Sepia: Detroit Wheels II

I'm not sure why my father fixated on Chevrolets but fixate he did, and from the time I was about three we had a series of Chevies.


Uncle Wiggily was a 1950 two-tone coupe exactly like this. I remember the velvety grey interior and the buttons on the radio - they were a cream Bakelite, square with a large dimple for my tiny finger. I remember being small enough to curl up on the inner deck (in the rear window). One one summer drive to the ocean (this took all day, before the freeway came through town in 1963) I captured a "woolly bear" caterpillar in Oregon who escaped in the back seat somewhere. I believe we also took our cat Growler for a seaside weekend and he spent most of the trip under the front seat.



Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy (Uncle Wiggily's muskrat lady housekeeper) was a '55 four-door. It was not a two-tone like the one pictured, but a solid blue, a funny darkish shade. Nurse Jane had a habit of overheating; crossing the Cascade range one day we had to fill soda bottles at every mountain stream to pour in the radiator. This ad does not illustrate our typical hill-climbing exerience. (Click to better read the exquisite prose!)



The Bad Pippsissewa was actually a powder-blue '63 Impala, but this ad is as close as I could come, aside from the hovercraft effect. It had a manly V8 engine that got about 6 miles to the gallon. When I finally got my license I drove it into the ground -- through high school and for several years thereafter until it expired in 1979 in California, where I left it to the junkers. It's the car in which I honed my dashboard-and-steering-wheel drumming technique.



My mother at last acquired her own Chevy, a Merlot-red '64 Nova. (In Mexico they called it something else since "Nova" means "No go.") My father named it Rosie (my mother not being a car-namer) after an old girl-friend, I think! My mum finally managed to eviscerate it by running over a concrete divider in a parking lot.



My father upgraded Impalas -- to a '65 model, a maroon stick-shift. A feckless colleague fobbed it off on him. It became known as Sam Abelson after a crusty childhood acquaintance of my dad's. The trunk leaked and he developed quite a forest of redolent mold in the trunk. It was also a sort of "annex" for him, he kept several years' worth of old student papers in the back seat.



Meanwhile my dad bought my sister, now out of high school, a 1969 Chevelle, sky blue like this one but not actually an SS (SuperSport) edition. She drove it like a SuperSport though, and eventually "totaled" it. Although, my son having just done the same to his old Honda Civic with a slight fender crunch, the term is pretty relative! Bloody insurance companies.



In the early '80s my folks got a pair of nearly matching chocolate Novas (Novae?) - a '77 and a '79. I honestly don't remember if either of them got names! Anyway my wife and I inherited them after not only my father but my Datsun B210 wagon shook off their mortal coils. The Novas had only six cylinders but were gas hogs, and they were hard to park, not only because of their size but because neither had power steering, my dad always trying to save on the extras. I recall that at least one of them featured a back seat that wouldn't stay put.

So, uh, that's the story.

Some these ads came from this great site.