I think you're over-thinking things... Vintage bicycles have been tinkered with and collected for decades already - this forum is roughly twenty years old. The frame could have been stripped a few years ago rather than forty. There are tens of thousands of vintage bicycle components and frames for sale eBay or Craigslist on any given day. Stripping down perfectly good bicycles is an unsavory but necessary aspect of the hobby of acquiring, rebuilding or modifying vintage bicycles like we love to do here in the C&V forum.

That's cool that yours looked like the one in the catalog! I personally find the chrome frame look rather distracting and haven't researched the model much, but chance has only led me to see a few like the one Mark has here.

The bike boom must have hit your area late, but as you yourself state, you were a victim of it when you purchased a couple of nice road bikes as early as 1971! From Wikipedia:

"The period of 1965–1975 saw adult cycling increase sharply in popularity — with Time magazine calling it "the bicycle's biggest wave of popularity in its 154-year history" The period was followed by a sudden fall in sales, resulting in a large inventory of unsold bicycles. Seven million bicycles were sold in the U.S. in 1970. Of those, 5½ million were children's bikes, 1.2 million were coaster brake, balloon-tired adult bicycles, and only 200,000 were lightweight 3-speed or derailleur-equipped bikes. Total bicycle sales had doubled by 1972 to 14 million — with children's bikes remaining constant at 5½ million, adult balloon-tired bicycles falling to about 1/2 million, and lightweight bicycles exploding fortyfold, to 8 million. Time magazine reported in 1971 that "for the first time since the 1890s, nearly one-half of all bicycle production" was "geared for adults."

-Gregory