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