Back when I was just a wee cub reporter hacking away at a keyboard for a daily newspaper in northwestern Ohio, I spotted in downtown Port Clinton a chestnut-colored  Cadillac station wagon. By the time I returned to the spot with my camera, it had vacated the scene, and I never saw it again.
Now Steve Donohue, who lives in my former stomping grounds (and who owns the Belvedereamino we recently beheld), comes along with some photos of a Cadillac shooting brake which he spotted on nearby South Bass Island in the village of Put-in-Bay, and which recalls those hazy days of my youth. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the same wagon, but that didn’t mean I was sure what exactly it was that Steve spotted.
I’ve had good luck searching custom-bodied Cadillacs over at car-nection’s New Cadillac Database of Dream Cars on Cadillac Chassis, as well as in Walter M.P. McCall’s Crestline book, “80 Years of Cadillac La Salle,” and both resources pointed me toward George Barris (shoulda known), who based it on a 1968 Eldorado Coupe and called it the Casa de Eldorado. McCall noted that
The upper rear body structure included a double roll-bar cage. Standard equipment included “his and her” storage compartments in the rear fender panels. Optional equipment included a sun roof, television set, and cocktail bar.
A little more digging turns up some information in Barris’s “Barris: Kustoms of the 1960s,” co-written with David Fetherston, in which Barris claims the idea originated when he pitched a 1970 Eldorado station wagon concept to Dean Martin and came up with the Casa de Eldorado.
None of the above sources indicate how many such Casa de Eldorados were built. The Put-in-Bay example above shows some subtle differences from the one in the Barris book, leading me to assume more than one was built. Any Casa de Eldorado experts out there who can fill us in on the details?
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