Cadillac Ranch

This is Stanley Marsh's Cadillac Ranch! It's a countercultural American icon.

The Ranch consists of ten Cadillacs from the late 50s/early 60s vintage half buried in the west Texas prairie just west of Amarillo, tilted toward the east with the submerged fronts of the cars pointed toward the west...toward LA, the land of dreams...both realized and broken. Stanley Marsh is a local boy in Amarillo, a helium millionaire, who is recognized as being somewhat eccentric and down to earth. When I visited here in the 1980s, I noticed that his name, address, and phone number were right there in the Amarillo phone book...very unusual for such a prominent citizen.

The cars are getting up there in years, and a suggestion to Stanley might be to replace them with new Cadillacs...he can afford it. The Ranch is a dynamic exhibit...some years ago the cars had to be exhumed and reburied a few miles west of their original location due to encroaching urban development...there is a shiny new large mall just a couple miles east of this place. So it's logical that the cars could be replaced.

Such an offbeat locale is right up the Lizard's alley, and he enjoyed his visit to the Cadillac Ranch.