[This picks up from the first chapter]
My first glimpse of America: looking down on a freeway at night, with glow-worm toy cars and a perfect cloverleaf. It was just like the picture of GM’s World of Tomorrow exhibit at the 1939 New York World Fair that I’d seen in an old book. We were circling to final approach at New York International airport, having left Austria (and micro-cars) behind forever.
It was August, 1960. I was seven years old. The intense surge of anticipation of my imminent immersion into a wholly new world of giant finned and chromed freeway cruisers was like that golden moment when you know you’re just about to lose your virginity. I knew it was going to be good. And I was not disappointed.
The combination of a mostly-sleepless twenty-hour trip, the excitement of flying on one of the first DC-8 jets, and a susceptibility to over-stimulation had my visual cortex in interstellar overdrive (not unlike later experiences with hallucinogens). Exiting the airport late on a hot muggy August night, I walked straight into one of those spacey Fitzpatrick and Kaufman rendered early ‘60’s “Wide-Track” Pontiac magazine ads.
The featured car (“Star Chief”) looked eleven feet wide. Elegantly dressed couples were departing at a futuristic airport with jets streaking overhead. Looking out at the assembled fleet of earth-bound star-fighters, the mystery of the design language of the aberrant 1959 Coupe de Ville I’d encountered in medieval Innsbruck began to unfold inside my mind.
We were picked up by relatives in a salmon-pink and charcoal-gray ’58 Plymouth station wagon, a bizarre hybrid of utility and flamboyance, a flamingo crossed with a cart. Having only experienced car rides on narrow alpine roads, riding down a six-lane expressway was like swimming in a school of exotic tropical fish fed only steroids.
he huge multi-colored leviathans were all trying to outdo each other. Fins and shiny protrusions extended in all directions. They had bulging multiple eyeballs, iridescent chromium gills and scales, and gaping maws sporting deadly-looking overbites or under bites, some with glittering orthodontia. A lone VW bug, a standard-size car back home, looked pitifully tiny and vulnerable, a baby turtle amongst these shark-finned predators.
We were spending three days with relatives in Brooklyn before continuing to our final destination in the heartland. While my family struggled with jet lag, heat and humidity, I was running around the neighborhood ogling the natives on a mission to create taxonomy of these unfamiliar beasts.
I struggled with a new vocabulary: Custom Royal Lancer, Mainliner, Super Wasp Hollywood, DeSoto Firedome Sportsman, Champion Regal Starliner. Damn! English was going to be a bitch.
I quickly gave up on the arcane language of marketing gobbledy-gook and focused on the pattern language of shapes. I soon discerned the first of many underlying patterns that grouped most of the newer cars into distinct families: windshields. Those expensive compound-curve dog-legged moldings were obviously shared across corporate cousins. The veil of badge-engineering was all too quickly rent.
There was a freeway pedestrian overpass a couple of blocks from where we were staying. I spent hours there. It signaled the beginning a long quest: to identify cars from ever increasing distances. This pastime filled much of my childhood. It was as engaging to me as my son’s phone is to him. The eventual mastery of this skill would become invaluable in my peak speeding era, identifying and eluding the prowling CHP at great distance in pre-radar California.
A relative took us on a tour of Manhattan in his canary yellow ’57 Bel Air coupe. The mixture of jet lag, skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels and Central Park in the midday heat was intoxicating. Too much so for my sister, who debased the shiny Chevy by spewing her Automat lunch out the window, sullying its flanks in the middle of Times Square.
I encountered new auto-exotica that day, including a matching brace of 1959 Cadillac hearse and limousine. Their paradoxical juxtaposition of feigned flight and formal fin-ality left stretch marks in my delicate still-forming automotive design lexicon.
My first Corvette sighting was the highlight of the trip. It was a sexy ermine-white ’57 convertible. Innocent of its primitive underpinnings, I fell for the bad-girl face, the buff body and its delicious, curvaceous butt. It was a worthy replacement for that abandoned object of my lust and worship in the old country, the stern Teutonic overachiever known as the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing.
I poured my unconditional love on that plastic-fantastic Yank, slamming my assimilation into all things American into top gear.
Those heady three days in the Big Apple led me to believe that the whole of America would be an endless extension of its skyscrapers, bridges and parkways jammed with shiny land yachts. Little did I know that our final destination, Iowa City, was a freeway-less university town in the middle of endless corn fields and muddy old pickup trucks.
I’d love to see a Rampside Classic on the DC-8–probably my favorite airliner ever in terms of styling. Many of them are still in service as cargo haulers, exiled to the far corners of the airfield, but still as graceful as the day they were delivered.
If one’s first glimpse of America is NYC, the rest of the country may have a hard time living up to that initial experience, I guess, at least from a visual standpoint.
Yeah, Iowa City isn’t NYC, but IC has Pagliai’s and the Brown Bottle!
The first attached image reminds me of my first trip to Europe. Amsterdam on final approach looked eerily like the above picture as the Northwest Airlines A330 I was riding in lined up on final approach to Schiphol.
The biggest culture shock was being in a huge airport of people who looked blandly Caucasian like me but spoke unintelligible languages (I took Spanish in high school/college and know a very limited amount of Mandarin).
My parents moved to Los Angeles in 1950– Disneyland, Douglas Aircraft (we lived in Santa Monica, birthplace of the DC-3), Freeways and endless orange groves… it was paradise!
And of course, because we lived near Hollywood and Beverly Hills, we would regularly see Steve McQueen driving his Mini Cooper down Sunset Blvd, or Lorne Greene shopping at the Brentwood Country Mart… not to mention endless sightings of Ferrari, Lotus, 300SL Gullwings, Maserati, Citroen, as well as the plebian VW beetles and Morris Minors, which were commonplace in the 60′s.
Where did it all go? What happened to America? Where did Monsanto “World of the Future” disappear to?
Perhaps that is why I enjoy Curbside Classic: it reminds me of my misspent youth, cruising L.A., chasing old cars, enjoying the sound of twelve cylinder engines and breathing in the sweet smell of two stroke oil… thanks, Paul.
Great stories Paul! In the S.F. Bay Area growing up in the sixties/seventies, there were (and somewhat still are) cars from every corner of the globe. Suburban San Rafael had dealerships that sold Italian cars (Fiat/Alfas – Doug Dicker Motors), British (E.F. Sweeney – Jags/MGs/Morris/Triumph), German (Leon C. Felton VW – Rossi and R.A.B. Mercedes – which sold Studebakers to the bitter end – San Rafael’s “Auto Zentrum” for BMW), and all the American Makes (my Dad’s ’65 Dodge Custom 880 came from “Shamrock Motors”).
Trips to visit relatives in Northeastern Missouri echo your Iowa City memories except the Grandfolks/Uncles/Aunties usually were big Mopar devotees with Ford or Dodge trucks on the side.
Rural Missouri relatives hated them “durn furrin’ cars” – mostly Volkswagens. Most of the Mo. relatives said they’d never buy “one of them damn Jap cars”., yet, I remember on a summer visit in 1970, my Grannie’s 1969 New Yorker would drink a quart of oil every fill up (with a case of Havoline in the trunk) until finally, she brought it back to the Chrysler place in Hannibal, Mo and I remember they pretty much rebuilt the police special 440 under the then Mopar “5 year/50K” warranty . . . .