(1968 Charger 440 R/t. What a machine).
There is plenty to talk about this morning and I am not going to do it, regardless of the temptation. Instead, I want to talk with you about The Way It Was. It was all about the cars then, the really rapid Detroit iron that defined a decade completely and demonstrably surreal.
We drove those cars hard and we loved them in a way that kids today don’t seem to understand- like that commercial with the two hamsters driving some square hallucination of a real automobile, nodding along with some heavy bass tunes.
It evokes another time, that commercial does. All the cities had their mechanized promenades, back in the day. Whatever the Miracle Mile happened to be, the lines of cars filled with kids peering at each other, smoking cigarettes and holding beers down below the level of the window. Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 classic “Born to Run” anthem pretty much sums it up, “the highway was jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.”
Of course, the song didn’t emerge from the Jersey Shore until the collapse of the regime in Saigon and the shock-waves of the 1973 oil crisis ha begun to change the way we drove. I remember Mr. Nixon’s pronouncement that the national speed limit would henceforth be “55 MPH.”
(Mr. Nixon decides we all drive “55”).
It was my first crisis as an almost adult, and dutifully tried to drive at that speed the next morning until an Olds with a cranky white guy at the wheel tried to insert himself into my tailpipe.
Fifty-five. Really. We were used to driving thirty miles an hour faster than that on the most routine of trips on the interstate.
And we drove. Mom and Dad bought a little condominium- a first in Michigan- in the mid-sixties at a little lake west of the Alpine Village of Gaylord, 250 miles north of Grabbingham. It was their first adventure in living the good life- there was an active social community on Martin Lake and each weekend, Raven would drag himself in from the American Motors HQ down on Plymouth Road to join up with the rest of us, standing around by the loaded Ambassador station wagon.
Raven would assume command, and we mounted up, one of us in the way-back with the bags and luggage, two in the back seat, and Mom and Dad in the front. Then we would join the great flow of traffic headed north, through Pontiac and Flint. There was no bridge at Zilwaukee then- there was a drawbridge on the interstate, and raising it to let the big boats head to the Dow Plant upriver made traffic jams that lasted hours. Then Bay City and Saginaw, through Claire (“Gateway to the North!) and the smaller towns in the sandy low hills and Grayling and finally the M-32 exit off I-75 in the dark.
The journey usually took around four hours and some change- Mom had the record time for the distance in three and a half hours, flat. So, in addition to the driving around we would do, and the trips over to Pat and Bud’s store in Elmira (Seed Potato Capital of Michigan!) we routinely put well over 500 miles on the cars on the weekends.
They still drive fast in Michigan. You can feel the difference between the states- Virginia moves along, Maryland pokes, Pennsylvania crawls with turnpike cops, Ohio is fierce, but once you make the big turn north in the Wolverine State, you can feel things open up and the foot gets heavy on the accelerator. Raven gave me the rules of the road as he was teaching me to drive, like he was an instructor pilot at Pensacola: “The cops will give you fifteen,” he said. Try to keep it a little under 85.”
Seriously. These days fifteen over gets you a ticket for reckless driving. Back then, it was just the margin of error. And of course we drove just as much in the winter, with the roads routinely covered with snow and ice. We all knew how to drive on the stuff, and just as fast. You just couldn’t use your brakes.
Anyway, As soon as I had my learner’s permit, Raven installed me behind the wheel of the family wagon, and I considered myself a veteran by the time I was approaching my 16th birthday, when I would be legal to drive all by myself. I commend my father for his forbearance. I remember teaching my sons to drive in Washington, and I think there are still dents on the floorboard of that 1992 Dodge Shadow Turbo from trying to apply the brake pedal I did not have on the passenger side- much less watching your teen-ager at the helm of the vast station wagon with the entire family aboard.
Nerves? You bet. But we learned fast, and the freedom that beckoned was positively intoxicating. So, I was going to bridge that context into the story of the Charger and the County Mounty, and realized I had not even mentioned VASCAR when I got dragged into updating some ancient information for a pal yesterday, and simultaneously got wrapped around the axle of 1967. It is too hard to just say “1967” and expect that anyone except an old fart would have the context for it.
In Grabbingham, two-a-day football practices started in August. We had just seen the National Guard depart the city a few weeks before in the wake of the 12 street riot, which was much more than that, and the second time I saw Raven go into defense mode.
The first time I experienced the impossible was in 1958 or ’59, when he built wooden covers for the little widows at the top of the basement walls with latches to seal them shut in the event of a nuclear attack on the Arsenal of Democracy. “In case I can’t get back from the office,” he said, in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone. “You will need to get these in place and stay down here until they sound the all clear. Popular Mechanics says it can help defeat beta radiation.”
My brother and I nodded back soberly. Our scout troop had recently toured one of the Nike Atlas missile defense batteries that were scattered around town, and we did the Civil Defense duck-and-cover drills at school. Seemed to make perfect sense.
The last week in July of 1967 I saw it again. The first reports were coming over the radio on Sunday morning, and he told me to get both cars over to the gas station and top them up in case we had to flee the city.
See? I was going to tell you a simple story about a neat car and a couple stupid young men, and I got lost in the lost world where it seemed presidents and candidates and civil rights leaders were just gunned down as a matter of course.
It is too vast to attempt to depict the reality of the fall of 1967- immediately after the riot, and before the complete freaking madness of 1968, much less the oil shock, and the way we lived, and the elements of class warfare.
So, I will get to the bit of trouble presently, but I was in the same Charger 440 R/T I was going to tell you about, and will, with my pal Dick at the wheel. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I wasn’t working at the Department Store for some reason. We had ventured outside our comfort zone- down Woodward and in the blue-collar town of Ferndale. We rarely went across Eight Mile, for the obvious reason that the cops there were nasty and still on edge.
We pulled up to the light at Webster, I think, and an aggressive ethnic type- Italian, maybe- had a ’64 GTO that he obviously took a great deal of pride in, but from the Shade Tree Mechanic’s corner, not the race-tuning of the MoPar mechanics that Dick’s father had on the payroll.
The Stallion revved his engine at a light and Dick smiled wolfishly. We came off the line when the light changed and the Goat tried everything he had, staying on the right rear fender of the R/T for several seconds until he threw a piston. A belch of smoke from under the hood as his knots dropped off rapidly.
Dick backed off on the accelerator, and angled to the left to take one of the jug-handle turn-arounds and start back up the Avenue toward Royal Oak. I think we were originally headed for the White Castle, the only one in the immediate area, and thought better of it since we could still see the irate Goat driver with his hood raised.
We went instead to Mavericks, and let the carhop come out and take our orders- a Billy (⅓ pound cheeseburger), fries and a Coke was the usual.
I was content to be a passenger, since I lost my license over what happened a few weeks before, and I was just over being grounded.
It was an amazing time. Some of the braggadocio that flew around Earnest W. Seaholm High School was about racing for “pink slips,” which was a charitable way of saying if you lost the winner got ownership of your car. I could only imagine what Mom would have done if I lost the title to the 1967 AMC Javelin in some display of idiocy.
Sometimes, in a tangential nod to the earlier topic, I am surprised that any of us survived long enough to vote.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303