What a great automotive column by George Jonas.
A lady, who didn’t sound like a friend of the internal combustion engine, looked at me reproachfully at a recent dinner-do: “Ah, you were an adolescent in the 1950s. You must have been car-crazy.”
“I still am,” I replied coldly, although it wasn’t true.
I was never car-crazy — motorcycle-crazy, perhaps, but not car-crazy. All the same, men in their 30s without a driver’s licence amaze me. You meet many these days. “Never got around to it,” they say.
In my day, the first thing boys did was go for a driving test as soon as they could, usually at 16, even if, like me, they had no prospect of owning a car. Getting a driver’s permit was a rite of passage.
It was a different era. Wheels mattered. It’s not that we were car-crazy; if anything, we were girl-crazy, and regarded cars as delivery systems for girls. We thought that girls were car-crazy, and couldn’t resist any boy who honked at them. We were wrong, of course – but not altogether. It wasn’t car-craze but status craze. Kids in malls are as hierarchical as royal courts.
“You’d need a car to get a date, runt,” was a frequent put-down among schoolboys in Eastern Europe. It meant that something near-impossible, such as a car, might do the near-impossible, and get you a date.
Time crawls when one is 15. The girls we liked had eyes only for those magnificent creatures of 18 and 19, the demigods of adolescence. We lesser beings could only press our noses against the window and dream. Our fantasies included owning cars. The status that a private car conferred in those days would barely be matched by a private jet today, and most fellows with private jets could get a date if they really wanted one, wouldn’t you say?
Cars were nifty machines, of course, apart from being girl-magnets, but I had only my driver’s permit to go with my fantasies of ownership until I came to Canada. The great advantage of fantasy-cars over real ones is cost. I never had any trouble carrying my fantasy-cars, but my first real car wiped me out financially.
A low-milage 1954 Ford Mainline 2-door cost only $1,000 in 1957, but that was $1000 more than I had. My weekly paycheque of $48 covered the cost of car payment, rooming house, laundry, and New Brunswick sardines for my meals, but when the mini-recession of 1957 left me without a paycheck for six weeks, it became a contest between car payments and sardines. The fish won. After I returned the Ford to the used car lot, the long walk home firmed up my resolution not to own a car again I couldn’t afford.
While fiscally sound, my resolution made my next car a 1949 Ford Prefect, the narrowest two-door saloon the Brits ever manufactured, with a three-speed manual transmission and a 1200 cc side valve engine, by then eight years old. It still had enough oomph to climb the gentle hill in midtown Toronto as long as you drove it in the lowest gear available, which was, of course, reverse. This gave rise to a conversation between a thrifty motorist (me) and a Toronto cop of Irish extraction.
Cop Morning, sir … Now why would you be going backwards, if you don’t mind me asking?
Me Because the car won’t go forwards, officer. Is backing up the hill against the law?
Cop I’m not sure, sir, but it’s against everything that’s holy …
The Ford Prefect cost me $100. It may have needed reverse to go up the hill, but it was mine, not the finance company’s, and when I sold it nearly two years later I still got $10 for it. For 90 bucks, it not only took me everywhere I needed to go during a span of 18 months, but once even let me make out in the back seat. Considering the car’s dimensions, a contortionist should have found it a challenge. Only the ardour of youth could explain it, combined with the single-mindedness of my partner, who kept humming “I ain’t misbehavin’, I’m savin’, my love for you.”
I can’t remember a thing about the 1952 Pontiac Fleetleader Deluxe four-door sedan that came next. Although it was as wide as the Ford Prefect was narrow, it brings back no romantic memories. A 1951 semi-automatic DeSoto sedan does, because my first wife and I used it for trips to New York. Whatever I paid for the plush monstrosity that required declutching only for the first gear and drove like an ocean-liner, it wasn’t much more than the $250 for which I sold it two and a half years later.
Over the next 50 years, I had nearly 30 automotive companions, some four-wheeled, some two-wheeled, and two of them three-wheeled (motorcycles with side cars). The one I drove most was a 1992 Toyota Previa; the one I had the most fun driving, a 1987 Innocenti Turbo; the one I drove least often was an 1982 Jeep CJ-7 (a girlfriend loved and confiscated it) and the one I had the least pleasure driving was a 1970-something Chrysler LeBaron.
The greatest chick-magnet, predictably, was a 1979 Lamborghini Urraco. It was also the greatest cop magnet. There’s no free lunch.
George Jonas
National Post
A lady, who didn’t sound like a friend of the internal combustion engine, looked at me reproachfully at a recent dinner-do: “Ah, you were an adolescent in the 1950s. You must have been car-crazy.”
“I still am,” I replied coldly, although it wasn’t true.
I was never car-crazy — motorcycle-crazy, perhaps, but not car-crazy. All the same, men in their 30s without a driver’s licence amaze me. You meet many these days. “Never got around to it,” they say.
In my day, the first thing boys did was go for a driving test as soon as they could, usually at 16, even if, like me, they had no prospect of owning a car. Getting a driver’s permit was a rite of passage.
It was a different era. Wheels mattered. It’s not that we were car-crazy; if anything, we were girl-crazy, and regarded cars as delivery systems for girls. We thought that girls were car-crazy, and couldn’t resist any boy who honked at them. We were wrong, of course – but not altogether. It wasn’t car-craze but status craze. Kids in malls are as hierarchical as royal courts.
“You’d need a car to get a date, runt,” was a frequent put-down among schoolboys in Eastern Europe. It meant that something near-impossible, such as a car, might do the near-impossible, and get you a date.
Time crawls when one is 15. The girls we liked had eyes only for those magnificent creatures of 18 and 19, the demigods of adolescence. We lesser beings could only press our noses against the window and dream. Our fantasies included owning cars. The status that a private car conferred in those days would barely be matched by a private jet today, and most fellows with private jets could get a date if they really wanted one, wouldn’t you say?
 |
| 1954 Ford Mainline 2-door |
A low-milage 1954 Ford Mainline 2-door cost only $1,000 in 1957, but that was $1000 more than I had. My weekly paycheque of $48 covered the cost of car payment, rooming house, laundry, and New Brunswick sardines for my meals, but when the mini-recession of 1957 left me without a paycheck for six weeks, it became a contest between car payments and sardines. The fish won. After I returned the Ford to the used car lot, the long walk home firmed up my resolution not to own a car again I couldn’t afford.
While fiscally sound, my resolution made my next car a 1949 Ford Prefect, the narrowest two-door saloon the Brits ever manufactured, with a three-speed manual transmission and a 1200 cc side valve engine, by then eight years old. It still had enough oomph to climb the gentle hill in midtown Toronto as long as you drove it in the lowest gear available, which was, of course, reverse. This gave rise to a conversation between a thrifty motorist (me) and a Toronto cop of Irish extraction.
Cop Morning, sir … Now why would you be going backwards, if you don’t mind me asking?
Me Because the car won’t go forwards, officer. Is backing up the hill against the law?
Cop I’m not sure, sir, but it’s against everything that’s holy …
The Ford Prefect cost me $100. It may have needed reverse to go up the hill, but it was mine, not the finance company’s, and when I sold it nearly two years later I still got $10 for it. For 90 bucks, it not only took me everywhere I needed to go during a span of 18 months, but once even let me make out in the back seat. Considering the car’s dimensions, a contortionist should have found it a challenge. Only the ardour of youth could explain it, combined with the single-mindedness of my partner, who kept humming “I ain’t misbehavin’, I’m savin’, my love for you.”
I can’t remember a thing about the 1952 Pontiac Fleetleader Deluxe four-door sedan that came next. Although it was as wide as the Ford Prefect was narrow, it brings back no romantic memories. A 1951 semi-automatic DeSoto sedan does, because my first wife and I used it for trips to New York. Whatever I paid for the plush monstrosity that required declutching only for the first gear and drove like an ocean-liner, it wasn’t much more than the $250 for which I sold it two and a half years later.
 |
| Lamborghini Urraco |
The greatest chick-magnet, predictably, was a 1979 Lamborghini Urraco. It was also the greatest cop magnet. There’s no free lunch.
George Jonas
National Post
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