Years ago — make that decades ago — in a mellow living room
mood late at night, my friend Rusty began to reminisce about all
the cars he had owned. He was a California kid, and he had owned a
bunch of them, something like 30 by the time he was an equal number
of years old.
I started thinking about cars again more recently, when I asked
my mother if she still had the Kodachrome slides of our family’s
1956 automobile trip from Minnesota to Oregon. (She does, and we’re
going to have them transferred to a disc, because it’s history.
Hard to think of your own family that way, but that America is gone
now.) We made that trek in a Dodge sedan, the six of us, my mother
and father, my sister and I, and my maternal grandparents, whom we
stopped and picked up in Arlington, South Dakota.
It was my Dad’s first new car, and he ended up hating it. It
overheated again and again on the way west. We carried a canvas
water bag slung over the radiator cap, occasionally losing it and
having to double back on the road to find it. As a boy of eight, I
remember the back seat best. We had a barrel-sized Scotch cooler,
and there was plenty of room for it between front and back seats on
the floor; enough so I could sit on the cooler with leg room, like
a jump seat.
DAD WOULDN’T EVER BUY a Dodge-Chrysler-Plymouth again. With our
next family car, Dad reacted against the Dodge’s problems, and
bought a Nash Ambassador.
That car, I remember well. It sailed along the highway on cushy
springs. Bragging rights for the time, it got 20 miles per gallon,
mostly through being severely underpowered. It sure wasn’t
aerodynamics or compact size. The thing was a whale. Inside, the
seats made into a double bed, fully flat. The split backs in front
reclined all the way back. There, they rested on L-shaped
rubber-coated metal braces mounted in the front of the back
seat.
We used it, too. Mom made it up with sheets and everything. My
parents parked the Nash in my grandparents’ yard and slept there
when big family get-togethers overflowed the house. It used to
tickle me to see my Dad in his pajamas, padding across the grass
with his toothbrush to the back porch steps in the morning.
DAD GOT SUCCESSFUL FAST in the sixties, so we got a new house and
two new cars in fairly short order by 1963 and 1964. We had started
buying cars from my mother’s uncle Orlund, a confident,
glad-handing Scotch drinker who sold Oldsmobiles from a Minneapolis
dealership. We had had an Olds 98 after the Nash, a car notable
mainly for the recessed hexagon pattern of foam on its roof lining,
irresistible to a child’s thrusting finger.
Now, with the new house, the new neighborhood, and the job
working out, Dad’s car purchases bloomed. For just about the only
time in his life, he did something stylish. He bought an Oldsmobile
Starfire convertible for himself, red with white upholstery, a
jazzy sleek car free of the whale-like encumbrances of the design
era we had just left. And for Mom, her first ever car of her own,
Dad and Orlund found a car that still resonates in American
automotive history: A 1963 Lincoln Continental sedan, the one with
the so-called “suicide doors” (hinged at the rear) for the back
seat. The 1965 model is pictured here. A year old, it was powder blue with powder blue
tuck and roll leather upholstery. At that time, Road &
Track used to include the Continental on its list of “The Ten
Best Cars in the World.” Everybody in America of a certain age
knows the model. President Kennedy was riding in one, the
convertible version, that day in Dallas.
I had all my teenage driving adventures in those two cars. For
my first frosty windows unbuttoned in the car dating adventures, I
took Dad’s Olds. The bench front seat let me drape my right arm
around my girlfriend while I drove in a thrilling casual promising
embrace. I had my first teenage accident in that car, too. In a
snowstorm, I took the car on what I promised my mother would be a
single errand. Of course I was tempted to do something else as
well, I don’t remember what. On Highway 52 near the Terrace Theater
in Robbinsdale, doing no more than 30 in the heavy conditions, I
pulled out gradually to pass a slower car and ended up in a
majestic spin. I had seemed to be going so slowly and carefully,
and now trundling sideways at what seemed much faster, and unable
to do anything about it, I watched a tree zoom up and smash into my
door.
THE CONTINENTAL FOLLOWED my mother and dad to Florida while I went
off to college in New York. On my first vacation home from
Columbia, the airlines went on strike. Typical of my mother, hardy
Midwesterner, she said, “We’ll drive then,” and off we went, my
mother, my frail hefty old grandmother, and me, in the Lincoln up
the east coast from Tampa right into New York City to take me back
to school for the spring semesters.
We stayed in New York a couple of days so Mom and Grammy could
see the sights. (Grammy had always supposed people only spoke
Spanish on the TV.) It was over some quiet weekend, perhaps New
Year’s, so even Manhattan was quiet, and that was in 1966,
remember, when the city was very, very different. We had a driving
adventure.
I chauffeured the car over to Fifth Avenue somewhere in the 80s.
We had crossed Central Park, and scoped out the views and the
buildings, and now we wanted to see the tall canyons of midtown. I
started south on the great boulevard, and we drove smoothly, block
after block, when it suddenly occurred to both my mother and me,
dedicated drivers that we were, that the green lights were turning
in our favor all the way downtown. Without speaking a word, I
adjusted the pace of the car to meet the lights, and Mom and I
wondered together how far we could get.
There were some dicey bits. The 57-59th street crossings, the
Grand Central area at 42nd street around the Pan Am building. Then
Herald Square, which would, we saw as we approached, be the real
challenge, with all the streets crossing and several closely
stacked lights in a row. We got through the first two and there was
just barely time and room to nip past the last as it turned yellow,
and we were home free downtown. From there, I drove uninterrupted
all the way to the Washington Square arch. Mom cheered.
THE LINCOLN CAME to a sad end. Mom had kept the car, sentimentally,
as a backup, through her divorce and out to California. When I hit
the low point of my life, with failed kidneys and the start of
dialysis in the 1970s, I used the car, though I had a motorcycle,
too. I foolishly, stupidly, gave it away to a girl who had torn me
up and broken my heart (think Bob Seger’s “Hollywood Nights”). I
had hoped to hold on to her, and of course I didn’t. She never
re-registered it, and we got a call from the Pasadena police many
months later. They had found it abandoned, and we just told them to
junk it.
“It’s an old car,” my mother used to caution me when I took it
out on drives. It had acquired the unnerving habit of stopping —
just stopping, the engine would quit, and we hadn’t found any
mechanic who could figure out why. It doesn’t seem old to me now.
It seems, in my memory, to be absolutely contemporary. I wish I
still had it.
