Golden age of car culture

1940 Pontiac Torpedo Special Series 25 “woodie.’’ Woodies were very popular in New England, where they were often called “beach wagons.’’

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

I’ve been binge-reading (but will soon stop, getting to overdose levels)  novels and short stories by John O’Hara (1905-1970), that  hard-nosed chronicler of American society, from the 1930s to the ‘60s. Few people have  written about U.S. social mores and the roles of class and money as well as O’Hara. And few have written such superb dialogue. (He also wrote accurately, but too much, about sex.) O’Hara can be addictive. But then in my case that’s partly because I’m old enough to remember some of the historical context in which he wrote.

Here I tell of O’Hara’s wonderful description of America’s car culture. He describes  the various  species of cars, some very exotic and most now long extinct, and their relationship with their owners, like a zoologist.  Those  grandiose Pierce-Arrows and Duesenbergs! Consider that O’Hara’s most famous  -- and first – novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934)  is about the downfall of a car dealer in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pa.

That reminds me of how much more obsessed we seemed by cars in the ‘50s and ‘60s than now.

In our family the arrival of a new vehicle was a big event, with, it seemed, often more emphasis on how it looked than   on how well it drove or how sturdy it was. Color was very important.

We had DeSotos, a Pontiac station wagon, a Jeep, several Chevy Impala convertibles (which my mother tended to wreck after some drinks), wooden-paneled “Beach Wagons” (aka “Woodies”) and a Rambler (bad move), among others. The most memorable was the three-wheeled (two on front, one in back) Messerschmitt (made by the German airplane company). My father mostly used it to drive to the train station, but a few horrifying times he drove it into Boston.

Ah, the new-car smell, soon to be overtaken by the acrid scent of our parents’ cigarettes.

Cars are much better now – much safer, much more fuel-efficient -- and clean electric cars may be dominant within the next five to 10 years. But there’s much less excitement when new cars are introduced than 60 years ago, and you’re less likely to read new fiction in which cars play the major roles they had in short stories, novels  and movies of decades ago. The  vertical front-grill disaster of the Ford Edsel (1958-1960) was a big story.  The romance has faded.

(Tires – radials --  are sure a lot better now. Fifty years ago it seemed we’d have to change flat tires several times a year if we drove a lot, which we did most years.

The car culture was something of  a national unifier as the terrible roads of the early 20th Century were improved, and then came the Interstate Highway System, starting in the late ‘50s.

Consider all those “road books’’ – e.g., Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and even  Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita – spawned by America’s golden auto era. Americans are less mobile now, but a latter-day road book called The National Road: Dispatches From a Changing America, by Tom Zoellner, has just come out. I’ll read it.