01-Oct-2007
A History Of My Life In Cars
I once had the idea of writing my autobiography using, as each chapter heading, a different car I’d owned. It was a clever idea; unfortunately, I couldn’t quite think of my life as clever enough to match the chapters.
Still, these metallic beasts do define us and do, in many respects, mark the beginnings and endings of various parts of our lives.
I learned to drive, for example, on a well-used 1949 Studebaker my mother bought to drive back and forth to her job at a boys’ reformatory. It had small silver fins on the back, an H-stick shift on the steering wheel column, and had been painted with black housepaint. It had charm, too, and atmosphere, at least until it fell apart one day as my mother drove home from work.
Next up was the Studebaker replacement: a 1949 Buick dubbed the Green Wienie. It was big enough that you could bed your girl in the back seat (a teen’s dream which, alas, never happened), was made out of nothing but steel and probably weighed about as much as a threesome of today’s Accords. Nevertheless, I occasionally got to take that one to school and it was cool, man. I was ice and tore up the road at about ten miles to the gallon (which gallon, though, cost about thirty-seven cents).
My own first car (which preceded my Honda motorcycle) was a 1952 Pontiac. The engine had eight cylinders all in a row and was about four feet long – lots of power for trips up to Kenosha where I was courting a sweetheart. She put her own mark on that car one time when we spent a Saturday afternoon washing it. Using an SOS pad, she rubbed most of the rust off of the chrome bumpers – as well as most of the chrome.
One Sunday, after some sort of a tiff or fight with my young wife, I drove our 1958 Chevrolet Del Ray out into the country to cool off. While I undoubtedly cooled off, I also managed to 1) get that car stuck up to its axles in mud; 2) immerse myself up to my ankles in mud as I walked to a farm house, and 3) burn out the valves on the car before deciding that a farm tractor was a better idea. I sold that car to a young woman for the exact amount on her income tax refund check (around a hundred dollars, as I recall). And, yes, I explained in detail about burned out valves and how much it would cost to fix them.
Our next car was a 1961 Buick Special purchased in 1968, a V-6, which suffered the astounding indignity of falling victim to a kind of environmental consciousness: it was sold and replaced with two ten-speed bicycles (complete with baby seats because we were no longer just a twosome). Living virtually next door to a supermarket, drug store, a McDonald’s, and the university where I was in grad school, we managed that bit of perversity fairly well.
Eventually, we redeemed ourselves for that truly bad idea with a brand new 1972 Volkswagen Super Beetle. Cost (and financed with a bank loan): $1900.00. We would have been a sight at the time – two adults, two kids, and an Old English Sheepdog zipping along the countryside for a hundred and twenty-five thousand miles until the body of that car finally declared its freedom from the frame. Prior to that moment, we regularly had to caution anyone sitting in the back seat not to put their feet on the floor since most of the floor was missing.
Following upon the demise of the Super Beetle came two inherited cars as my parents health waned and they entered a nursing home. First was a Ford Tempo which brought us a new life in Maine, and then their Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, a car so big I expected a helicopter to land on its hood at any moment. Yet it rode like a cloud and was as comfortable as most of the furniture we’ve ever had in our lives. It also conked out on me one time on the Ohio Turnpike, leading me into a backwater garage that seemed like something out of a Faulkner novel. Nevertheless, I nod with acute sympathy anytime I pass one of those cars stalled at the side of an interstate.
These more mature years have found us in full embrace of the Honda (we have two). Not a lot of kicky cachet to these vehicles, but their reliability and dependability are astounding.
We have yet to learn the full cost to the world of the internal combustion engine, and it may turn out that that cost will be horrible. But whether we toodle around in our Mini Cooper’s and face squashing by eighteen-wheelers, or toodle around in our SUV’s and face the derision of our peers, these four-wheeled boxes mark us as certainly and as permanently as any currently fashionable tattoo. As we move from one part of our lives to another we move on wheels and we remember those wheels.
It is, thus, not at all surprising that we occasionally hear of some autophiliac circumventing local ordinances and getting himself buried in his prized Mustang or Comet or Corvette or …
G. K. Wuori © 2007
Photoillustration by the author
