Auto American

Inventor Karl Benz in the first automobile

There are few baby boomers who can’t say that the auto holds a central place in their psyche. It certainly is smack dab in the middle of me, a ‘50’s boomer who can list every make and style he's driven in what the sociologists say is the primary personal metaphor with which to show off one’s status, a status traceable to rising affluence in the years following WW II.

So I’d like to cite a few milestones and tell a story about some experiences with this probably marvelous, possibly malevolent, metal fashioner of minds, especially minds molded by middle class American means.

This past November, for instance, marked the 30th anniversary of Blondie’s 1980 release of Autoamerican, in which lead singer Debbie Harry satirizes the pivotal position of the car in American society.

"Based on the desire for total mobility and the serious physical pursuit of religious freedom, the auto drove mankind further than the wheel and, in remote areas even today, is forbidden as a device too suspect for human conveyance. This articulate conception has only brought us all more of the same, thoughtlessly locked into phase two gridlock, keyed up, on it's rims and abandoned on the expressway."

Then there’s my rare, handmade first day cover by artist Dorothy Knapp, franked by a plate number block of stamps commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the American Automobile Association. These stamps were issued in 1952 while I was gestating in my mother's womb. The event anticipated my birth into the height of the auto age.

The auto might be a quintessentially American devise, but I learned basic auto maintenance driving Fiats, starting in 1977 with a white ‘68 model 124. The Italians do know how to fashion beautiful designs for vehicles. I drove a used Karmann Ghia in high school, a Volkswagen for which they designed the sleek body. But the 124 was a real ugly duckling. I bought it because I liked how it sounded like a Ferrari. Well, the engines of Farraris are also built by the Germans. It seems that the Italians can’t figure out how to engineer worth a damn the vehicle itself. Oil leaked from the 124's faulty rear main seal onto the exhaust manifold, sending a stream of smoke in the car’s wake. I had a stoner and fellow botany major friend of mine fix it at his new Corvallis, Oregon garage, the Rainbow Repair. Then it sat on blocks for months until a windfall student aid disbursement enabled me to replace the rusted rear discs, which had caused them to scrape against the pads, heat up, and expand until braking without my consent ground the car to a halt along with my status as an Auto American.

The windfall refund happened at the time of my graduation from Oregon State. Fixing the Fiat was the prerequisite for hitting the road. I replaced the head gasket and water pump myself. My roommate taught me how to time the tappets with feeler gauges, a needed task when cam shafts weren’t over the head like they are today. I kept the car tuned by hand all the way to Florida to visit my brother, once checking the point gap in an abandoned shed in the pouring rain. Once in Florida, a sudden summer rain squall soaked the pavement, and I slid to a stop under the lights at an intersection. There I was met by a Ford LTD that couldn’t stop either on the slick pavement, so it wrapped my Fiat around its huge front end.

I promptly replaced it with another Fiat when a used car dealer ran after me and threw a deal hastily scribbled onto a scrap of paper onto my lap as I was driving away from his dealership. It was a deal I couldn’t refuse, a shiny white 128 model with only 65K miles for only $800. Yea, it had been freshly painted, and the engine compartment had been spray painted black to hide a multitude of sins. First order of business was to replace the velocity joints, because the protective boots had cracked, allowing Florida sand to enter and grind the gears to nubbins. I had borrowed the price of the car from my brother, so I thought I’d pay him back by means of a quick summer job. But I was hired long term by a foundation that served troubled youth, and I had to return to Oregon to arrange my affairs. This necessitated another couple of trips across the country, this time in this lemon of a Fiat.

The belt tensor loosened on every major bump in the road, and I was underneath the car many times with a wrench tightening it. The 128 was Fiat’s attempt at a front-wheel drive four -banger for the masses, so the redesigned transmission, of course, gave out crossing over the Sangre De Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. I limped into Colorado Springs where an uncle lent repair money. When the rusted stabilizer bar broke free of the body in the Cascades of Oregon, I had to grasp the steering wheel like a vise to keep the car from lurching into the oncoming lane of traffic. The welder who fixed it failed to inform me that I needed an alignment, so the new tires I got in Reno on money borrowed from my folks while at their time share on Lake Tahoe were rubbed bald by the time I got back to Florida. At least that damn Fiat got me to Vegas where I caught a show performed to the Eagles new hit Life in the Fast Lane. It served as a theme song as I barreled down the Front Range into Denver, thinking I could save on gas by coasting the car in neutral up to 80 mph, while forgetting that a jury rigged weld job giving out would have put an end to this Auto American's life in the fast lane.

But I loved that Fiat, even though everything on that car except the engine gave out. It had no radio until I could afford a tape deck with speaker boxes I had students I was counseling build. It leaked rainwater, so I fiber-glassed sealed the air intake vents, thinking that’s how the rain got in. On a winter cross country trip home to my parents in San Diego for Christmas, I wrapped myself in blankets, because the heater didn’t work. In the mountains south of Mount Lassen on a trip to Reno to look for work during the winter of the ‘82 recession an unlucky jackrabbit broke the electrical wire to the fuel pump that hung like gonads between the rear wheels. There I was under the car and an unreal star-studded sky in the pitch black night fumbling to reconnect it. Later I had to run a wire directly from the battery to a toggle switch I stuck into the dash and then back to that electric pump. Flick the toggle or the car didn’t start. I wore out the brakes coasting down national forest dirt roads after a month volunteering with Summit Expedition, a climbing and stress-camping program in the Yosemite. I put in new pads and replaced that now gummed up fuel pump while overhearing the program’s director appeal by phone for new clients. Turning into the driveway after a 600 mile trip back from canoeing in the Boundary Waters, the steering wheel suddenly spun like a top. Zero steering. My partner and I sat there shocked by the notion of how fortunate we had been. So even the rack and pinion steering had to be replaced. I self-deceptively rationalized that each new repair would restore for good my freedom as an Auto American.

I was more than happy when making enough money allowed me to invest in a new pick up, and a "For Sale” sign eventually drew a dad needing a cheap car for his teenage kid. It still amazes me how I survived that Fiat. The funny thing is that I sold it for only $300 less than what I had paid for it eight years earlier. That price plus the repairs came to just over $3000. $375/year plus gas seems to me today to be a cheap price to pay for the freedom of an Auto American.

Most people have an intuitive understanding that the golden days of Auto Americans are coming to an end. A world power cannot perennially remain one when it runs on foreign oil. And the impact on the fragile biosphere must be taking its toll, especially given the growth of that impact. Passenger cars in 1960 numbered 61,671,390. Passenger cars in 2008 numbered 137,079,843, a 221% increase. The number of registered vehicles in 2008 was 255,917,664, or 0.83 vehicles per every man, woman, and child in the country (DOT statistics). When a typical vehicle puts a pound of carbon dioxide into the air every mile it is driven, contributing big time to the nine billion tons of additional carbon per year that until our age sat sequestered as fossil deposits dating back to the Carboniferous period in geologic history, an effect has to be on its way, if it isn’t already. As a science teacher I have taught a unit on rapid global climate change every year since 1989. It makes me a little uneasy facing students with the realization that their generation gets to figure out what to do with the consequences of mine, a generation that gave rise to the golden age of the Auto American.