Griley, that Toro is very cool!!
On the topic of that 62 Catalina bubbletop, the roof is very strange indeed. The aluminum engine in that car was recently featured in Hemmings Muscle Machines, but in a Tempest wagon.
There were many of these all aluminum 389's floating around back then. Pontiac Engineering was whipping up some very exotic stuff, and what's amazing is that they had the smallest budget and engineering garage of all the divisions. Yet they managed to turn out DOHC and SOHC engines, 3-valve heads, 4-valve heads, all aluminum engines, aluminum rear ends, hemi heads, aluminum frames, swiss-cheese frames, aluminum bumpers, aluminum fenders, 2-piece aluminum headers, lightweight 421SD cars with rear transaxles, and they did all that by 1963.
On top of that, it was recently discovered that back in 1961, Pontiac engineers were prepared to release (for production) a twin turbo 389. Smokey Yunick had taken one of these twin turbo 389 packages and produced 900 hp on a dyno by kicking up the boost. Estimates had the production version at around 450-500 hp, and again, this was 1961! Pontiac cast up exhaust and intake manifolds for a production run, but abandoned the project when it was determined that NASCAR and NHRA would not allow turbo cars.
Always liked the cover of this early 1968 Hot Rod issue. The SOHC 421 in the lower left corner was installed in Mac McKellers 1963 Grand Prix, and all these decades later, it still pops up at car shows on occasion.
I hope you guys make it to the Muscle Car Nats in Rosemont IL in a couple weeks. There will be a large Pontiac representation there, including the factory lightweight 65 GTO, the Car & Driver 64 GTO, and loads of others. The theme is "the best of 1969".
