Reflection on pre-1970 cars in general

Today I was driving home along Massachusetts Route 9 and passed a classic 1959 Cadillac four door hardtop. It was bright red. It was loooong! It had huge fins! It had more chrome than I had seen for an age! It was beautiful!

I looked back in my rear-view mirror and it stood out like a cherry lollipop amongst a sea of bland vehicles. Bland shapes. Shapes as creative as a chicken's egg. (Low coefficients of drag I'm sure) Bland colors. It looked as if only the Caddy was in Technicolor. Everything else was a black and white movie.

Cars of today have their qualities. They are smarter than a fifth grader. They can change the audio system by voice command. You can answer your cell phone without lifting a finger. They can adapt to varying driving conditions better than an Indy driver. They have computers that are more powerful than were on the Apollo Lunar Lander.

Maybe I'm just a shallow person. Attracted to things only skin deep. A brassy blond in a skin tight blouse with a diving neckline. Those old cars were sexy!

Then there's performance. The suspensions of today's cars are far superior to those of 1970 and before. Even pre-70's performance cars didn't handle as well as 2008 Toyota Camry.

Also today's fuel injected, computer controlled engines start easier and run smother that what was under the hood decades ago. The only thing is, heaven forbid that any thing goes wrong in a car of today. You need thousands of dollars of shop equipment to diagnose a problem. Then once you know what's wrong almost every part of the engine is buried under lots of other parts, wires and hoses. That big old 1970 Cadillac I saw today probably had many cubic feet of open space under that bright red hood. The eight spark plugs probably stared right up at you when you lifted the hood.

If I were writing this in 1908 rather than 2008, I would be praising the beauty of horses and damning the looks of the horseless carriages. If I had written this in 1908, probably nobody would have read it because it would not have been deemed worth the ink and newsprint to even publish it as a letter to the editor. Possibly, no one will read it in 2008. It may be like the tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it.

I won't know for sure unless you post a comment.

Learn more about this author, Joseph Turnbull.
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