The last time we admired an interesting vehicle parked down on the street in Denver, Colorado, that vehicle was a snow-covered 1974 Volvo 144 near downtown. Now we're heading a bit further south in the Mile High City, to the parking lot of the Brutal Poodle restaurant.
The Brutal Poodle is much loved by metal aficionados in South Denver, with dishes such as GWARled Cheese and Burial Tots on the menu plus drinks named after such luminaries as Lemmy Kilmister and Lars Ulrich. Naturally, you'll hear plenty of symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal blasting from the sound system inside, because it's brutal in there.
Pintos of any sort are rare sights on the road these days, and this one is an especially hard-to-find example of the facelifted ponies sold for the 1979 and 1980 model years—the last gasp before the Pinto was replaced by the far more modern Escort for the 1981 model year. These final Pintos got square headlights and enlarged taillights, but didn't differ much from the first Pintos that hit American streets as 1971 models.
The infamous Mother Jones article that gave the Pinto its reputation as a car that burst into flames when hit from behind came out in the fall of 1977, though Pinto sales were already declining quickly by that point. To be fair, just about all small cars with the fuel tank located between the rear bumper and axle (that is, most Detroit compacts and subcompacts of the era) were vulnerable to fuel-tank leakage in rear-end collisions, but the Pinto became the most notorious.
What makes this car a Pinto Runabout is the glass rear hatch. Two-door sedan and wagon versions were available as well. This one has the "accent tape stripe" option in orange, plus the "luxury cloth/vinyl" Interior Decor Group. It's a bit rusty and needs license plates, but I saw it moving under its own power and I could tell its owner was proud of his vintage Ford. Keep in mind that this Pinto is as old now as was the 1935 Ford Model 48 when it was new (and it probably sat in gas lines in that grim summer of 1979).
