Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? – Jakc Kerouac, in “On the Road” (The real Tangerine Flake Baby, as created by Kalifornia Kustom auto madman Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Seeing this car, and talking to Roth, gave New Journalist Tom Wolfe the inspiration to publish his first collection of essays […]

Here is something like the Model A in which Dad drove Mom out to Detroit in 1948 to start their new lives in the Motor City’s rip-roaring auto industry. It was used, of course, having been husbanded by someone through the gas rationing and rubber shortage of the war years. Look at how the design […]

(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 […]

(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 […]

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 […]

(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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]