The Cars

I realize that from the title, some of you might have, for a small portion of a second, had the vagrant thought, "Gee, he's going to talk about Rick Ocasek's group." I will admit to liking some of their music and especially the cover art on Candy-O. But no, this is not about the rock group, it's about my relationship with automobiles and driving.

The first family car I can recall was a Studebaker. I would not be surprised if some of you have never heard of this make. Production of them ended in 1966 which is probably a bit before some of you were born. Anyway, this was the first family car we had. It was replaced by a 1955 Chevrolet four-door sedan that was blue. This is the car I most clearly identify with my early childhood. I have clear memories of driving to the Bronx in it to my grandmother's on Friday nights for supper. I was young enough that my mother would put me into my Dr. Denton's before we left for home and I would sleep on her lap on the way home. (No. There were no seat belts then. If we had hit something I probably would have become an integral part of the dashboard and would not be sitting here writing this.) It was a manual transmission with the gear shift on the steering column. It was in this car that my mother struggled to learn to drive (which she never did). After my father died in 1968, a friend of ours who was a car mechanic looked it over and declared it unfit to keep. We sold it for $25.00 and, from what I understand, it died on one of the bridges on the way to Brooklyn.

In 1963 my parents purchased a Dodge Dart. That was a remarkable car. The engine was a slant six that came in two sizes, 170 and 270 cubic inches (we got the smaller one). It had an automatic transmission that was controlled by a series of push-buttons on the left side of the dashboard. Because it had no clutch, my mother finally learned to drive an automobile. Most important, it had a radio. A radio! Now I could listen to the Yankees games when we were in the car without having to jam my little transistor radio (yes, I said transistor radio) in my ear. This is the car in which I learned to drive. It was also the first car in which I experienced, as Meatloaf so eloquently put it, passion by the dashboard lights.

Freshmen at Syracuse University were not allowed to have cars and parking was at an extreme premium. But by my sophomore year, my mother had remarried and the Dodge Dart was given to me. Living in a fraternity, we had our own parking lot. And everyone's car had a name. There was Ward, the VW Beetle. There were the Oil Burner, my big brother's 1964 Chevy Impala and the Gas Range, his roommate's 1965 Impala. There was the Beast, a 1960 full size Mercury convertible that, when the windshield washer was activated with the top down, the front seat passenger got sprayed. And there was my Dodge Dart which my big brother named Arnold Ziffel for some reason. (In case you don't know, Arnold Ziffel was the pet pig on Green Acres that Mr. and Mrs. Ziffel treated as if it was their child (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Ziffel)). Syracuse winters are long and hard but between 1971 and 1974, the two most reliable cars were the oldest, the Oil Burner and good old Arnold. Arnold was the car in which I courted the woman to whom I am married. He was the car that drove me to a fraternity wedding in Rochester despite persistent overheating. He went with me to Air Force field training in Plattsburgh, NY. And in May 1974, days after I had been commissioned and received my bachelor's degree, and fully laden with all the stuff from my room, we were driving from Syracuse to Connecticut, less than a month before our wedding. I stopped for gas on the New York Thruway about ten miles west of Albany. When I started Arnold up, the engine made a dreadful noise and some ugly smoke emerged from the tail pipe. Knowing as little as I know about cars, we limped away from the service area and made it to Albany where I pulled into a service station. The mechanic took one listen and pronounced it terminal. The main engine bearing was shot. Short of repair, no way was this car making it to Connecticut. We called my fiancée's parents and her uncle and a family friend drove up to Albany and met us at a motel where we had taken refuge from the now pouring rain. In the worst rain that Albany had seen in decades, I had to transfer all my things from Arnold into her uncle's car. That was when I discovered that if it rains hard enough, those raincoats were not entirely waterproof. We drove to a junk yard, pulled the plates off Arnold and left him to his fate. If I had a bugle I would have blown taps. (And then her uncle and her friend were annoyed at me because they expected me to do the driving home and I was soaked and exhausted.)

We used the cars in the family over the summer because I was due to go on active duty in August but in California. We flew out on a Wednesday and were met by friends. The next day we took a lease on an apartment and went and bought a car, an AMC Hornet Hatchback. (I'm sure some of you have never heard of AMC. It was absorbed by Chrysler in 1988.) We needed one off the lot and the only one we could find that had the features we wanted was a manual transmission. I had never driven a manual but my wife had. So she spent the rest of the day giving me a quick and dirty lesson in driving a manual transmission. That was Thursday. That night our friends and we decided to go to San Francisco for the weekend and take the new car. Suffice it to say, I did not dare the hills of San Francisco as a stick shift driver. (We used public transportation in the city. But the following May, after I graduated, my wife's uncle came to visit and we went back to SF and did the scenic drive. I'm proud to say that I DID manage the hills with a stick shift then.) When we left California, my wife was pregnant so she flew home. I caravanned across country with one of my Air Force classmates. We drove from Sacramento, California to Homestead, Florida for water survival training. I had a lot of stuff loaded in the car and it was rather heavy. I had the wonderful experience of driving across the Mojave Desert (Death Valley. Ever heard of it?) in early September with the heater on to keep the car from overheating. From Homestead, I had to drive up the coast to New York where my wife would meet me and then on to Rome, New York to report to my base.

Our first second car was a big old station wagon. My in-laws gave it to us so that my wife would also have a car. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't fuel efficient but it ran well in the winter. Our first Christmas tree was cut down and transported in that car. It was also the first car on which we ever put snow chains.

After I got out of the Air Force, we purchased a Datsun B-210 and gave the Hornet to my in-laws. It became my mother-in-law's car. After finishing graduate school, I took a job in Charleston, West Virginia. We caravaned down. Me in the Datsun, loaded to the gills with stuff including a two-drawer file in the passenger seat, my wife and daughter in the station wagon and my father-in-law and a friend in a Hertz truck driving our hosehold goods. That station wagon came close to being totalled near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Where Interstate 81 merges with another main highway, a tractor-trailer was in the lane ahead and to the right of the wagon. It had a corrugated steel body with metal signs mounted on the side. One of them came loose and came flying directly at the station wagon. My wife did a stellar job of evading it and it missed hitting by a few feet. I happened to have a CB radio in the Datsun and listened to the truck drivers praising how that "beaver" avoided hitting the sign. My wife was thoroughly amused when I told her what they had said.

To be concluded....