I have always had a love affair with cars, and during the course of my long life, I have probably had between 75 and 100 of them. There are some, that at this point in my life, I don’t even remember having. When I was a young man, cars were somewhat simple mechanically, and I would often be found under the hood or totally underneath them working on one thing or another. In early 1949, I bought my first car. It was a light, chalky blue 1934 Ford Coupe with a rumble seat and suicide doors. I was fifteen years old, at the time. Both the car and I had been born in 1934, we were manufactured the same year. A coupe is a car designed to carry only two people. Most persons reading this thought will not know or may never have heard the word ‘coupe.’ It had a rumble seat and what we called suicide doors. A rumble seat is an area in the back of a vehicle where instead of a trunk, there is a lid that opens out from the top and inside is a small seat, if persons are not too large, it will hold two people. Of course they are sitting outside in the weather. Suicide doors are doors that open from the front, unlike all car doors today that open safely from the back. If a person were to open a suicide door while the car was travelling down the highway the door would either be ripped off by the wind or it would bend back against the car and be ruined anyway. Early cars all had mechanical, brakes, clutches, as well as, mechanical steering systems. Meaning they were not hydraulic and smooth operating like all of those functions are today. The brakes were operated by a cable running from the pedal, underneath the car to each of the four wheels. That cable would often become stretched and when it was stretched too far, the brakes would no longer work. It was easy to tell when it was time to crawl underneath the car and tighten the turnbuckle on the cable, because the car would no longer stop as fast when I braked. Instead of turning the steering wheel with your little finger as you can with hydraulic steering, mechanical steering was much harder, it sometimes took both hands and a hard pull to get the wheel to turn the car. Parts would wear out much faster because cars did not have sealed lubricant at every moving joint or part as modern cars have. They had what we called grease zerks where we manually greased the various joints with a hand held grease gun. We pumped grease into the joint via the zerk and when we saw grease oozing out of the joint we knew it was time to stop pumping. We usually greased them once a month or every several hundred miles. The joints were not sealed so the grease would often be forced out when the car was driven. Cars were not driven as much or as far for long distances as they are today, nor were there anywhere near the number. The roads were mostly gravel with washboard ripples in many places. Cars were junked after between 50,000 and 100,000 miles. Today’s cars will go three, four times as far. I read the other day where a small Toyota pickup was driven 1,000,000 miles by the original owner. That would never happen in the early days. Not only were the oil and other lubricants less sophisticated but the method of getting oil to the moving engine parts was much less sophisticated as well. It was a mechanic’s ‘glory day.’ Cars were always being worked on either in the garage by a trained mechanic or by, what we called a ‘backyard mechanic.’ Most men were backyard mechanics to some extent, including myself. Tires were a constant problem, the rubber formula had not been perfected and they all had inner tubes in them. An inner tube was a round rubber balloon type unit that fit inside the tire, the tube held the air, whereas tires seal themselves against the rims today (no tubes). Tires were always going flat, you could just about count on a flat tire about every one hundred miles and hope you were near enough to a gas station to fix it. Windshields were all flat plate glass that were easily chipped or broken by rocks or pebbles being thrown up by passing cars. Because the windshields were mostly straight up and down, not slanted as today, driving at night was a strain because the lights of oncoming cars would reflect off the window and often blind you. In some cases we would have to pull over until oncoming cars passed. Side windows were rolled down, not by pressing a button, but by a hand crank or handle.
Today that 1934 ford would bring a pretty price as car junkies make street rods out of them. They put big engines in them, cut and channel them and of course, all the operational, mechanical parts are exchanged for hydraulic systems.
But! I was a happy lad, so happy to have my little ford coup, it took me to work every day (I had quit school in February when I turned fifteen), I took mother to the store to buy groceries, and I showed off every evening by driving up and down main street with my friends. What silly but happy times and at the same time, what hard times. “Things Change, Thank Goodness!”