Some of us in the old car hobby remember the days when cars had steel dashboards, no air bags or safety belts, and a collision avoidance system was paying attention to driving instead of texting or yapping on a phone. Most vehicles had neither power steering nor power brakes. Many, in my part of the country, didn’t even have heaters. An AM radio was a luxury item, and windows were rolled up or down by hand cranks.
As kids, we seldom rode in child safety seats, but often in the beds of trucks. We ate Twinkies, Sugar Pops, Sugar Smacks and real butter (if our parents could afford it). We drank sodas, Kool-Aid and milk that didn’t taste like milk-flavored water. We built a lot of our own toys and invented things in garages or barns filled with chemicals and old motor oil. We used our dads’ electric drills, saber saws and bench grinders, most of which had enough power to pull a Sherman tank out of quicksand.
We didn’t tell our parents when we had life-threatening accidents, because they would douse our wounds with iodine... or, worse, might take us to a doctor. About the only good thing about going to a doctor was he didn’t tell us to lose weight.
Just about every boy—and more than a few girls—were mechanics, because we had to fix our old things instead of buying new ones. If we weren’t already mechanics, we quickly learned how to be when we bought our first cars.
Of course, this is just another version of, “When I was your age,” and succeeding generations will have their own. But how does this relate to carburetors and buying old cars and trucks?
Several years ago I bought a very nice 1964 CJ-6. I had my eye on this Jeep for over a decade, because it seemed to spend most of its time sitting at a gas station. I had asked the gas station owner several times if it might be for sale, but he always just smiled and said no. Then, one day, a friend called to say he’d seen this Jeep sitting by the road up the coast with a “For Sale” sign on
