Some childhood memories of our family cars - maybe meaningful, maybe not...

I'll preface all this by talking briefly about my own cars. The first car I ever owned, which I bought my freshman year in college, was a 1961 Ford Falcon Futura, with bucket seats and an engine the approximate size (and sound) of a sewing-machine motor. I didn't realize when I bought it that Falcons were cult items, that collectors paid big money for them. I bought it for $250 cash, so I guess the guy who sold it to me didn't realize it, either :). It died six months later, of multiple causes, and I was wheelless until that summer, when I bought a 1972 VW Beetle from the guy my uncle always traded with.

Incidentally, it's quite possible to have sex (boy-girl variety) in the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, as long as you're both short and you don't mind some awkward positioning. My girlfriend and I did it one night, parked on a dead-end road - partly 'cause we were just horny, and partly 'cause we were curious to see if it would work. I won't say it was the greatest orgasm of my life (or hers), but it worked :).

I had the Beetle for several years. My youngest brother got in the habit of borrowing it, and finally wrecked it - he had a habit of doing that kind of thing. It wasn't totaled, but it cost me (and my insurance company) over a thousand dollars to fix it, and it never drove right after that. The Bug eventually got sold in favor of a Mustang II. My cars have all been anonymous and unmemorable since then - although my pickup truck was neither.

My own adult-era vehicles are a whole different story, and way outside the scope here. So, let's go back in time, to little Danny's Wonder Years...

Over the years that I was growing up, our family cars varied in color, make and model, and we kept them for various lengths of time. But as I recall, every single one had these characteristics in common:

• They were always humongous. We were a family of three, for most of youth. But my mom liked barges.
• They were always Detroit iron. We bought Ford, GM or Chrysler only. My mom had no particular brand loyalty among them, but you never saw a German or Japanese or (the horror) Swedish auto in our garage.
• They were always used. My mom never bought a new car in her life until I was a junior in college; she finally broke down and bought a new Chevy Nova. My brother told me her main motive was the extended warranty.
• They were never around for more than three years, maybe four. Mainly because they were used... well-used, for the most part.

Speaking of that American-made fetish - almost every member of my mom's extended family believed in Made-in-the-USA, too. And, unlike her, some of them were fiercely brand-conscious. Various uncles or cousins were diehard Ford fanatics; various others were Buick or Olds or Chevy or Pontiac people. My grandparents and my great-aunt (Grandma's sister) were Chrysler fans till the day they died. And my cranky old Great-Uncle Gus was still complaining about the demise of Studebaker, ten years after the company folded. He'd switched to a Chrysler New Yorker, but he was not a happy customer. I don't think we had any American Motors Corp. partisans, but just about every other domestic nameplate was represented.

The one big exception to our USA fixation was my mom's brother-in-law (dad for cousins Nina and Bill... you'll meet them, if you haven't already). He managed somehow to convert to Volkswagen, of all things, and the whole family had nothing but Squarebacks and Dashers and occasional Beetles the whole time I was a kid. Family get-togethers nearly always featured a loud (friendly, but loud) debate about "goddam foreign cars". (If it isn't obvious already, my family had its share of redneck-leaning folks.) My uncle was the lone holdout till the summer right before I left for college, when another uncle drove home one day in a brand new Datsun 280Z. It scandalized everyone, but he didn't care - the 280Z outweighed the comments. I liked that car alot, myself :).

When I was in elementary school, my mom drove an early-1960-something Ford Galaxy, 390-cc V-8 under the hood, painted bright white. The speedometer went up to 140 mph (though naturally my mom didn't test its limits.) It had a clunky after-market AC unit installed, which was virtually useless, because whenever you ran the AC for more than 20 minutes the car overheated and you had to shut down and sit till it cooled. I liked that Galaxy. It had personality.

This car had bench seats covered in red vinyl "upholstery". Nobody wore seatbelts back then, so the seatbelts got stuffed down under the seats around the second week we owned the car, and were never seen again as far as I know.

A few Galaxy memories:

• Loooong vacation trip to the Florida panhandle, in sweltering high summer; my mom driving, and my two younger brothers and me squabbling over who got to ride shotgun and who got stuck in the back seat. We used to work out the most incredibly complicated trade-offs over that issue... things like: "If you'll let me ride shotgun till the next gas station, I'll let you have 14 sips of my Dr Pepper, and I'll let you play with my G.I. Joes, but you have to let me sit in the big chair in front of the TV for two nights when we get home..."
• The time my mom left her car keys on the table, and I decided it was a message from God, and took the car on a three-block joyride, smashing mailboxes, running a stop sign, and finally driving up on a neighbor's lawn (and killing the engine, fortunately), at nine years old.
• Going to the drive-in movies with my mom and brothers, and us boys sitting out on the hood "to get a better view", while my mom snoozed behind the wheel and up on the screen Clint Eastwood pretended to act.
• Nearly getting caught, Alex and me, feeling each others' 11-year-old stiffies through our soccer shorts one evening, when my mom, driving us to Alex's house for a sleepover, turned around at the stoplight to ask if we wanted ice cream. (We were too hot for ice, and we were too young to cream... but thanks anyways, Mom...) That was a very enjoyable sleepover, too, as I recall...
• The sad day when my mom came home driving a big ugly anonymous Pontiac Bonneville instead of the Galaxy, and telling us she'd "traded up." Yeah, right. A Bonneville. (My consolation: the Bonneville only lasted one year. Nyahh, nyahh, toldja so. :))

I liked the Galaxy alot, but it wasn't my favorite family car ever. Oh, no. That would be the car my mom acquired after the Bonneville threw a rod and went to that Great Garage in the Sky.

I was on the edge of 15 years old. We'd been without our own wheels for a couple of weeks, and were depending on my grandparents, my aunt and other relatives, and my mom's boyfriend to ferry us around. It was a pain in the butt for all concerned, as you'd imagine, and my mom kept talking about another car, and where she'd get the money. It turned out that her boyfriend held the key, literally.

So, late one afternoon, I came bicycling up the street, home from my summer landscaping job, shirtless and all sweaty and dirty in my cutoffs and muddy sneakers... and I turned the corner and saw our driveway... and beheld Nirvana. Specifically, a 1959 Cadillac Sedan deVille. The model with the giant tail fins and the torpedo taillights.

I rode down to our driveway, turned in, my mouth hanging open the whole way. At first it didn't occur to me that this could be our car. My sensibilities had been ground down to a dull edge by the Bonneville, and I couldn't conceive of us having anything like this to replace it. But there it sat, two-tone sedan, light blue with a white roof, chrome practically dripping off every curve and edge.

I parked my bike (well, actually I let it fall over on its side, as usual), went inside. My mom and her boyfriend were sitting at the kitchen table with their beers. I said, "Hi Mom... Hi Ken... those your wheels?" Ken laughed, said, "Not any more, Danny."

It didn't sink in right away. I guess I was staring at him, because my mom said, "Ken sold it to me. It was his brother-in-law's." I blurted out, "Holy shit, you mean it's ours?" My mom sometimes got on my case about cuss words, but this time she said, "Yeah, baby, you got it!" I got the idea she was excited, too :).

And for the next four years, we had it. :)

Oh, my God - was that a car :). I learned to drive in that car, and it was the very tangible ticket to freedom I'd wanted my whole life, the Holy Grail of my adolescence.

I don't know what size engine, but it was V-8 and it kicked ass on the highway. And that, of course, led to the deVille's single biggest disadvantage, as far as a teenage boy is concerned: It guzzled gas like Bear Bryant's players guzzled GatorAid. And my mom's rule was "you drive it, you fill it" - no matter how low it was when I got behind the wheel. I thought that last bit was grossly unfair... but it was tank up, or go without wheels. The deVille didn't drink regular, either - it was "white gas" only, a.k.a. "high test" (the quaint names my family still called Premium gas.) I remember many an evening, out with friends or my girlfriend or whatever, driving home after dropping everyone off, stopping at the local corner gas station, and watching my paycheck disappear down the filler spout...

In my 11th-grade year, that gas station closed at midnight, and my curfew was allegedly 1 a.m. (really later, since my mom didn't check as a rule), so I'd either have to stop in the middle of the fun and fill up, or (more often) stagger out of bed way too early the next morning and fill up the barge. That was okay with my mom, as long as she didn't get in and see the needle pointing at "E". Sometime during 12th grade, the station went to 24/7, and I got to sleep in.

I remember one rainy morning in 11th grade in particular. I slept especially late, after some kind of revelry the night before; and when I woke up, the first thing I heard was her telling someone on the phone, "I'll be over in about 15 minutes... [pause]... Danny had better have filled up the tank last night..." Aggh! I jumped out of bed, threw on a pair of shorts (it was around 60 degrees out, incidentally), flew downstairs, grabbed the keys off the rack, got behind the wheel, cranked it up, backed out of the driveway, got down as far as the corner... and only then noticed the gauge read "Full". Huh?... Oh yeah... I filled up last night... Duh!! :)

I drove back, slunk inside with the keys. My mom was in the kitchen. She didn't say a word. Just looked at this 16-y/o boy, wearing cutoff Levi's and nothing else (and covered with gooseflesh), with an expression one part guilty and two parts still-asleep... :) To add to the picture, you have to know that I was completely bald-headed and had shaved off all my body hair (except pubes) - 11th grade was the one year I shaved for swim team. I imagine a family photo of that scene would be quite entertaining today :).

The Cadillac featured an AM radio with five pushbuttons that you could set to specific stations. For most of the time we had the car, the stations were set as follows, left to right:

1. My mom's insipid local easy-listening station
2. Sometimes-okay local country & western station
3. Powerhouse local rock and roll station - played pure Top 40 R&R (Kiss, Styx, stuff like that)
4. Lower-power rock and roll station in a town 25-30 miles away from our city (hard to pick up after dark) - played "Lite Rock" (Elton John, Eagles, stuff like that)
5. WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana - a clear-channel AM station that could be picked up all over the eastern United States after dark - rock and roll, all kinds. (I remember lots of Beatles and Aretha Franklin... can't go wrong there)

That AM radio survived all kinds of arguments and warfare, between every combination of family members, over what to listen to. None of those five stations pleased everybody. I had the broadest tastes. I listened to #3 mostly, but #5 and #4 were good, too, in that order; and I even found stuff I liked on #2. My mom adamantly refused to budge farther to the right than button #2. My middle brother liked only #2 - bedrock country fan that he was. And my youngest bro liked only #3; he was a metalhead before his time. As you can guess, there were quite a few times that the radio ended up being turned off because two people couldn't agree.

The arguments ended for a while when the antenna got broken off somehow, and my uncle stuck a warped coathanger in the socket, which effectively eliminated all stations except #3. A few months later my mom got the antenna fixed, and Radio Wars began all over again. I was glad the antenna got fixed, despite the bickering. The period when we had the coathanger-antenna coincided perfectly with the period when Maria Muldaur's "Midnight at the Oasis" was high on the charts, and Station #3 played that putrid thing with barf-inducing regularity.

Memories of that deVille:

• My friend Paul's face when he came up the driveway, that first evening my mom had brought the car home. It was like he'd seen a UFO. With tailfins. :)
• Learning to drive, and too many close calls and hair-raising near-misses to count (somehow, I never had a single accident in the deVille - my guardian angel was with me...)
• Dreading the fact that I'd have to take my driver's license road test in that car, knowing that I'd have to parallel-park it to pass...
• ... and feeling the intense flood of relief when I took the test, on my 16th birthday, and the examiner directed me to park on a mostly-empty block, with at least three spaces between each car.
• Packing alot of friends in that car, and going cruising (and you can pack aLOT of friends in a '59 deVille).
• Sucking off my boyfriend Kenny in that car, and 69ing with both of us stretched out almost full-length across the back seat.
• Later, going on dates, and getting laid, in the same back seat of that car.
• Hanging my high-school graduation tassel from the mirror. That was so 1970s, so juvenile, and so cool :).
• Washing and waxing the damn thing - the only other occasion (besides filling the tank) that made me ask myself: "Cadillac? What was Mom thinking?

"Every boy's dream, a pink Cadillac" (quote from the movie "Pink Cadillac" starring Clint Eastwood). I don't know about the pink part; my mom's was blue. But boys and Cadillacs... yeah. :)

The Cadillac finally went the way of all dinosaurs when I was away at college. I had no notice of its disappearance. Just met my mom at the Greyhound station one evening, on a weekend trip home (I was in between my Falcon and my Beetle), went out to the car with her... and it was the aforementioned new Nova. I was crestfallen. I said, "Mom, where did that thing come from? You traded the 'Ville?" She said, "Yeah... repairs were eating me alive. I like the Chevy alot better, really." I protested: "Mom! You could've sold it to me! You know I'm saving for another car..." But I knew it was too late.

If I ever win the lottery - which won't happen 'cause I don't play... but anyway - if I do, I'll buy a '59 deVille. I'm serious. I'd offer to take all my friends cruising again, too. Imagine a bunch of late-30-early-40-something men and women, starting to get gray hairs, cruising in a deVille with the radio up loud, playing Kiss's "Christine, Sixteen"...

Okay. Maybe not :). But the car would still be cool. Shoot, I'd even let my kids borrow it, when they get old enough. As long as they fill it up, of course :).