If you could afford a very special car in the 1920s & 1930s, you bought a Packard.  In the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, you bought a Cadillac.  In the ’70s and ’80s, you bought a Mercedes.

What’s the answer now?  The luxury car field has become very crowded.  There’s no one dominant make.  SUVs have joined the luxury class.  In fact, there are so many luxury cars now that they’re really just commodities, good as they are.

If you spend $150,000-300,000, you can get a real luxury car, like a Rolls Royce, Maybach, Bentley, Ferrari, Aston Martin or Lamborghini.  But the first two are stuffy, standoffish (and not very attractive).  The others are so fast that they’re virtually unusable, except for posing.

So what’s a good luxury car?  What qualities should it have?  It should be:

1. Beautiful
2. Rare
3. Recognized as something very special
4. Useful, but not necessarily on a daily basis
5. Have a good story to tell.

With these criteria, I found the perfect car right in my own garage – a 1955 Cadillac Eldorado convertible.

It was bought new at the old Cadillac dealership at 1000 Van Ness Avenue, in time to be a birthday gift to its original owner in March, 1955, 49 years ago.  The late Hugo Fambrini, a North Beach butcher shop owner and investor, bought the car for his wife, Lena, who kept it for over 40 years before selling it to me.  She had many other new cars in the intervening years, but loved this one so much that she never parted with it – until the mid-’90s, when she was no longer driving.

Recently, Lena Fambrini and I drove to lunch in her old Eldorado.  We were joined by her two sons, Ken and David Fambrini of San Francisco.  She recalled how dazzled she was that Spring day, when she first sat behind the wheel and saw her initials on the gold door plaque.  She’s about five feet tall, and would have been no match for the heavy, 18-foot-long Cadillac, had power-steering not been invented by then.

I asked Mrs. Fambrini if she and her husband had shopped for the car together like a modern couple.  Her reply was interesting: “Of course not. He selected the car and brought it home as a surprise.”  Keep in mind that his task was easier then.  There was really only one make of car that had the luxury field to itself.

A new luxury feature in 1955 was the power seat (that moves up, down, backwards and forwards electronically) that helped her manage this behemoth.  She learned to park it, even in front of her husband’s shop on Grant Avenue.

We drove to lunch with the top down.  On the freeway in Marin County, it got a little windy, but years of experience had taught Mrs. Fambrini to bring good, windproof headgear.  The old Cadillac keeps up with traffic, but creates a sort of hazard as other drivers speed up or slow down to get a better look.

We parked in front of the restaurant and were immediately surrounded by a crowd that no Rolls could attract.  A car like this makes people curious and comfortable.  They ask questions – How old? How valuable? What’s it like to drive?

The interior is a riot of blue leather to match the paint, plus white leather and chrome accents throughout.  The exterior style is one of those fantasies that Cadillac carried off so well for so many years.  The rear fins recall World War II fighter planes, while the front bumper guards were nicknamed Dagmars, after a well-endowed actress of the time.

Look at it this way: with the cost of new luxury cars at $75,000-100,000 and up, and with so many of them sold that there’s no exclusivity, the old Eldorado begins to make some sense.  It’s lots more fun, certainly more exclusive, and will provide a more entertaining ride to Sonoma or Sausalito for lunch than any new car you can name.

If you buy such a car, you’ll have enough left out of your $100,000 budget to buy a really good new car for everyday.  The only problem with this approach is that with two cars, you double your parking problem.  I’ll let you solve that one.