(Originally published 4/10/21)
Once upon
a time, I charted car comings-and-goings on individual pieces of construction paper. Sometime
in the mid-1970s the teenage me plopped down on my front stoop, and occasionally
at the front window, and recorded the manufacturers of the automobiles that
passed me by. What an interesting boy I was. Back then, I knew car makes and
models—be they Dodge Darts, Chevy Impalas, Buick Centuries, and most everything
in between—because they were respectively unique and readily identifiable.
In those
simpler times in the old neighborhood, everybody knew a whole lot more of their
neighbors than city folk do nowadays, including the specific kinds and colors of the cars they drove. Locals distinguished themselves with their choice of vehicles
and couldn’t, therefore, come and go incognito. Currently—with some notable
exceptions, of course—what is parked along the streets, and in area garages,
look blandly similar, despite all the amazing technological advances therein.
Automobile
hues in the 1970s were also in sync with the fads and fashions of that groovy snapshot
in time. Danny drove a dark-brown Ford LTD; Cathy, a pale-yellow Volkswagen "bug." Jack “elbows” had a sky-blue Plymouth Duster, and Jimmy and Desi next door, a bright-red
AMC Rebel. There were folks who drove gas-guzzling “boats,” as my friends and I
called them back then. Arthur’s father parked a metallic gold-colored
Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight on the street that was the size of a stretch limousine
Others sought out economy cars that were simultaneously affordable and fuel
efficient in an age of increasingly high gas prices and, sometimes, outright
shortages, courtesy of that awful cartel in its heavy-handedness heyday.
My father
owned a 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne for fourteen years. It had an interior smell—a
car-seat vinyl meets gassy residue kind of scent—that inspired carsickness,
particularly without something called air conditioning. In fact, one member of my
family would puke his guts out at the mere notion of getting into the thing—yards
away from it—before every road trip long or short. The Biscayne was at long last
retired in 1973 and we thereafter rode in style in a second-hand Buick Skylark,
purchased from a guy on the next block. It was a set of wheels with the creature
comforts of air-conditioning and a
kneeling-bus quality before there was such a
thing. A decade later, somebody convinced my father to
get with the program
and purchase a Chevy Chevette, a car that drove so many “people happy” with its
incredible gas mileage. It had a stick shift, the back windows could
only go down halfway,
and no air conditioning. Sure, it got decent gas
mileage, but there was no turning back. We were a spoiled clan by then.
Chevrolet, by the way, won the gold medal in my 1970s car-charting Bronx survey—by a considerable
margin if memory serves. There were foreign cars around then, but they were
foreign to most drivers who often were loyal to one American manufacturer or another. Times
change and stoop statisticians—sad to say—have gone the way of the typewriter and countless classic automobiles with style.
