(First published in 2007)[The previous chapter]
My first glimpse of America: looking down on a freeway at night, with glow-worm toy cars. 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.
The 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 that tour of Manhattan. It was a sexy Polo-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, that 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 with lots of 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.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/auto-biography/autobiographyaviation-history-douglas-dc-8-the-trip-of-a-lifetime/
There was a museum exhibit I saw as a kid that featured a few rows of seats from a DC-8 and a section of the fuselage with those huge picture windows, which I saw years before ever flying myself. I remember the reading lamps were integrated into the top corners of the seatbacks. That was the closest I got to ever flying on a DC-8.
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 . . . .
A nice aritcle Paul ~
I grew up Down East in the same time period , in Boston and Cambridge , both College Towns , there was a wild variety of Imports , in Rural New England where I spent much of the 1960’s , it was mostly old pre war American Iron plus battered pickup trucks .
Arriving in California in 1969 I was amazed to see even MORE Imports , Jaguar 120’s and Riley’s , GoGo Mobiles , anything and everything , being used as daily transport although the junkyards in Long beach were absolutely packed with piles of (IMO) perfectly good Imported cars stacked five or more high , ruining them for anything , they were too lazy to un stack them for parts sales even .
What a waste .
-Nate
Well I am part of the 50% of New Yorkers who do live in New York City and I am still amazed when I visit that place. Cannot think of another state that in the eyes of pop culture is so dominated by one Metro Area. Members of my family have lived in the Metro Area since the 1910s so it is fascinating to hear the stories of the olden days. It is a good thing you landed in New York City when you did Paul since by the late 1960s it had stumbled into a funk it would not get out of until the early 1990s. Have you ever visited New York City in the decades since?
Until late 2008 I had never been further than 1,000 miles from my home in the Southern Tier so crossing into Iowa sure was an eye opener, but I am used to rural living so I was not terribly shocked. Personally Los Angeles is the biggest culture shock I have ever experienced and I still prefer New York City.
I have only lived in the 3 West Coast states. We took a family road trip in the new 72 Winnebago Brave and that was my first exposure to the rest of the US. My sister’s then husband’s family was from Indiana, and we visited his family’s tobacco farm. One of his family’s friends had a gas station and I spent a day helping out, pumping gas and checking oil for customers. A person pulled up in a Pinto, and nobody walked up to gas up the car and I was suprised to see the man get out and head for the pump. I stopped him and told him I would get it, he said that was OK he would do it himself. I offered to check the oil he said it was fine. When the pump stopped I pulled out the nozzle and he walked inside to pay instead of on the drive like everyone else. When he left I was informed that “those people” are not to be waited on. Except as you can probably guess another term was used. Coming from Southern California, I couldn’t believe how behind the times it was there.
The Pontiac illustration is amazing. Some pictures are apparently worth a thousand words, but that one is probably good for at least five thousand on the American dream circa 1960.
What’s surprising is how ‘desirable’ the whole image still is. Even 55 years on, who wouldn’t want to be those people in that car?
You know, Paul, your reminiscing and describing your experiences of 50+ years ago is so very enlightening and informative. That is every bit as enjoyable as looking at photos of cars and learning details about old cars that I don’t know much about. The ability to see things through another person’s eyes and understand things from a different perspective is almost like watching a movie. As someone who has been visiting this site (almost) every day for about 3 years, this was a very special treat for me. Thanks for sharing and doing an outstanding job of conveying your (then) new experiences. Oh, and certainly the pictures you’ve provided help greatly, too. Since I’m definitely not so young any more, I do enjoy going back in time to “how things were” when I was young, and also to better know and understand things before my time.
Reading this was a little surreal. Flamboyant late fifties cars, picture of my house, flamboyant late fifties…wait what??
That “street 1960” photo, the black and white between the pink Imperial and blue Custom Royal? That’s my building. Grace Street, Richmond, VA. Still looks about the same, except change out the cars for modern ones and the trees have grown (or gone in one case).
Small world. (Or should I say “small world wide web?”)
I missed this comment when you first left it here. Wow; that is quite a coincidence! I just googled for “1960 street scenes” or something like that.
Seriously. I knew of the photo–I had found it on a blog that specialized in vintage Richmond photos. But to see it here, completely unprompted–quite a coincidence indeed. I’ve since moved; that building (apartment 2, left hand side on the first floor) was home for the first three years I lived in Richmond, until we bought a house a few miles north last year. Great location with some good memories.
Here’s the Google Street View as of August of this year–different cars (how strange would that Aveo have looked in ’60), bigger trees, same 1920’s era buildings.
Dear Mr. Neidermeyer,
like you, my favorite corvettes are ’56 and ’57. However the ’54 vette that you saw was called “Polo White” not “Ermine White” by G.M. Thank you for a great article
Dave
By the time I was a kid in the ’70s, windshields had become too similar to use them to distinguish different manufacturers of cars, but I can imagine circa 1961 they were also an easy way to distinguish new cars (with the curviest windscreens) from old ones (with the flattest). For me, the equivalent telltale new car feature was the 5mph bumper. New cars had big bumpers, old cars had spindly, delicate-looking small ones, and that was the easiest way I could tell if someone owned a new car. And of course I regarded the big new ones as more elegant and prestigious – I mean, they were new! Only years later did I learn they were a response to a legal change and one unpopular with most car buffs.
I love your essays about your life. Great impressions expressed well including your poor sister’s comment on Times Square, so to speak. I loved your essay on your trip from Iowa to California. I had printed it so that I could curl up somewhere after my day’s labors and enjoy it. Enjoy it I did! I have commented before on my fascination with the new cars back then. My friends and I loved going to the dealerships near us in The Bronx to see the new models every year. T period was from mid September until early October that all (except one) new model year introduction occurred. The exception was Packard. On the First of the year conservative distinguished advertising was published in newspapers to introduce these vehicles. Keep ’em comin’, Paul!