was seen on the left-hand grille, right-hand side of deck lid and behind the front wheel openings. Tail lamps were no longer completely surrounded by bumpers and carried lenses with bright metal trim moldings. Rear side marker lamps were of a shape inspired by the GTO shield instead of the triangular type used on Tempests.

Pontiac Motor Division’s release of the “The Judge” option package was made on Dec. 19, 1968. At first, “The Judge” came only in bright orange with tri-color striping, but it was later made available in the full range of colors that were available for other ’69 GTOs. Special standard features of The Judge package included a blacked-out radiator grille, Rally II wheels (minus bright trim rings), functional hood scoops and “The Judge” decals on the sides of the front fenders and “Ram Air” decals on the hood scoops. At the rear of the car there was a 60-inch wide “floating” deck lid airfoil with a “The Judge” decal emblem on the upper right-hand surface.

The standard “The Judge” engine was the Pontiac 400-cid/366-hp Ram Air III V-8. It came linked to a three-speed manual transmission with a floor-mounted Hurst T-handle shifter and a 3.55:1 rear axle. A total of 8,491 GTOs and Judges were sold with this engine and only 362 of them were convertibles. The more powerful 400-cid/370-hp Ram Air IV engine was installed in 759 cars in the same two lines and 59 of these cars were convertibles.

“The Judge” option was added to 6,725 GTO two-door hardtops and only 108 GTO ragtops. The editors of Car Life magazine whipped a Judge through the quarter-mile at 14.45 seconds and 97.8 mph. Supercars Annual covered the same distance in a Judge with Turbo Hydra-Matic transmission and racked up a run of 13.99 seconds at 107 mph.

Looking good at 50!

Jordan’s Judge turned the big 5-oh this year and the car looks great, but it wasn’t easy. The process took five years and actually started many years ago when Jan’s brother Al had it. “He had started to buy parts and quarter panels and a hood and different parts,” she recalled. “He wanted to restore it some day, so he was collecting things for it. So we had all those original parts from when he owned it, and we were able to use all that.”

The couple had a hard time deciding at first who to turn the project over to. “We had one place fly out to look at it, and when it came time to give us an estimate and they found out she had originally bought the car it was like, ‘Oh, so it has personal attachment,’ and there was no limit,” he said. “It had sentimental value so there was no limit to the price!”

“No one would really give us an estimate what it would cost,” Jan adds.

Finally, the couple settled on having a local shop serve as a sort of general contractor, “but there wasn’t just one shop that worked on it,” Cook says. “Lots of people were involved. Like we take the dash out and ship it to California, and another place would do the chrome. Most of the time it was done in places around Wisconsin.”

Cook also scavenged some parts himself from junkyards that were within driving distance. “We put air conditioning in it,” he pointed out. “I went down to Tigerton [Wis.] to a junkyard and took it out of another car myself. We replaced a lot of little things, like window cranks that were worn out and things like that.”

Jordan still has the original window sticker, which shows the car cost a grand total of $3,446.76 after showing up on the lot loaded with about a dozen options and accessories. Among them were a four-speed manual transmission with a console; flip-up headlamps; radio; power steering; heavy-duty battery; tinted glass; and front floor mats. One noteworthy option not on the car is the familiar hood tach, which Cook says frequently causes consternation among car show attendees. “I’d say six or seven times out of 10 you’ll hear somebody come up and say, ‘This is a clone. This isn’t a real Judge, it doesn’t have the hood tach.’ And I get up and go over and say “We know it’s original. She bought it new!’ But people don’t know you could get them without the hood tach.”

Few cars will get you noticed quicker than a bright orange ’69 Judge, with snazzy graphics, a big ol’ spoiler in the tail and a growling 400 V-8 under the hood. Jordan is probably used to the attention the car gets after so many years, but the car’s extroverted personality is a huge part of its enduring appeal.

“Even for the little kids, it’s a head turner. I do [enjoy it],” Cook says. “Compared to new cars, yeah, it’s a beast. There is no comparison — you know the long-throw four-speed compared to the close-mesh six-speed like in her [2013] Mustang [laughs]. There’s no comparison. But it’s an old car.”

“We’ve put about 1,600 miles on it and we like to take it out. She wanted a trailer queen, but I said, ‘No, no, no! If we are going to put this much work into it, we’re going to use it.”

Unlike the day she went to shop for the car and had to learn to drive it, Jordan almost always has company in her Judge these days. “I don’t usually drive it now,” she says. “Roger always drives. I just ride along.”

The post Car of the Week: 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge appeared first on Old Cars Weekly.

Story and photos by Brian Earnest

Even if it wasn’t super rare and didn’t carry a champion’s pedigree, Steve DeMars’ 1970 Pontiac GTO “The Judge” convertible would still be ultra-cool.

It’s just hard not to be impressed with the immaculate “triple-black” ragtop and its perfect paint, perfect chrome and that ominous 366-horse, 400-cube Ram Air III engine living under the hood.

The fact that the car is nationally known and decorated and one the few ’70 GTO convertibles you’ll ever find with factory air-conditioning makes it the total package. And yes, it drives great, too.

DeMars has had to show some restraint in the 17 years he’s owned the car. He’s only put 4,000 miles on the GTO during that time — the odometer now shows 67,000-plus miles — but he didn’t buy the car with the intention of driving it much, anyway. The black Pontiac was simply one of those “Holy Grail” cars that a hard-core GTO enthusiast Demars couldn’t pass up when he had a chance to own it.

“This was a no-brainer. As soon as we knew that [the previous owner] wanted to get rid of it, it was get my semi there and get it picked up and get it back here,” said DeMars, a resident of tiny North Freedom, Wis. “It was in December. We have a movie of it coming down the road and a movie of it coming off the truck. There was snow on the ground and it couldn’t be driven up here, it had to be hauled.

“I bought it basically just to have it and because I knew it was very rare. I didn’t know how much I would really to drive it, and since then I haven’t really driven it much. It’s been shown more than anything, although it has been in a few weddings. It was in a wedding just recently up here this summer.”

The Starlight Black GTO has traveled full circle in its four-plus decades of life. It began as a bit of a show piece for a Tennessee car dealership, became transportation for many years for its first owner — a woman — and was eventually taken apart and put back together again as a near-perfect specimen. The car was originally delivered to Benton Pontiac-Buick in Cleveland, Tenn., with a fully loaded window sticker and an asking price of $4,955.98. The woman who bought it probably had no idea that she was buying an unusual muscle car when she signed her name on the title, but she apparently liked the car because she kept it until 1990.

“Her husband finally passed away and she was too elderly to really do anything with it, and a man named John Karnes knew it and John just kept talking to her about getting a hold of it so he could restore it,” DeMars said. “And when he did, he kept a log on it and the log has everything about what parts he sent where and what he did. Ninety percent of the parts on this car were taken off and restored and put right back on the car. Very few parts were purchased.

“It was a little rough. The lower back quarter had some rust and they had to pull that out and re-do that. At one time, for some reason they went and put a radio antenna on the car and that hadn’t come from the factory. John Karnes had taken that off and they had to weld that area shut. Mainly, the back quarter was the worst area on the car. They did a rotisserie (restoration) on the car and pretty much took everything off the frame and put everything on it. They had a person in Cleveland who did the motor. It was all done by friends of his, actually, down in Tennessee.”

The car made its first big splash on the national scene, oddly enough, when it was named “Best in Show” at the 1994 Corvette Nationals. By then, DeMars had already heard about the car and was keeping tabs on it.

“1991 was when I started knowing about the car, but 1994 was the first time I ever saw it,” he said. “I had a friend down in Cleveland, Tenn., who told me about it and I had another friend down in Knoxville, Tenn., who owned a lot of Corvettes … and this car, was shown at the Corvette Nationals in 1994, and it took Best of Show in the Nationals, against Corvettes, and also against a car that was a 1994 (winner) at the GTO Nationals. That car was a ’71, and it was shown against that ’71 and beat that ’71 there also.

“That’s how I got to know about the car. I belong to the GTO national club [GTO Association of America] and at that point I just kind of started following it around and watching at. Then the gentleman who owned the car, John Karnes, he decided that he wanted to adopt some children from overseas and he adopted two girls and he decided he needed the money and needed to get rid of the car, and that’s how I got it. He traded the kids for cars.

“I ended up going down and getting the car and having it shipped up here. Him and I have been friends and kept close all these years. I showed it at Nationals in 2001 and got silver with it in Minnesota, and in 2002 I re-showed it out in Denver, Col., and got a gold there. It was restored in 1990 and it’s won trophies all over the place.”

The car was apparently one of only five black convertibles with air conditioning, but just being a The Judge ragtop makes it scarce. Pontiac cranked out more than 40,149 GTOs for the 1970 model year, but only 168 of those were The Judge convertibles. The Ram Air III V-8 wasn’t exactly plentiful, either. Only 288 of the GTO ragtops — base GTOs and Judges combined — had that engine option. DeMars’ convertible has the Ram Air III hooked to a Turbo Hudra-Matic 400.

The Judge option package was once again available for the GTO two-door hardtop and the GTO convertible. It was officially called the code 332-WT1 accessory group and included the 400-cid/366-hp Ram Air V-8, Rally II wheels less bright trim rings, G70-14 black sidewall fiberglass-belted tires, a T-handle-shifted manual gearbox, a rear deck lid airfoil, specific body side stripes, “The Judge” body decals and stripes and a black-textured radiator grille.

The Judges were $300-$400 more than the regular GTOs, but they were still a relative bargain in the muscle car world. The 366-hp engine package added $337.02 to the price of the cars that it was ordered for, regardless of whether the car was a hardtop or a ragtop. That put the base price of a hardtop with “The Judge” equipment at about $3,604.02, although there may have been some mandatory options that added a little more to that. Prices on the convertible version started at about $3,829.02.

Buyers who wanted to get their GTO Judge with a more powerful Ram Air IV engine had to shell out $558.20 extra. In addition, Ram Air IV cars could only be built with either a three-speed Turbo Hydra-Matic transmission or a four-speed manual gear box.

The Judges could be ordered in all the regular GTO colors, or a special Orbit Orange that was made available at midyear. Depending on the base color, the special judge graphics were either trimmed in green, yellow and white striping; blue, orange and pink; or yellow, blue and red. Starlight Black cars like Demars’ got the yellow-blue-red treatment. There were some variations in the look of the rear spoilers. Some were body color, some were black and some had striping. Judge decals were found behind the front wheel openings and on the trunk lid.

The front end featured twin side-by-side headlights with rounded lenses set back from the protruding Endura rubber nose. In back, taillights were sunken into the wrap-around bumper.

Standard equipment included bucket seats, padded dash, heavy-duty clutch, deluxe steering wheel, dual exhausts, Rally II wheels, a three-speed manual transmission with a T-handle shifter and a new rear sway bar. Of course, the rear deck foil and special decals and “eyebrow” markings on the fenders were an important part of the package, too.

DeMars is a GTO buff — he also owns a 1971 Judge hardtop — has been showing his black convertible since he’s owned it, and he’s never seen another car like it. “There were only 168 convertibles made and of all the car shows, national shows, that I’ve been to, this is the only black one we’ve ever run into,” he said. “I know where there was one. It was in Ohio, I’m not sure if it’s still there, and at one time I had an opportunity to buy that one, but that was the same year that this one was going to get sold, so I held off on that one.

“Five of them were triple-black with air conditioning, but we haven’t found another one yet. People will say they know where one is, but we’ve never seen one… In Denver when they were judging it, the judge there said, ‘This is very, very rare. I’ve never seen anything like this, with air conditioning in a convertible.’ Then another judge came walking over and goes, ‘What’s up with this thing?’ and the first guy said, ‘This is about as rare as you’re ever going to see.’”

Other than keeping the car clean and show-ready, DeMars has done very little to The Judge. He’s tweaked a few things to make them “correct” in the eyes of show judges, but beyond that he’s mainly tried to preserve the Pontiac and avoid any mishaps. He knows that plenty of other Pontiac and muscle car buffs know about the car, and he doesn’t want to be the one to bang it up. “We try to be very careful with it,” Demars chuckled. “It’s really too expensive to drive much.

“It’s got a little history behind it… It’s not a car that people don’t know about.”

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The post Car of the Week: 1970 Pontiac GTO Judge appeared first on Old Cars Weekly.