Pseudo Car Guys

Seeing as it has been a while since I pissed a lot of people off … oh wait … it has only been a couple of days. Anyway, it has been a while since I posted anything. There is something about temperatures never climbing above thirty degrees, snow storms on a weekly basis, and a winter that just won’t go away that makes saying anything car related irrelevant. Yet with all the yuck we have experienced this year, I did manage to get my only vintage car out on the road at least once every three weeks.

I was so desperate to drive my 1954 Hudson Jet Liner (aka Fred Mertz) one day that I drove it to my ear doctor’s office across two counties in rush hour traffic. I didn’t even have an appointment. From there, I drove another fifty miles to my mechanic just to have an oil change and Fred’s six month check-up. I didn’t have an appointment there either.

After this winter, I am more convinced I made the right decision to thin my herd and only have one vintage car. I like to drive mine not show them, so imagine how frustrated I would be if I had to find time to drive more than one old car every week. It would never happen. I also don’t consider myself a car collector. How can I be with only one? I know guys with more than forty cars. I cannot imagine. How can they afford to keep all of them running? How often do they get to drive them? What about the cost of insurance and registrations?

I know a guy who has thirty-four of the same model car. He also has twenty or so other models from the same manufacturer. Here is the funny part. He always shows up at car club events in his mundane daily driver, and he gets furious when he does actually decide to bring one out only to realize when it is too late that it means putting ninety miles on his car during a road rally. I don’t get it.

My friend, Frank, has the most fabulous 1965 Ford Falcon. It is a one-owner car that when he bought it a few years ago had 29,000 miles on it and the build sheet in the trunk. I said to him, “Even if you put 3,000 miles on it a year, in twenty years, you’ll have a seventy-year-old car with 89,000 miles on the odometer.” He agreed, and he drives it events all over, even taking it from Virginia to New York to Chicago and back home last summer. That makes Frank the ultimate car guy.

What are the other guys saving their cars for? The afterlife? They only allow Willys Whippets and Nash Ambassadors in Heaven, so you might as well drive it now.

Enough about real car guys, the ones who crack me up are the “pseudo car guys.”

All of us have met them. Being a monthly contributor for Hemmings Classic Car (shameless plug), I encounter them more than most.

For example, the most common ones are the ones who only know two cars, Mustangs and Camaros. I was interviewing someone for another freelance gig on another subject entirely, and the conversation turned to cars. I explained I wrote a column for Hemmings Classic Car called, “Detroit Underdogs” (usually found on pages 70, 71 or 72, more shameless plugs), focusing on the inexpensive and forgotten cars those wanting to enter the hobby may consider rather than the usual cars you see at events. He responded, “Oh yeah. I just watched a show about an underdog car. They were restoring a 1969 Camaro.” It took everything for me not to climb onto his lap and kiss him. I would make the day anyone considered a 1969 Camaro an underdog a national holiday! I did inform him that just about any first generation Camaro was hardly an underdog, and if he cherished his life never to say that out loud at a car show. He laughed.

However, there are those who come up to me and tell me I should write about this or that car. Usually the car is not really an underdog, or worse, I have already written about it, which means they don’t read my column. Sometimes they get insistent, so I say, “I am given a list of cars from which to choose, and I cannot stray from the list, but thank you for the suggestion.” Just between us girls, there is no list.

Another group of pseudo car guys are the ones who know their favorite make or model up, down, right and left but know absolutely nothing about any other cars. Worse yet, they don’t understand classifications. I’ll give you an example (you knew I would).

In 2010, the theme of the Straight Eights Beach Ball Invitational was “Compacts & Mirrors.” We were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of the Big Three’s 1960 compacts, and the introduction of the first successful compact, the 1950 Nash Rambler. Only one of the trophies out of the twenty-five or so handed out would be for “Best American Compact Car.” I know car stuff, so I knew that American was not needed in the Compact Car category because in Europe, they are known as Saloons. But, I wanted to alleviate any confusion. On one episode of Keeping Up Appearances, Hyacinth Bucket wants Richard to test drive a new car. He responds, “How about a simple, four-door saloon?”

Remember, only one out of twenty-five trophies was for a compact car. Well, do you know how many people were up in arms? What do you consider a compact car? Why is that a compact car? Strangely, the ones who had their sphincters all knotted up didn’t own and had no desire to own a compact car. I think it was the first time I realized that a lot of car guys aren’t really car guys at all. Their only worry was that there was a category in which they couldn’t compete and win a cheap plastic trophy.

While some of them thumb their noses at the base and compact models offered by their favorite makes, they really should honor those cars. If it weren’t for all those Valiants and Darts, Chrysler could possibly have died a long time ago. Ford made a ton of money selling Granadas (my favorite Ford), so they could design and build those hideous early eighties, Fairmont-based Thunderbirds. Sadly, I have seen more of those Box-Birds than Granadas lately.  

Speaking of categories, you should have been there when I explained to a guy that his Pontiac was not an independent. It was an orphan. If you ask Nash, Hudson, Studebaker, Packard and Rambler guys, they will tell you the Pontiac technically is not an orphan because its parent company is still operating. To keep the peace and avoid headaches, Oldsmobiles, Mercurys, Plymouths, etc., are considered orphans at orphan themed car events, sponsored by Orphan Car Clubs. They learned their lesson. I finally found a way to educate them as to what is an orphan, “If you cannot go into a dealership today and buy a new one, it’s an orphan.”

By the way, there is a Hudson dealership in Michigan that is still operating. They are just waiting to replenish their inventory. Every week, the factory calls and says, “Next Tuesday.”

The ones who irk me the most are the ones who have only negative things to say about cars they never owned. They just assume a car is a piece of crap because it isn’t made anymore or it was ugly – to their eyes.

My father was guilty of this, but he was never a car guy. I think he changed the oil in his cars once. His idea of a tune-up was emptying the cigar butts from the ash trays and running it through a Robo-Wash. Then, he would proclaim the car was a piece of crap because it burned oil. Of course it burned oil. After 60,000 miles on the same five quarts of oil, it is bound to start belching it out in the hopes you will give it a fresh batch.

It wasn’t until I bought my first car that I realized cars weren’t supposed to have blue smoke pouring out of the exhaust pipe while the valves tap out a melody from the anvil chorus.

Dad was looking through one of my many car books, and he proclaimed Studebakers were crap. What was his basis? He never owned one? I don’t think anyone we knew owned one.

I can tell you from my research that Studebakers were often ill-timed and missed their target market by a year or two. They also once made a car called the Dictator – not the best name to choose in the 1930s. They were very expensive to make due to having the highest paid workers in the industry coupled with their South Bend, Indiana, plant being far away from parts suppliers in Detroit. However, Studebakers are hardly crap. Their engines are practically bullet proof, and since they never adopted unit construction and pretty much built their cars the old fashioned way up to the end, they are easy to restore if you need to go that route. Next time you see a Studebaker, check out how many body panels it takes to make one.

 

Better yet, check any auction site. Of all the independents, I’ll bet there are more Studebakers on the road than just about any of the others. I have never been to a car show where there weren’t a dozen or so Studebakers. You will see a couple of AMCs, maybe a Rambler, never a Nash, and a few Hudsons. I think Packards are the only ones that outnumber the Studebakers among independents. You will also see at least one PackardBaker. If I have to tell you what that is, you are not a car guy.

Finally, there are the news feed commenters, or those who comment on all news feeds. If you want to have a good laugh, read the comments on Fox News or CNN’s website. I think these people sit all day in their underwear getting ready to pounce on each story and blame it on President Obama or Michelle Bachman. And if you read them enough, you will see all of them know each other because by the third comment the insults start flying.

Whenever the Hemmings Blog (another shameless plug), features an AMC or Rambler in one of their entries, there is inevitably the one guy who says, “All their cars were crap. That is why they went out of business.”

There are many theories as to why they went out of business, including deemphasizing economy and trying to compete with the Big Three in all categories. I believe, and some others do, that they should have kept the Rambler name as their identity and continued to concentrate on sensible, economical and reliable transportation. Then, they would have come out of the 1960s in better shape. With the oil shortages in the 1970s, they would have had enough in reserve to develop more modern cars rather than restyle cars that relied on 1960s engineering.

Once, I couldn’t resist. So I wrote, “Did you ever own one, or know anyone who owned one? What makes you think they were all crap?”

His response, “No. But I always heard they were.”

Well, I heard Billy Dee Williams would win Dancing with the Stars.

Visit my website: www.miltonstern.com and/or become a subscriber to Hemmings Classic Car at www.hemmings.com

To Drive or Not to Drive

If you own a vintage car, the winter months can be frustrating. Do you pack the car away, disconnect the battery, cover it in blankets and pour Stabil into the tank? Or, do you take every opportunity during those months to stretch your car’s legs?

One year, I poured Stabil into the tank of my AMC Spirit, and come spring, I had to replace the gas sending unit. I know it isn’t supposed to destroy gas sending units, but the flu shot isn’t supposed to make you sick either. I don’t know why I poured that crap into the tank. I drove the car every clear day that winter, and it was Snowmaggedon winter at that!

What freaks some people out is that I drive my 1954 Hudson Jet Liner year-round with some exceptions of course. I never take it out if there is salt or sand on the road, and therein lies my dilemma this year. While we aren’t having a year like Snowmaggedon, we are having a snow event every week. Don’t you love how they call them “rain events” and “snow events” now? Up until the latest rain event, our roads were covered in salt. Tomorrow, we are supposed to have a “sun event,” so I plan to drive it.

I look at the seven-day forecast to see if a clear day falls on a day when I can get Fred Mertz out on the road. Sure, the rest of you have better things to do on a rare sunny winter day, but how often during January and February do you get an opportunity to drive a sixty-year-old car? Wow, I just realized that 2014 makes my car sixty years old! OK, let’s not rush it. He left the factory in August 1954, so he is fifty-nine and half.

Do you know what else I do? I run errands in the Hudson. I leave him in parking lots while I go inside and shop. I take him to the barber shop. I even use him to take my dog to the vet. I found that getting dog hair off vintage vinyl is a lot easier than vacuuming it out of new cloth seats. I have a friend who has a coronary every time I do this. I always tell him when I do just to get his reaction.

I had friends who owned a 1979 Lincoln Towne Car they parked in my garage at the apartment complex where I lived at the time. They hardly drove the car. I had a set of keys, so I would call them and tell them I was taking their car to go shopping. Sure, it took up two spaces in the parking lot, but it was being driven, and that is what mattered. I eventually bought the car, and if I could have parked it in my driveway after I bought my house without the trunk hanging out to the middle of the street, I would still own it today.

Here is the deal. It’s a goddam car! If I don’t drive it, who will? I think just letting it sit until the next car show is an insult to the men and women who built it. Also, car shows kind of bore me after the first couple of hours unless there are some really interesting and rare autos in attendance.

Speaking of car shows, have you noticed how some owners pull out a lawn chair and sit by their cars all day ready to answer questions? I realize your car is special, but good God! Get up off your ass and go look at all the other cars. I park mine and go walk around. I guess I am not as self-absorbed as some would think. I love my car and get excited each time I am able to drive it, but I don’t expect you to get excited at the sight of it parked between a Commodore and a Terraplane.

 

My other favorites are the ones who spend the entire show detailing their cars. Do you really have no time to clean your car before the show? This is the equivalent of leaving your hair in curlers then combing it out after you sit down at a luncheon.

At Hershey, they have that Car Coral with all the cars for sale. Now, I understand standing next to your car if you are trying to sell it, but some of these people are downright weird. Last time I was there, I saw a very nice 1955 Studebaker Champion four-door sedan for sale. I approached the car to see the interior. All the windows were rolled up, and a family – or I assume a family – or four adults, recently escaped from the set of Deliverance, were sitting in the car. Not wanting to squeal like a pig or hear how pretty my mouth was, I walked away very quickly. I cannot imagine they sold that car. Then I wondered if they were part of a package deal. Buy a Studebaker and get a set of four kissing cousins included as a bonus.

At the Rockville Antique and Classic Car Show, there was a 1956 Packard Caribbean that was shown for several years. The car was pristine. In the passenger seat every year sat an elderly woman, doing a crossword puzzle and smoking a cigarette. She was always smoking inside that gorgeous car! You could tell by the look on her face, that this was the last place she wanted to be. I never saw her husband. This past year, the car wasn’t there. I wonder if he died, or if she finally burned a hole in the seat and he killed her? We will never know.

Of course, the spectators don’t get off the hook. My friend Frank and I were walking around the Rockville show near a couple of early 1930s Cadillacs when we heard in a very loud voice from a man looking inside a beautiful 1932 model, “Wow. This Cadillac has a manual transmission.” That cracked us up.

Toward the end of this year’s show as we returned to Fred Mertz to take him home, I noticed the owners of the 1937 Hudson Terraplane were still sitting in their chairs, just where we left them four hours earlier. I know them well through the Hudson club, and they are a lovely couple. The Missus said to me, “Milton, a lot of people had questions about your Jet, but you weren’t around. Where were you?”

Seriously? We were looking at the other 500 cars in attendance. To me, standing there waiting to answer questions is like wearing a new suit to a party and standing in the middle of the room hoping everyone will notice and ask you where you bought it. Oh my God. Get over yourself.

When I go out and run errands in my Hudson, I don’t do it so others see me on the road. I do it for the pleasure of driving a vintage car and appreciating manual steering and brakes while not wearing a seat belt. It is like driving naked!

Yes, getting the occasional thumbs up is cool, but for the record, I hate it when they beep because it scares the shit out of me.

However, can you imagine if I parked it at the grocery store then stood by it for an hour hoping someone would ask me about it?

The sad part is I know someone who loves attention, and he would do just that. If I ever do it, throw a net over me.

If you drive in winter or if you don’t, get on my email list, follow me or buy a book at www.miltonstern.com.

Road Hugging Weight

Welcome to my new blog. I have decided to retire the old one, but you can still read the archives online.

Since I have become a contributor to Hemmings Classic Car with my monthly column, “Detroit Underdogs,” and after eight years editing a car club newsletter, I find that I want to focus on driving in the United States rather than just backing out of my driveway at the trailer park, where I reside with my co-pilot, Rose Marie, my rescue puppy.

How much more can I say about manufactured living? But, to those fans of the trailer park trash existence, I will pepper this new blog with anecdotes from the mobile life when apropos.

For those who don’t know me, I belong to seven antique car clubs, three that are gay, and four that are make specific. I prefer the independents to the Big Three, but I have owned my share of Mopars and Fords along with AMCs over the years. Presently, I own two cars, a 2011 GMC Canyon base-model pick-up with a steering wheel, a radio and little else. It has roll-up windows and manual door locks. Surprisingly, it has a bed liner and cruise control. I drove it cross-country last year with no problems even though seven people insisted I rent a car with a trunk. I don’t take advice well.

My other car is a 1954 Hudson Jet Liner. Unlike other Jet Liners, this one has no fender skirts, continental kit or full wheel covers, and that is why I bought it because those are three things along with fins that I do not like. For future reference, the Canyon is Caroline Appleby and the Jet Liner is Fred Mertz. I used to name my cars after Bewitched characters, but that only resulted in them leaving a trail of smoke and fire every time I took off and having to page Dr. Bombay every couple of months.

So here goes …

It is the middle of winter. The weatherman said we have actually passed the coldest part of winter, but I am inside and I cannot feel my fingers or toes or other things that stick out … like my nose. Yesterday, or was it the day before, Atlanta got hit with a rare blizzard that dropped three inches of snow on the ground, causing a traffic situation that was indescribable. Every time I see something like this, I think of what would happen during a terrorist attack. Every car in the pictures of the mess was either an SUV or front-wheel drive sedan, and they were black, gray or white. I miss colorful cars. There were also an inordinate amount of eighteen wheelers stuck in the malaise.

Several years ago, there was a twenty-minute thunderstorm in Rockville, which knocked out power lines. It took almost three weeks to get the power back on, so we have our own problems, which is why I don't live in Rockville anymore.

Back to the South. I grew up in the South in southeastern, Virginia. Yes, that is the South because it was an hour south of the capital of the Confederacy. We didn’t get a lot of snow, but on the rare occasions we did, we got whoppers, and many times they were ice storms. These were the days before every man had front wheel drive and every grandmother had an SUV. With the exception of the hippy professor types, I can guarantee you we drove big heavy cars with rear-wheel drive.

As luck would have it, I was always the one who was stuck at work in these freak blizzards with a 1973 Ford LTD – a yellow four-door with a brown vinyl roof. Yes, it was that ugly but a nice car to drive. Going back a few years before I learned how to drive, my brother became a man in 1972. No, not like that. That was the year of his Bar Mitzvah. Aunt Honey and Uncle Sam and Aunt Min and Uncle Iz came down to stay with Grandma in her one-bedroom apartment. Uncle Sam was the only one with a license and a car – a green four-door 1972 Chevrolet Nova. It was December, and they had driven down in a snow storm, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. Uncle Sam said, “The secret to driving in the snow and ice is letting the car take off on its own before applying the gas.” He was right.

The problem is not everyone met Uncle Sam, so we ended up with the situation on the roads this past week. However, I think we have another problem – overconfidence.

When we drove rear-wheel cars, we knew the limitations. We knew that you couldn’t go the speed limit in the snow and you only drove in ice if you needed to get someone to the emergency room to have a limb attached and only if there was a sixty percent chance of saving it!

Although I remembered what Uncle Sam said, this didn’t matter to my parents. During a blizzard, they would call me at work every ten minutes telling me to go home. It was annoying and embarrassing, and once, when I was in my late twenties, I threatened to report them to the FBI. It didn’t work; they called back ten minutes later. I worked as a manager in the food service industry, and they expected me to drop everything and leave with customers sitting in the establishment. One time, I handed the phone to a customer and said, “Tell my mother you are waiting for your lasagna.” She thought it was one of my friends.

At the end of my shift that winter in 1979, I was ready to leave, and there was no more traffic on the road. In addition, no snow plows had come through. At the time, I worried about that, but sometimes if they plow without salting and sanding, they just create a sheet of ice.

I called home to assure them I was leaving, and I hung up on my father mid-sentence, which I know pissed him off, but I had already spoken to him three dozen times that afternoon.

One of my co-workers needed a ride home, so we brushed off all the snow on the LTD. Speaking of which, why don’t people do this? I hate being behind someone and being pelted by ice sheets and big-ass snowballs.

Kristine, my co-worker, asked if I knew what I was doing. I assured her I did even though this was my first time driving in this kind of weather. I had a positive attitude even then. My parents thought I would die, but I was sure I would get home safe and sound.

I was parked behind the restaurant, and I needed to negotiate a small road before hitting Warwick Boulevard in Newport News. Remembering Uncle Sam, I let the car take off on its own, which was easy with a 429 cubic inch four barrel V-8 under the hood, and off we went.

She lived off two side streets, and I even managed to pull into her driveway and back out without slipping or getting stuck. Keep in mind, this car had rear-wheel drive and no positraction. The drive home required me to go down Warwick Boulevard, make a left on Main Street, and go through an underpass. I felt like Lucy with the Pontiac stuck to the Cadillac. Although I was the only car within sight, I still followed the traffic signals because I always follow the rules. The light turned green. I allowed the car to make the left then eased on the gas and picked up just enough speed to go under and emerge on the other side. Well, that was easy, and there was no other car stuck to my bumper.

I then had to negotiate the winding section of Main Street and managed to do so with no slipping or sliding. I was really beginning to appreciate “road hugging weight.” Then onto Beech Drive to our house on Dresden Drive. Now, I had managed to get through all these streets with no problem, and I knew when I arrived at the house, I would need to have enough speed to get up the driveway or that was the most likely place for me to get stuck. I thought I was such an expert driver at this point.

I rounded the corner, eyeing our house, which was the second one on the right, and what did I see? My brother and father standing there attempting to shovel the snow and standing in my direct path. I beeped the horn and waved my arm for them to get out of the way, and instead, my brother started giving me signals as if he was guiding an airplane into an arrival gate. They wouldn’t move! What did I do? I stopped the car and got out, and I said, “I didn’t want to run you two over, so get it up the driveway, yourselves.” I then went into the house.

Needless to say, my last nerve was plucked from all the phone calls, I just piloted that tank of a car along a treacherous route and just when I needed to have a clear path into the driveway, I risked making my mother a single parent with one angry child.

I will not share what happened after they managed to get it into the driveway, but let’s say there was more screaming than on an episode of All in the Family.

I never got credit for driving that car in a blizzard. I had the best driving record in my family, and my friends usually asked me to do the driving, but you wouldn’t know that to ask them. I was caught in many a blizzard in that heavy Ford LTD after that, and I never had a problem.

From the mid-1980s to about five years ago, I jumped onto the front-wheel drive bandwagon, and that is when I witnessed what had become of drivers now that most of us were driving cars pulled by the front wheels or all wheels. They go too fast. I actually do not like driving front wheel drive cars in the snow. I don’t know what it is, but being behind the wheel of a light car that is low to the ground is not my ideal, and I am not fond of an SUV either.

Recently, someone asked, “What is the best car you ever drove in the snow?” Many of the younger ones mentioned Pathfinders, Cherokees and Blazers, etc. No one mentioned a front-wheel drive car, but I think I was the only one who said a 1973 Ford LTD was the best car I ever drove in the snow. The second best is my GMC Canyon, which only has rear-wheel drive.

If this global warming keeps up, maybe I should buy another ‘70s Ford LTD?

For my column, “Detroit Underdogs,” subscribe to Hemmings Classic Car, for my books, visit www.miltonstern.com. You can also follow me by adding your email to my distribution list.