Remembering my first car

     I bought my first car used for $100 in 1955. It was a 1948 two-tone (black on the bottom, white on the top) Chevy Business Coup with no back seat, intended for use by traveling salespersons, for example. It had a bench seat, a starter button on the floor, and a three-speed manual stick shift. Power was an inline 83-hp six-cylinder engine. It could do 85 or 90 downhill if you had the temerity to push it that hard; I usually did not. Poor-man’s AC consisted of simple swiveling triangular windows just ahead of the side windows; they scooped in enough air to keep the interior quite comfortable. It had roll-up windows and a staticky AM radio. No seat belts or other safety features. No turn signals; we used hand signals back then, which worked fine except in the rain. Braking was four-wheel drums and sometimes iffy if they got hot in the hilly country of the western Massachusetts Berkshires. I did all the maintenance on it myself. I loved it and wish I still had it.

     I worked part-time then by myself manning a two-pump gas station in my home village of Williamsburg doing tune-ups, tire repairs, oil changes, and grease jobs (most cars had many under body grease fittings). I pumped the gas, checked the oil, and cleaned the windshield of every customer’s vehicle. With a car parked over the grease pit for an oil change, two or three tire repairs stacked up, and several vehicles awaiting fuel, it could get busy, but I liked that job as much as any I’ve ever had since.

     Chevy vehicles, of course, have endured over the decades. Other makes of American vehicles that were available then but did not endure and have faded into history included:

Chrysler

Plymouth

Hudson

Pontiac

Kaiser

Fraser

Studebaker

Packard

Tucker

DeSoto

Willis

LaSalle

Mercury

Crossley

Nash

Oldsmobile

Checkers (mostly taxicabs)

     Cars of that era often had manual transmissions, whitewall tires that gave an extra touch of class but were hard to keep clean, exterior visors over simple flat two-piece windshields, rear fender skirts that were a pain to remove for checking pressure or tire changing (especially in the winter), liberal use of chrome, and tough steel bodies you could sit or stand on, but which nevertheless sadly turned to lace along the fender bottoms and rocker panels after a few years of exposure to the heavily salted winter roads of the northlands.

     Our rides have certainly improved over the decades in both comfort and safety. Buyers often do not even bother to look beneath the hoods before purchasing at prices that to me seem astronomical; that was the first thing we did in days of yore, and most of us well knew every facet of how cars worked.

     I remember those simpler times fondly, but not without regrets. If two of the kids in my small-town high school, Linda Sanderson and Mack Heath, had had a padded dash, seat belts, and air bags in their car while traveling a country road in the darkness, they would likely have survived hitting a bridge abutment. Their memorial photos are in my 1956 graduation book.

     I think of them often.

Phil

www.philbowie.com