Jalopy

A thought occurred to me this week and, lo! And behold! It was a blog-worthy thought.

I harken back to the days of my adolescence when I would see an old “classic” car driving down the road, either in sad shape as it had rolled on and on with nary a thought to its upkeep, or one of the lucky ones that had been rescued from the cancer of rust and decay, and restored to or beyond its original luster. People of a certain age know to what I refer. The classics. The ’55 Chevrolet Classic or ’57 Chevy Bel Air, the Ford Fairlane...just about any car from the 1950s that teenagers and gear-heads of the post-Vietnam War era would transform in their garages from old cars to road glitz.

A restored '57 Chevy (1957 Chevrolet Bel Air).

I was 21 years old in 1985. I never drove one of those classic old cars, never got more than a gaping glimpse at the interior of one of them, feeling fortunate that I was able on a few occasions to stick my head through an open window to look at the ancient dashboard styling or the impossibly sprawling, skinny steering wheel; at the strange knobs and levers. To my eye, these cars were primitive compared to the cars belonging to family members that I was allowed to ride in or drive at the time. 


(A brief aside… when I was a small child — perhaps in the early 1970s — I would play in Uncle Frank’s big old Buick, which may have been from the 1950s, but I had no clue then of the significance of the car’s age.

Uncle Frank's Buick looked a lot like this one.)

When I looked these cars over, I was overcome with a kind of awe. What must it have been like to drive these things back in the day? They were so huge! Were they difficult to handle? Tough to steer? The sense of a bygone era, a time before my time, would fill me with the yearning to go back 30 years in time, from the 1980s to the 1950s, just to see what it was like then.

This week I was waiting to turn onto a busy highway when I saw a “boat” from the 1980s drive past me. Maybe it was from the 1970s, as it looked much like the 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass pictured here.

I’ll place the car in the 1980s, as that’s when I would have been most aware of such a car.

As it zoomed past me — in seemingly much better condition than the vehicle pictured — that blog-worthy thought occurred to me: that car is [at least] 30 years old.

It may not seem such a blog-worthy thought, but when set beside the thought of the 30-year-old cars of my youth, a disconnect occurs. As the 1980-ish Olds drove past me, I saw just an old, gas-guzzling tank, whereas 30 years ago I was filled with awe at the sight of a 30-year-old car.

The difference? Well, of course, just about every car from the 1950s is viewed as a classic, even the marketing bombs (Edsel, anyone?). I swear, if even the smallest handful of the most obscure automotive failure were manufactured, there is someone today who is an absolute fanatic about it, and owns three of them. Or thirty. Very few examples from the 1970s and ‘80s are viewed so warmly. "Planned obsolescence” — the manufactured flaws and weaknesses that were designed to kill a car by the time it reached 75,000 miles in an effort to generate repeat sales (remember 5-digit-only odometers?) — was an endearing, if unknown at the time, feature of our beloved cars of the ‘50s, but by the 1970s and ‘80s, it was killing our nation’s auto industry because the manufacturers of our imported Japanese and German cars weren’t interested in seeing their product rattle into heaps of rolling junk inside of 10 years, and neither were American auto consumers any more.

But more viscerally, I think the lack of awe at seeing a 30-year-old rolling throwback cruise by me was due, simply, to familiarity. In that Olds (or whatever it was) I saw an old beast that I had probably ridden in, either with a family member or with high school friends on a Friday night after pizza at Aurelio’s. There was nostalgia. It was “my” era. With a car of the 1950s, for me, there is no nostalgia, just a mystique, a wonder about what it was like to ride in such a car back then. With the ’77 Olds, I know what it was like. I knew what the various knobs were for. I knew how it handled. And I was never impressed.

After it passed by, though — and after I had the fleeting thought that became this post — I was rather impressed that the heap was still rolling after all these years. Like its classic predecessors, there probably aren’t too many left on the road...due not to the fact that few have survived the currents of time, but more probably due to apathy.

Impressed, yes, and hopeful that whoever was driving it was bringing it to his garage somewhere, and was that evening going to begin his labor, and soon that heap would once again be road glitz.



°