At 270,000 miles and counting, Pittsfield man's 1972 Packers Cadillac just keeps rolling into Lambeau Field tailgate party
GREEN BAY - Bart Boyden’s faithful tailgating companion at Green Bay Packers games for the last 30-plus years is over the hill, doesn’t go as fast as it once did, can be prone to the occasional leak and let’s not even talk gas.
It’s also the undisputed life of the party.
His 1972 green and gold Cadillac Fleetwood has been turning heads outside Lambeau Field since before Brett Favre ever wore No. 4.
It’s a mainstay of Lot 10, where Boyden props open the trunk to show off the car's history in license plate years, blasts party music from speakers strapped to the roof and never fails to draw a crowd with his one-of-a-kind ride.
“We always get people walking by and wanting to take pictures. That’s what it’s there for is for people to enjoy,” said Boyden, who lives in Pittsfield and has both green package and gold package season tickets. “But yeah, if I had $5 for every picture I think that was taken I would be retired now.”
Boyden bought the classic Caddy in 1990, after the 1970 Pontiac Catalina he had slowly been morphing into a Packers car in the late ’80s up and died on him. It was baby blue with a vinyl roof when he got it, but he knew it was destined for a life of green and gold, so with the help of friends he customized it — exterior paint job, interior seats, its own flagpole on the rear fender and, the equivalent of a cherry on top, a Packers helmet hood ornament.
It also comes equipped with a feature you can’t get anywhere else: an owner whose football-loving parents named him after legendary Packers quarterback Bart Starr.
“You couldn’t ask to be named after a better person,” said Boyden, who makes it a tradition to wear his No. 15 uniform, shoulder pads and all, for the home opener tailgate. It’s right up there with raising the tailgate flag every game to 1960s NFL Films music.
Its longest, greatest road trip was to New Orleans for Super Bowl XXXI
Each year, he gets a new license plate for his golden Caddy and displays a collage of the old ones in the trunk, a Packers pop-up exhibit before pop-ups became cool. Most of them read “PACK” and the year, but he commemorated “Y2K” in 2000 and “COVD” in 2020. This year he’s sporting “23LOVE” plates to mark Jordan Love’s first season as the Packers’ starting quarterback.
The "4 FAVRE” plate framed in the middle of the collection comes with its own story.
Boyden was tailgating with the car at The Broke Spoke bar in Favre’s hometown of Kiln, Mississippi, on the Saturday before the Packers beat the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans. A woman came up to his wife, Laura, and asked if he would be willing to trade plates: her “4 FAVRE” for his “97 PACK.”
“Heck, yeah,” Boyden said. He quickly got a screwdriver and removed his front plate but then noticed she only had a back plate. She took it off and put his on.
“Oh, I work for the DMV,” she told him. “That’s OK.”
That 1997 road trip to the Super Bowl is the longest distance Boyden has ever traveled in the car. It leaked oil on the way down, forcing him to stop every 150 miles to add more. He jokes it was his trail of bread crumbs to ensure he could find his way back home.
These days, given the car's advanced age, Boyden sticks to mostly just driving it the short distance to Lambeau. It never fails to get a reaction when it’s rolling down the road, because it is a little hard to miss.
“There’s a lot of thumbs up and horn honking and woohoo,” he said.
Before the season starts, he puts it through a training camp of sorts. He drives it to work a few days to make sure it’s roadworthy and get out ahead of any potential issues.
It has somewhere in the ballpark of 270,000 miles on it, so naturally it requires some babying. Things like making sure the fender skirts stay on, going slow and taking the back roads when there’s rain or snow, since its traction isn’t what it used to be in its younger days, and forgiving it for its exhaust smell.
He redid the paint job and body work around 2000, but there’s always touch-ups or repairs. He bought new speakers this year. The subwoofer his brother-in-law built in the mid-’90s is still going strong.
He doesn’t have to worry about gas mileage, but he guesses that big ol’ boat might eek out 7 miles to the gallon. A couple of years ago when it sounded like the gas tank was hanging low, it took some “on-the-fly engineering” to correct it. Boyden isn’t interested in pushing his luck by putting the weight of a full 25 gallons in it.
When it was sidelined by repairs in 2021, he had to resort to the minivan
He thought he might have to retire the car a couple of years ago. He was on his way home from the grocery store before the Sunday night game against the Chicago Bears in December 2021 when it felt like the back end was slipping out from behind him. It turned out to be the trailing arm in the suspension system.
Until he could get it repaired, he had to recruit the family minivan for game-day duty the rest of the season. Boyden was the same hospitable host. All of his usual tailgating buddies still showed up. Laura still made her famous deviled eggs for the spread.
But a beige minivan just doesn’t have the same drawing power as a half-century-old Cadillac the size of an end zone painted in flashy Packers colors.
“It was just so weird. Just so used to people stopping by. ‘Oh, wow, people aren’t stopping by,’” said Boyden, who gets his joy from sharing the car with fellow fans and offering a beer to Lambeau Field first-timers. “It just wasn’t the same.”
People have suggested the “Packillac," but Boyden never did give the car a name. Then again, he never thought it would stick around as long as it has. It has seen some epic tailgating, and who knows, maybe it’s a good luck charm.
The groomsmen were wearing Packers vests when Bart and Laura got married in 1996 and look how that turned out. The Packers won the Super Bowl that season.
The mechanic who repaired the Cadillac in 2021 cautioned that it’s likely “on borrowed time.” Boyden is just taking it one game at a time, but he’s determined that it make it to 2025 when Green Bay hosts the NFL draft.
“It seems to be holding up, so we’ll just take it as long as we can.”
Knock on wood. Or metal. Or fiberglass.
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Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @KendraMeinert.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: His 1972 Packers Cadillac has been a Lambeau tailgate star for decades
