Cars are part of the background scenery on the stages of our lives; like houses we’ve lived in or old albums of family pictures.
The first car I remember as a child is to still the most unique. It was a 1936 Cadillac Fleetwood Sedan, over 15 feet long; a car Al Capone might have owned. It had running boards, spare tires mounted up on each side of the engine compartment, a radiator ornament like a winged victory figure, and rear doors hinged in the back, so they opened to the front. Dad bought it used from a Buick-Oldsmobile dealership in 1940. I remember the feel of the upholstery on the back seat and the hand straps by each door that hung down to aid entering and exiting. The back of the front bench seat housed a set of compartments the width of the seat, one compartment above the other. I imagined that they must have been designed to hold machine guns or something like that. The trunk was small, but the engine compartment was grand. The car was very reliable, and Dad always drove it slowly to make the tires last. Those old US Royal Master wide whitewall tires made it through the war; when Dad discovered a flat tire, he just patched the inner tube again!
1936 Cadillac My Favorite – Our 1949 Oldsmobile 88
When Dad’s name came up on a buyers list for a new Oldsmobile in 1946, he parked that Cadillac in the weeds behind the machine shed. Several years later a junk man from Quincy bought it for $50.00 and hauled it away. Looking back, when I was 6 years old the car was great; when I was 11 years old, I was embarrassed to be seen in it. Funny how your perspective changes that way.
The first car my brother and I owned in 1955 was a 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88. It was fire engine red with a rebuilt engine block that made for a very high performance V8 engine. I don’t know if Dad realized it when he bought it for us, but it could go 100 mph easily. It had an automatic transmission called a hydromatic drive; no more manual transmissions! I loved that car but it’s the only car I’ve ever totaled. I was driving cautiously back to college at the U of I on a windy January morning after an ice storm. Somewhere between Springfield and Lincoln on old route 66 I hit a patch of ice and a gust of wind hit the car simultaneously and spun it around and into a bridge abutment and compressed the drivetrain a few inches; no one was hurt but I was heartbroken when the dealer in Springfield said if was “totaled” and Dad agreed.
That beautiful car was replaced with a dumpy white 1952 Ford four door Fairlane with a stick shift and no pickup or anything exciting about it. It burned oil; I had to add a pint with every other gas tank fill-up. At one time it had a broken master cylinder in the brake system, so I carried a can of brake fluid in the trunk and whenever I had to pump the brake pedal a couple of times to engage the brakes I’d stop and add more fluid. The front seat was a conventional straight bench configuration. The only seat adjustment in those days was several settings of the forward – rearward position. When that latch broke, I could anticipate the seat slamming forward if I hit the brakes very hard, so I would have to brace myself. I forgot once when some college girls were dozing in the front seat beside me as we were driving home at Thanksgiving and I hit the brakes and forgot to brace myself to hold the seat and let it propel the girls against the dash and they were sure we’d had a serious wreck. They were nervous as cats after that incident and stayed awake the rest of the way and found an alternate path back to Champaign after the weekend and never accepted my offer to ride with me again!
Bad Car Good Car
The car that I bought in 1960 from my father-in-law was his 1957 Chevy. The popular tan colored four-door with the distinctive markings on the rear fenders. He sold it to me at a bargain price; actually, he was making an investment into the safety of his daughter. I think he took my ‘52 Ford with the bad brakes and floating seat to a local junk yard in Mt. Sterling. I wish I had that ’57 Chevy today; who knew at the time that it would become such a classic!
The first time I owned a second car was in the mid 60’s when we moved to Rohmann Avenue in West Peoria and Jan sometimes needed the family car when it was my turn to drive in my carpool. I went to a used car dealer by the name of Walt Colgan on Main street who sold me a terrible car, but it was cheap; only a few hundred dollars. It was a brown low-slung four-door Ford with a set of very large fog lights that I never used but they prompted many sarcastic comments from my buddies. It had a radio that would go dead for no good reason and I had to hit the dash in just the right spot to make it come back on. No air conditioning meant windows rolled down on hot days; and at just the right aerodynamic car speed with the windows open the felt lining inside the roof would be sucked down without warning enveloping the heads of the people in the front seat. After the first time this happened, I learned to either slow down or increase speed quickly and it would pop back up. But the first time this happened with my carpool they didn’t want to ride with me again! I finally convinced them this was a phenomenon I could avoid; not to worry. They asked me one day in all seriousness “Has this car been in an accident?” and I had to admit that I had asked myself that question too.
By the early 70’s the cars being manufactured in the United States were approaching their lowest point of reliability. Everyone hoped that any new car they purchased from Detroit was not built on a Monday with everyone’s weekend hangovers, or on a Friday when half the workforce could care less, as they anticipated the arriving weekend. In 1975 I bought an ugly brown nine-passenger Dodge station wagon. This vehicle developed a dangerous habit of literally dying by way of completely losing all electrical integrity; the car would suddenly cease to work and simply coast to a halt. I found a solution; to simply remove some fuses and wire directly across them, but this did little for my confidence in the car’s reliability.
Another feature the car had was a rear end gate that let the kids that sat in the third seat facing rearward climb in and out. The door hinged two ways; one was to rotate down around a set of hinges along the bottom so it would flatten out for moving stuff in and out; the alternative opening mode was by a set of hinges on the left side that let the door swing around so the kids could enter easily. I remember parking on a country road near our family farm on a slight upward slope and went around to swing the door open. I gave the door a vigorous jerk because it almost always stuck in this mode. However, this time the door opened freely, and since I had provided more impulse than needed the damned door swung around and the weak pot-metal hinges holding it snapped simultaneously, allowing the door to fly down into a weeds-and-rocks filled ditch beside the road! The door was kept from disappearing completely into the ditch by an umbilical cord of electrical wiring holding onto it. The boys and I managed to lift it back into place and secure it, but that meant climbing over the second seat to use the third seat. When I traded that car in, I resolved never to own another Dodge.
My only complaint with recently owned cars is that I don’t get my money’s worth out of all the high-tech features. About the time I have mastered some voice commands for phone calls, or figured out all the audio sources, or how to put in addresses, a week goes by and I’ve forgotten how I did that. In closing I admit that cars were and still are a part of the fabric of life for just about everyone in my “growing up in the ‘50’s” generation.
DLS 1/6/20