Like any American of my age, I maintain an automotive biography. You can trace most of the major events in my adult life by what I was driving at the time. The first car I ever bought was a used Buick compact. In the first month, I had to replace the transmission. In the second month, I had to replace the better part of the engine because the tappets went bad. (The mechanic explained to me what tappets were. I have long since forgotten.) I didn't have time to replace the brakes because they failed during a blizzard, causing me to ram into the back end of a vehicle that had demonstrably better brakes than mine had. This resulted in the Buick's being retired to a brief career as a lawn ornament in the front yard of my parents' house.
By this point, I had moved to Boston and gone to work for an alternative newspaper, the salary structure of which dictated that any vehicle I would ride during my employment there would be owned by the MBTA. Once I left the underground press and went to work at a daily tabloid newspaper, I went out and bought a Chevrolet Chevette. The transaction took seven minutes. (I think that may still stand as a record at the dealership.) The Chevette got me from my house to the ballpark, which is all I ever demanded of it, which was probably a good thing. Pushing the plucky little car past 60 miles per hour made it quiver and shake. Alan Shepard had a smoother ride into space than I usually had trying to get to Natick. And once, when I drove it to New Hampshire to cover a tennis tournament, the middling mountains around North Conway made it gasp and wheeze and labor so badly that I thought seriously of just leaving the poor beast by the side of the road so some hunter could put it out of its misery. In something of a cruel irony, after I was married, we gave the Chevette to my sister-in-law, who was living in Appalachia at the time. Somewhere in the distant mountains, it breathed its last. As far as I know, it's still there, a home for squirrels. That left us, briefly, with only the Pontiac LeMans that my wife had brought to the marriage, and still my favorite among our family cars.
Since then, my family and I have owned a Chevrolet station wagon for which the word "lemon" might have been coined, a Ford Granada that I got when my father's Alzheimer's kicked in, a Buick that I got when my aunt's Alzheimer's kicked in, a couple of Mercury sedans, and a Ford Windstar minivan that we bought at a bargain in 2001 because President George W. Bush told us that buying a car was the best way to keep Osama bin Laden from moving in down the block. Some of these cars ran like tops. Others -- like the Windstar, which has been great for keeping terrorists at bay, but lousy at keeping its electrical system from failing -- have not. But all of the cars I've ever owned have one thing in common.
They were all American cars manufactured in the United States of America.
This makes me rather alone among my friends, almost all of whom, at one time or another, have driven some foreign iron. (The only foreign car I've ever driven regularly was a Toyota owned by my college roommate, who was from Louisiana. Every time the clouds rolled in over Milwaukee between October and April, he tossed me his keys, his knowledge of snow and ice being largely theoretical and his car having tires roughly the width of my fingernails.) This was not a conscious decision, but I am not discounting the subliminal effect of all those commercials I saw in my youth about seeing the USA in my Chevrolet.
After all, this is a car country. We invented the automobile. We invented the way it could be produced for the masses. We invented the kind of labor movement that ultimately would enable the masses to afford the automobile, and ultimately would enable the masses to have weekends off so as to enjoy the automobile and all the places that the automobile could take them. Like McDonald's and the Holiday Inn. We turned the dials on the car radio and we heard people singing about cars, from Robert Johnson's Terraplane to the bargain Chuck Berry got for "No Money Down," which may well have been the "coffee-colored Cadillac" into which he saw Nadine climb, from "Mustang Sally" to "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena," from the "Little Deuce Coupe" to the "Little GTO," from "Thunder Road" to "Dead Man's Curve." From the end of World War II on, the United States of America was an internally combusted, fuel-injected, hemi-powered country of the mind, with its own music, its own language, and its own cultural identity. They should have replaced the eagle as the national emblem with a Stingray, or at least a Mustang.
How much of a car country are we?
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