Author: Vic Socotra

Car People

(One of Dad’s concept cars- the Tesla electric car of 1958!) We were car people- in Detroit, of Detroit, the Fathers all had auto contracts with their companies that included a new car every year. We had a flood of new vehicles through the suburbs, and we were quite opinionated about all of them. “Knowledgeable […]

And Still Champion

(Tracy has been cooking all afternoon. That is not the winning burger- it is the trophy. Last year’s was a four-foot-tall bowling trophy. Photo Willow). “A GROUND ROUND SMACKDOWN FEATURING TEN OF THE BEST BURGER SLINGERS IN THE DMV.” No, not the Department of Motor Vehicles. That would make no sense. DiMarVA, they mean- the […]

Pony Cars

I will never forget the night we abandoned George’s ’66 Mustang up in the Maine woods on the road to Belfast. The 289 cubic inch engine gave up the ghost on us in the dark in 1975. We were at loose ends, as recent graduate of college and had not quite figured out what to […]

Woodwarding

(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 […]

Chargers

It was 1966 and my first scrape with the law. It did not go as disastrously as it could have, though the potential was certainly there for permanent physical mayhem and a significant black mark on my Permanent Record. In a way I benefitted from my callow age- just as the underage undocumented aliens are […]

La Femme

I am jet-lagged and punchy this morning. It had been a pretty good flight back into DCA- Ronald Reagan National on the signs- and we made it in between thunderstorms spawned by the Polar Vortex that is making this an unseasonably pleasant summer. Given how surreal everything else is these days, I thought I might […]

Car People

People- well, American people, of a certain age- love their cars. I wrote the other day about the quirky little Nash Metropolitan the family had back in the fifties. I wish we could have kept all the good ones. A pal who lives Down Under wrote to comment that his “brother has kept his ’67 […]

TAPS

Another Great American left us over the weekend. This departure is worth noting on it’s own merit, but the death of RADM John Marocchi links us back to our pal Mac Showers. John was the senior surviving retired Naval Intelligence Admiral, and his story was a unique one. For the small community that cares about […]

Metropolitan Story

I am going to write about the beloved Nash Metropolitan this morning. It is, I think, a non-controversial topic on which to write. I was thinking about it in the course of marveling at the news that we are going to spend abut $67,000 a year on undocumented Dreamers, of whom we understand we will […]

Bye-Bye, Byrdie

(Senator Robert Byrd, D-WV, tunes his fiddle. Photo courtesy of Eem in Cambridge, MA). We have been down the rapids on a variety of issues together over the last fourteen years. We have wandered through history, taken adventures in urban and country living, traveled across oceans and marveled at the diversity of this amazing world. […]