Where 500 horsepower sounds a lot Like Christmas A STORY WORTH TELLING
“ The styles have evolved, but the soul is still the same.”
— Overheard at the car parts store “I love this season of year,” I announced to the coffee club last week.
“Whoa, hold on,” one of them muttered, gripping his mug. “It’s not Christmas yet. There’s plenty of shopping days left.”
“No,” I said with a laugh. “I’m talking about the big car show on Saturday morning, same weekend as the Poultry Festival.
Besides, I don’t start Christmas shopping until the week before.”
Someone chimed in with, “You think kids still care about cars like we did? Some don’t seem to even care about a driver’s license.” “Not entirely true,” I protested. “The machines look different today, and the technology has shifted.
But wheels are still a small-town teenager’s passport to the outside world.”
I took another sip of coffee, recalling I got my first car in 1963.
“True, we spent our weekends under the hood of a homebuilt hot rod or a muscle car then. But look around today, that passion still exists,” I added. “Same late-night garage hours and pride of ownership. The tools in the garage have changed, but the pride of driving something unique remains.” The conversation took me back to a time when most young guys were graduating from building plastic model cars to hiding hot-rod magazines inside their history textbooks and drawing flames on paper schoolbook covers.
It was an era when every Detroit-built car had a distinct personality. You didn’t just know a Chevrolet from a Ford or a Dodge at a quarter mile away; even a novice could tell a Bel-Air from an Impala, a Mainline from a Fairlane, or a Coronet from a Meadowbrook.
Getting a license was a sacred rite of passage, and individuality was paramount.
Dinah Shore filled the airwaves singing, “See the USA in your Chevrolet.” Ford ads touted sleek styling by promising, “Ford has a better idea.”
Not to be outdone, Dodge captured the youthful spirit of the era by proclaiming, “One look and you’ve got Dodge fever.”
And the autumn unveiling of the new model lines was pure September magic.
That magic never faded for me. I still feel it every time I walk into my garage, where my trio of mid-1950s Fords reside: a ’55 Ford Crown Victoria, a ’57 Ford Thunderbird and a ‘57 Ford sedan. That last one was purchased new off the showroom floor by my grandparents in Northeast Texas. It was the very car in which I learned to drive and drove around on dates with my first and second girlfriends.
It is fair to say my life would have turned out much differently if American steel and internal- combustion engines hadn’t given me an incentive to survive high school afternoon classes. We lived for the final bell, just to watch the pilgrimage of rolling stock leave the parking lot, carrying classmates to jobs or to the local burger joints.
We lived for the anticipation of cruising the Mount Pleasant city streets at night, blazing the asphalt at East Texas drag strips on the weekends and slowly driving past the Martin Theater on a Friday night to see who was at the movies.
“So,” I said, tossing a couple of bucks on the table before exiting the coffee club. “Do yourself a favor and check out the car show. It’s going to be packed with incredible machines and memories for all generations.”
After all, whether you’re 16 or 86, 500 horsepower and a gorgeous paint job will always sound a lot like Christmas.
Contact Aldridge at leonaldridge@gmail. com. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge.com.
