Remember the original 1968 Hemi Dart? If you do, you probably wear reading glasses, are losing your hair, and look forward to playing with your grandkids. ‘Course, if you’re of the new generation, you have spikey hair and piercings—like you fell face-first into a fishing tackle box. And all you know of these cars are the lettered and modified Super Stockers that run at the track.
The original Hemi Darts looked nothing like that. They were truly things of beauty, with primered gray body, black fiberglass gelcoat fenders, lift-off hood and skimpy tires. You had to go to the Hurst facility, where they screwed these things together from a factory roller, and pick up your ride with your trailer. Or, maybe you went to Mr. Norm’s Grand Spaulding Dodge in Chicago, and bought one from him.
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| Grand Spaulding Dodge, the country’s leading high performance Dodge dealer back in the supercar heydays, shown here in 1969. | Mr. Norm and the Dodge Fever girl at the Dodge exhibit in the 1968 Chicago Auto Show.. |
Either way, you got an out-an-out racecar that you couldn’t legally register anywhere in the states, and that came with no factory warranty. No matter, if you wanted something that, out of the box, would dominate the quarter-mile or rule at late-night street racing, this was as good as it got.
Norm Kraus, the “Mr. Norm” of Grand Spaulding Dodge (GSD), is one of the icons of the ‘60s-‘70s supercar era. Nobody called them “musclecars” back then. Some car magazine, later on, invented the term and it caught on. Norm was a master promoter. He specialized in performance cars before anyone else did in Chicago, and established the GSD reputation that would become legendary.
Norm was a slick promoter—maybe one of the slickest in the car sales business. He dialed into the youth performance market by establishing the “Mr. Norm’s Sport Club,” which, like Mr. Norm himself, still is in existence today. The GSD service department also installed a Clayton chassis dyno, and Norm offered free dyno tuning (he called it power tuning), rejetting the carb and recurving the distributor with every car purchased. And when Norm found out about traction bars, he threw in a set of those, too.