The Confessions of a Shade-Tree Mechanic: Berkeley the 60S & 70S

By Cj Becker

Roger Williams stumbles through adolescence with the aid of a few friends and his love for the automobile. At the end of college he hits the road to the West Coast in a rolled and tucked, convertible Pontiac, along route 66, over the Sierras to Berkeley for graduate school in 1963. At Berkeley he meets Ginny Wyant a Phi Beta Kappa from Boston University. In the explosive environment of Berkeley in the 60s Roger and Ginny fall in love and move in together. In revolutionary times Roger and Ginny decide to drop out and join the gypsy life. Roger becomes a shade-tree mechanic for artists, musicians, and drug dealers. The parties, the concerts, the riots, the drugs, and the attempts to create a sustainable life outside the mad house of the Vietnam War culture that Roger and Ginny participate in are legendary. After a few years Ginny decides to return to school and complete her PhD in psychology. In 1970 Roger and Ginny have a daughter. The family sustains them through the brutal 70s. By the end of the seventies the war is over, the movement for social change is dead, and the move the to the political right begins. Roger and Ginny move into the next revolution in Silicon Valley. Ginny, who has gotten her degree, gets a job at a psychiatric ward. Roger and Ginny change gender roles. Roger becomes the President of the Mother's Club, rebuilds the house they have been able to buy, and has time to sum up the utopian 60s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 22, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595911301

Book preview

Chapter 1

I graduated from junior high in 1954. That summer I worked on Rock Ridge Farm. Rock Ridge was a dude farm located outside of Eaton Center in Carol County, New Hampshire, north of Lake Winnipesauke and the Massachusetts overflow in southern part of the state. It was up the Glines Hill Road, a place so undeveloped, so out of the way that even today satellite photos show only a white smudge. The owners, John and Libby Armstrong, had moved to New Hampshire to get away from the harried life in the Jersey sprawl across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Rock Ridge provided city dwellers with the novelty of experiencing a small, working farm, close at hand, without having to do any work. Two house girls assisted Mrs. Armstrong with the cooking and cleaning. Three boys, including me, helped Mr. Armstrong clean the pigs, saddle horses, milk the cows, and cut, rake, and pitch the hay. We boys lodged in what had once been a chicken coop out by the barn. In addition to the straightening values of hard work, which began at sunrise and often continued into the moonlit night, we got room and board and a hundred dollars at the end of the summer. It was at Rock Ridge Farm that I experienced the first blossoming of romance. And that’s where my automotive maidenhead was blown at the age of fifteen by an ancient Model A Ford.

The Model A was in the last stages of a long, slow decline. Not only did she lack the chromed bumpers, headlights, or windscreen of her youth, she no longer had fenders, a body, or a rearview mirror. This beast was nothing more than an engine mounted on a frame with wheels, brakes, and a bench seat sitting up behind the steering wheel. She had to be parked on a slope facing down hill so she could be jump-started. She was used so infrequently that the battery was always flat. I would hoist myself aboard with the aid of the steering wheel and settle into the musty bench seat. From the seat of the Model A, it was impossible to see any vestige of her original beauty, but I knew nothing of that. What I knew was a purely utilitarian machine in all its primal glory.

I reached over and switched on the ignition. With the ignition on I advanced the spark lever under the left side of the steering wheel all the way to its topmost position. I opened the throttle using the lever on the right side of the steering wheel three notches so I could just feel the gas pedal depress a little. Next the choke adjustment rod under the dashboard was turned in until it stopped, and then counter clockwise one full turn to enrich the gasoline mixture, as I’d seen the older boys do. After depressing the clutch and shifting into second gear, I released the hand brake to begin the slow dive downhill. Ready or not here I come, I yelled as she began to roll. When the vehicle reached sufficient speed, I popped the clutch. She coughed, sputtered, and jumped to life with an explosion and cloud of exhaust out the back. She had no muffler, of course. This was New Hampshire, where people go to Live Free or Die, away from federal mandates. Around the farm, everyone turned to look for the cause of this obnoxious violation of the peace and quiet.

Once the engine was running, I had to perform several operations in rapid sequence. Depress the clutch again, shift into neutral, and apply the foot brake to stop the roll. Set the handbrake until I could nurture the spark of life into a smooth running engine. With the engine picking up speed and easing into a self-sustained purr, the spark was retarded to its normal position. As the engine warmed, I backed off the choke, so the carburetor was neither too rich nor too lean, closed down the throttle, and we were ready to go. The Model A was ready to work. That antique automobile gave me an instinctive feel for the four humors of internal-combustion engine health—gas, compression, spark, and timing—that very few of my peers would ever have. It set the stage for my future profession as Roger Williams, shade-tree mechanic.

Most of the Model A’s work was now in the wintertime, when the dude farm was converted into a ski resort. She would be driven down to the lower pasture, her rear end would jacked off the ground, and she became the donkey for the ski tow. Attached by a leather belt, her rear wheel turned a rope between two pulleys and dragged skiers from the low to the high pasture. Here was a chore that hearkened back to machinery’s earliest days: the man-powered wheel that lifted water from the river into the fields; the ox- or mule-turned mill stone that ground grain into flour; the water-powered wheel that operated looms, polishing wheels, and newspaper presses. Mr. Armstrong’s conversion of the Model A into a ski donkey represented a deep-rooted human inclination to find a way to save labor.

The real workhorse at Rock Ridge Farm was the army-surplus jeep Mr. Armstrong had purchased after the war. It was my job to sit on the warm, molded, cast-iron seat of the hay cutter as Mr. Armstrong pulled it around the hay field with the jeep, the split windshield folded down onto the hood. Actually, I had two jobs. One was to raise and lower the cutting bar with a lever; the other was to engage or disengage the cutting bar with a pedal. The hay-cutting schedule was determined by the calendar and modified by the weekly weather projections. To cure, the freshly cut grass had to lie in the sun for two weeks, during which time we prayed no rain would fall. The next step was to rake hay fields into long piles called windrows. The person riding the hay rake pressed a pedal at the right moment to release the hay collected by the great curving tines of the rake. Wind blowing over the turned hay in the windrows aided the process of curing. Uncured hay was vulnerable to rot and was therefore uneatable, but even worse, it created heat that might ignite a fire in the hayloft of the barn.

The last step in the haymaking process really revealed the jeep’s special qualities. Shifted into low, low, four-wheel drive with the throttle pulled out a notch, the jeep crept along the windrows at a half-a-mile an hour as four or five of us pitched the hay onto the wagon that was hooked to the back. Only at the end of the windrow was there a need for someone to turn the steering wheel so we could work our way down another windrow. That little go-devil engine in the jeep could pull the great weight of wagon, hay, and people up the hill from the lower pasture without breaking a sweat. The job was finished when we raised the hay up into the hayloft of the barn with a block and tackle, where it was stored to feed the livestock during the winter.

When everyone else was occupied with jobs that I couldn’t do, I might drive the jeep up to Conway, fifteen miles north of Eaton Center, to run an errand for Mr. Armstrong. I didn’t have a license but it didn’t matter because Mr. Armstrong was the county sheriff. If he decided I was old enough to drive, that was all that was necessary. One clear, cool, piney summer afternoon I drove down the hill into Eaton Center. I followed a familiar route along the two-lane country highway, around Crystal Lake, connecting up with Route 153 at the broad end of the lake near the beach. The windshield was up, but that was about all. The jeep was the epitomy of an open vehicle, with low sides, built close to the ground. The jeep could only go fifty miles per hour, but it seemed like considerably more. The road raced by and the wind screamed around the windshield; the excitement of driving this vehicle was palpable. I cruised into Conway and down the main street to the hardware store to pick up the order John had phoned in. Mr. Armstrong’s trust made me feel light on my feet, and I held my head up high.

The hardware store smelled of leather, neat’s-foot oil, and beeswax, topped off with a high note of turpentine. I walked down creaky wooden aisles, past bins filled with nails, screws, hooks, screw eyes, and angle irons; shelves laden with boxes containing fuses, switches, and light bulbs; and a wall holding up racks of shovels, rakes, and axes. This was the place to go when tools were needed, when things needed to be fixed. This was where the gods themselves went to get their business fixed. This was the kind of place my father never took me.

At the back of the store, I found a man behind a counter with the cash register. I asked for the supplies Mr. Armstrong had ordered.

All right, young man, he said, we have that orda right hea. We’ll put it on John’s bill.

I took the bag, and said, Thank you.

I walked back out to the jeep, put the supplies in the back seat, and was off again back to Eaton Center. About halfway home I pulled off the road to pee, unaware that the shoulder was only about three feet wide before it dropped down into a three- to four-foot drainage ditch. The jeep pitched over violently. Panicked, I jammed on the brakes and held on to the windshield, which seemed to be at about a 45-degree angle. After my emotions calmed down a bit, I followed the numbers: I shifted the transfer box down into low, low; engaged the four-wheel drive; gave her a little gas; and engaged the clutch. The jeep drove right back up onto the road slick as grease. I returned to the farm no worse for wear. No trumpets sounded, no organs played, but I had passed a test. Driving in the jeep to pick up supplies at the hardware store was my bar mitzvah, my initiation into the life of an adult male—before I was even old enough to drive. And I had the good fortune to drive an original go devil jeep. Holy Toledo!

There was no mirror in the chicken coop that served as the boys’ bunkhouse so I could not see the dark hairs growing on my upper lip. But there was another sign of my hormonal changes that I could experience. I fell madly in love with one of the house girls, Marleen McCarthy. A cute blond from a neighboring town, she was twenty-one going on thirty, while I was fifteen going on fifteen-and-a-half. She had a boyfriend and planned to marry in the fall, but that didn’t stop me. She was beautiful and perfect fit for me as I saw it. I discovered that anything was possible when you’re in love. On Sundays the whole crew would go up to Swift River with a picnic lunch and I would ogle Marleen all day long. For several days I was confined to the chicken coop with a mysterious fever, because of her. I was often lost in my own private world. Roused out of it by a question I would notice people smiling. Everyone else seemed to know my inner feelings, though I don’t think I said anything to Marleen or anyone else. I received some sharp hazing from the other boys. Even now, it is hard to talk about her.

On moonlit nights when there was no haying to do, the boys and I rode horses down to the Eaton Center. My favorite horse was a Tennessee-gaited palomino, a four-year-old mare named Moonbeam. That horse loved to run. While most stable horses cantered a bit as they headed for the barn, Moonbeam was young and frisky enough to break into a gallop at any time, in any direction. All you had to do is give her the word. Moonbeam’s riders had to be particularly careful when they moved the reins to signal a turn. Riders who stayed straight up in the saddle quickly found themselves rolling around on the ground.

All there was to Eaton Center was a small convenience store that also sold gasoline. Arriving out of the dusk of the evening, we would dismount and tie up our horses at the store’s porch railing. I would go into the store and take a bottle of Moxie, Original Elixir, out of the cold box and put a nickel in the jukebox to hear Bill Haley and the Comets sing Shake Rattle and Roll. Rock ‘n’ roll was starting to become the soundtrack to life. I would be hard pressed to rate what was more exciting in my fifteenth year at Rock Ridge Farm: Marleen, the Jeep, Moonbeam or the Model A. With the jeep, the Model A, and Moonbeam I could fly through the air with some degree of control. With Marleen, I hadn’t a clue how to turn a corner or get out of a ditch. Marleen was sweet enough to give me a copy of her high-school graduation picture, signed with her love, at the end of the summer when my parents came to pick me up.

My parents, George and Alice Williams, moved to New Jersey from Yonkers, New York, during my summer at Rock Ridge Farm. At the end of the summer, I left New Hampshire for Morrisville, New Jersey, my new home, with Mr. Armstrong’s hundred-dollar check in my wallet. In Morrisville, some of my old furniture, my hand-made Heathkit pre-amplifier, amplifier, and FM tuner had been moved into a freshly painted room located over the garage. The first thing I did to make myself at home was to build the hi-fi components into a bookcase, a new addition to my bedroom furniture. My father took me down to Hudson Street in New York City, where I bought a Shure M-16 Studio Dynetic tone arm and a Bogen-Presto TT3 professional-quality one-speed turntable using the money I’d earned at Rock Ridge Farm. I scavenged the speakers from an old PA system and an older stereo that belonged to my father. Speakers were the weak link in my hi-fi.

My front bedroom window looked down the driveway, out into the street, and the entirely new world of New Jersey. The new house was one of several constructed in what had been a cow pasture. Everything was freshly painted, shingled, and paved. The neighborhood seemed to be painfully exposed. At that point, the trees that would eventually shade and soften the view in coming decades were mere striplings anchored by guy wires. I had no friends in this world and no connections to anything outside my new room. I would brood about the unforeseen opportunities for unhappiness at Morrisville High School when, like the lonesome call of the wolf, the guttural roar of a Harley in the distance would pull me out of my isolation and return me to my recent New England state-of-mind. I dreamed about Marleen as Hank Williams’s I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry moaned through my mind like a breeze through the pine trees. I had listened to Hank Williams by the hour at Rock Ridge Farm.

One of my earliest Morrisville memories occurred on Saturday evenings at dusk. For a half hour or so, a thrilling roar would rise and fall like waves crashing down a beach, breaking through the quiet suburban air. After a short silence, it would begin again. My father explained that the noise came from a racetrack just across the railroad tracks a few miles away and promised to take me sometime. I was amazed that such a noise was tolerated in the bucolic setting of Morrisville. It gave our new house considerably more depth of character than was apparent in the glare of the noonday sun. On muggy, late-summer evenings leading up to my first year in high school, lying on my bed at Orpheus’s threshold, the undulating choruses of the distant racers roared into my subconscious. The racetrack noise became the backdrop as I played out the bittersweet memories of the past summer until ten o’clock when the dirt track went silent. And then I drifted into the peaceful underworld of sleep.

My father did take me to the track on one occasion. My adrenaline was so high that I could barely see straight. It was the automobile culture’s version of bear baiting or cock fighting. After the third race, I began to notice that the roaring beasts were actually banged up family sedans with no mufflers and numbers painted on the sides. There were no safety devices such as we know today. Auto manufacturers were on public record as saying that crashes were not survivable and that was that. NASCAR sponsored this sort of stock-car racing. NASCAR was launched with the Daytona 500 in 1949, but its roots go back to the drivers who trafficked illegal booze during Prohibition, especially in the South. Those Robin-Hood rustics bored and stroked their engines so they could outrace the Feds in their government-issued vehicles. It was the tried-and-true American story of good ol’ boys versus the government. When NASCAR was launched after the war it wrote the rule that its racecars be the same as those people could buy on the showroom floors. In some early races drivers simply rented a car and took it directly to the track. Later the Big Three would produce limited runs of a few hundred Daytona cars, continuing the illusion that anyone could get behind the wheel and outrun the government.

As I sat on the slivery wooden bench seat in the stands, people around me pointed and shouted knowledgeable comments about the cars and their drivers. Dirt flew into the corners as the cars went around, and around, and around, always turning to the left, always counterclockwise. In some ways the race was like a high-speed, adult version of the electric bumper cars at Coney Island that I was familiar with. Cars bounced off the walls and fences, igniting showers of sparks. Skidding cars, burning tires, and dragging sheet metal was part of the show. Wheels fell off at an alarming rate. Waiting for a crash was a large part of the fun and was not a rare event. Nothing was more exciting.

NASCAR was and is a spectacle that lifts the pedestrian experience of the family sedan out of the mundane, with its payments, rules and regulations, and tedious responsibilities. NASCA is still run for the benefit of good ol’ boys and their women, who stand on the sidelines and hoot their champions on to glory. It is a traditional gathering ritual of the American culture, just like mom, football, and apple pie.

As a teenager, the pure, raw unbridled power of dirt-track car racing left me in a cold sweat. It was intoxicating. But that year, when the season ended, the track did, too. It was shut down, knocked down, and trucked to the dump. I couldn’t believe it. The Mennen Company bought the property and built a plant on the site of the old racing oval. It turned out that dirt-track racing was too elemental for suburban Morrisville. In the future, instead of the rumble and the roar of the stock cars, we got the scent of underarm deodorant when the wind was just right.

Chapter 2

In the post-modern, post-war world of the 1950s, we Americans seemed to be happy as pie and eager to get back to our beloved automobile culture. Newsreels about the war considered were augmented by heroic melodramas portrayed by 4-F actors such as Frank Sinatra and John Wayne. But this propaganda was beginning to be belied by works such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, a gritty retelling of the real war in the southern Pacific. An International Style utopian architecture was beginning to be utilized in the big cities for the returning vets. Called urban renewal these hideous housing tracts soon became ghettos. Social chroniclers like John Updike were finding a rich vein of hypocrisy in the jack-in-the-box suburbs with their detached, single-family houses, cocktail-shaker morality, and buzz-cut lawns. Like Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman we were out to sell America, but not necessarily happy with the result.

The Russians set off their first atomic bomb in 1949 and their first hydrogen bomb in 1953. To anyone sharp enough to do the numbers, it was clear that a nuclear conflict would end civilization and perhaps life itself on planet Earth. As the we did our best to forget the wars past and wars in the offing while the kids were still up, women were reminded how Grandma’s Pantry had been well stocked in case of flood, hurricane, or fire on the evening news. The pantry now would be our defense against nuclear attack. Civil defense became a major preoccupation.

In 1955, the federal government initiated a national psychodrama of controlled fear. President Eisenhower authorized Operation Alert, a simulated nuclear attack, and with 15,000 government employees fled to a secret retreat in Virginia. In front of a tent, the president stood at a microphone, using the new technology for social communication, television, to proclaim that America had survived. Impressed by the autobahn he had seen in Germany during the war, Eisenhower justified—on the basis of the new crisis, the Reds are coming!—the building of a federal highway system upon which nuclear weapons could be safely transported. While our parents listened to Bing Crosby and Doris Day and planned their next automobile purchase, schoolchildren learned how to survive a nuclear attack:

Duck and cover.

There was a turtle by the name of Burt.

And this turtle was very alert.

And when danger threatened he never got hurt,

He ducked and covered, he did what we all must learn to do,

Dum, dum, diddle, dum, dum,

At the fringes of society getting back on the road again had a deeper purpose. The cuckoo insanity of American life made dharma bums out of many a sensitive soul. Greek-Catholic altar boy Jack Kerouac was given an honorable discharge from the army in 1945. The diagnosis was Dementia praecox, a high propensity for sexual activity, and a symphony of voices screaming in his head. He applied to Columbia to begin a writing career. At Columbia he met Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. After a few years Jack left Columbia, and his friend the sorrowfully poetic red-diaper-baby Allen Ginsberg, to hit the road, traveling to Chicago by Greyhound bus. From there, he hitchhiked to Denver, picking up a ride in a flatbed truck carrying bails of hay through the heartland of the country. In Denver, he planned to hook up with his old chum from Columbia, Neal Cassady.

Cassady grew up with an alcoholic father in the scummy world of flophouses, pool halls, hot-dog carts, back alleys, and freight yards. He had recently done time for offering two joints to an undercover agent in exchange for a ride to work. In Neal, Jack found a holy con man with a mind just crystallized enough to ride shotgun on his automotive perambulations around the country. They struck out from Denver to find the soul of America, going first to the West Coast. In San Francisco, they met Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet who had opened City Lights Bookstore. In the navy, Ferlinghetti had walked the killing fields of Nagasaki after the Bomb.

One way or another we Americans attempted to leave the horror of global politics behind by fulfilling our most primary and noble instinct—to move. We moved, and we called it change. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady, and Ferlinghetti were part of the considerable pent-up desire in America for a return to the freedom of the highway. The voice they gave to a beaten-down generation was beatific in its debauchery, the only political act with any impact at the time. Most American intellectuals at the time still followed European models and were content with an ironic posture. Kerouac went further, creating a purely American post-modern style in On The Road with Carlo Marx playing the role of Alan Ginsberg, Sal Paradise playing the role of Jack Kerouac, and Dean Moriarty playing the epic hero Neal Cassady.

*  *  *

One of the best times I had with my father was the trip out to the local armory. I followed him into an office, where he signed in and picked up two pairs of binoculars and a spotter’s book of airplane profiles. Under an azure sky, on top of the flattop, crenellated, redbrick armory building in the middle of an emerald-green field, we kept our eyes open for Russian intercontinental bombers. We peered into the sky with profiles of Bear, Backfire, and Bison bombers etched in our minds. But all we ever saw were Piper Cubs and the occasional DC-3.

When it was determined that our fear of bombers with nuclear weapons was overwrought, it was replaced with the Sputnik panic after the Russians put the first satellite in orbit. When that excitement paled, it was followed by the missile-gap panic, and then something else, and so on. In any case, my father and I stopped going out to the armory. In reality, there wasn’t much we could have done to stop any of these potential catastrophes. There was also the possibility that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to survive these modern catastrophes. My parents rejected the idea of building a bomb shelter, believing that there would be nothing worse than surviving a nuclear shoot out. Their solution was to drink heavily, smoke incessantly, and play classical music.

My mother, who was in a constant state of anxiety, added Marsilid to her list of remedies. First used for tuberculosis patients, the drug later was found to have an anti-depressive side effect. Marsilid was a derivative of hydrazine, the fuel the Germans used to propel their V-2 rockets; Werner Von Braun introduced V-2s and hydrazine to America. It was discovered that Marsilid blocked an enzyme that broke down serotonin thereby increasing its levels in the brain. The euphoric effect of serotonin on the brain had just been discovered. This fit well with the prevailing medical theory that depression was not a psychological or existential condition, but a chemical imbalance. Many hoped that all human unhappiness would soon be washed away by a simple adjustment in a chemical balance. After Marsilid stopped working for my mother the doctors prescribed reserpine, which decreased the level of serotonin. Like Marsilid, it seemed to work for a while.

When I was in elementary school, learning to duck and cover, I chanced onto some fortuitous play therapy. As part of a sixth-grade school project, I built model of a nuclear power plant. I invested it with the positive uses of nuclear energy and it was completely safe. I got high marks for this project. Another form of therapy came when I dreamed I was coming out of a movie theater. Looking up into the starry universe, I was unsettled for a moment by the appearance of cosmic tentacles in space. Other people were running, shrieking in terror, but for some reason I was not afraid and I quietly made my way home through the panic. The dream showed me that while something that seemed out of place or unusual could create a panic attack, one need not follow the crowd.

By the time I reached high school, my newly available sex hormones were keeping my mind anchored to earthly things. In 1956, I was mostly concerned about visits to the dentist, what to say to girls, and cars. From my perspective, the shift from wartime to peacetime industry (under the cloud of nuclear disaster) would be played out in the styling and horsepower race between Ford and Chevy. I would sit in the second-story classroom of Mr. Henderson’s English class—attempting to diagram sentences, make sense of dependent and independent phrases, or determine where to put commas—when a sound approaching in the distance made me, and the rest of the class turn toward the windows overlooking Atno Avenue. It was the heart-quickening sound of a red-and-black Ford Crown Victoria with glass-pack mufflers. Everyone knew the driver, whose conspicuous lateness demonstrated the lack of power the educational system held over him.

The senior jock cruised down the street looking for a parking space next to the building, where he could keep an eye on his little beauty. Chrome was everywhere: the scooped grill; the thin strips that topped the hooded headlights, ran down the fender, and circled the round, red, jet-exhaust taillights; the tiara that spanned the roof; the chrome plated extended bumper that supported Continental kit for the spare tire; and the exhaust pipe tips that stuck out from the lowered rear end. Although I appeared to be looking down at the blue notebook in front of me, in spirit I was glued to the window, my tongue hanging out looking down at that nasty Ford. Yes, I was in love again. When the jock finally parked his car and entered the school with his shades on, wearing his brushed, blue suede shoes, the girls all whispered, Don’t be cruel.

With the coming of winter, our minds turned to Christmas, but by the late spring of the new year the war-surplus searchlights were dragged out of storage again by the local car dealers. They were cracked to life about an hour after sundown. From our family’s side porch, we could see the wands of light circling the sky. They overlapped briefly, resembling dueling laser weapons of invaders from outer space, but they were neither the deadly rays of the saucer people nor even military spotlights in search of Backfire bombers bearing nuclear weapons. They were searchlights announcing Chevy’s new model and giving the global position of our local car dealers.

When I still lived in Yonkers, my class had visited the Chevy plant in Poughkeepsie to see the ’54 Bel Airs roll off the assembly line. The garish, tropical-color schemes caught my eye in a way that I can still remember, although at the time I was more enthusiastic about our visit to the Life Savers plant in New Rochelle. A certain hormonal metamorphosis had not yet occurred. By 1957, I was a different person. When the first new Chevy circled Morrisville High School that spring like a dark knight in shinning armor, I was shocked. Just when it looked like Ford had overtaken Chevy, capturing number one in sales for 1956, Ford backed off from the gaudy standards set by the Crown Victoria and produced a rather bland, unfinished-looking car. I couldn’t believe it; it looked like a mock-up. Meanwhile the Chevrolet Bel-Air, the bread and butter of General Motors’ most popular marque, hit the road with a gorgeous wide-mouthed, Cadillac-bumpered, shark-finned car. It was powered by the immortal small-block V8 engine. This engine first appeared in the ’54 Corvette at 265 cubic inches, but in this car it had been bored out to 283 cubic inches. With Ramjet fuel injection, that mill could churn out 283 horsepower. For the first time, engine capacity equaled output in a car off the dealer’s showroom floor.

I hated the new Chevy on sight. It had beaten the ’57 Ford hands down in both power and beauty. I discovered that I had unconsciously taken Ford’s side in the national automobile debate: Ford versus Chevy. That darlin’ little Crown Victoria still had me all shook up.

The sociology of car ownership among high-school boys was cut and dry. Those who had reached the pinnacle of their education—and would work in a gas station, or work their way up to assistant manager at the A&P, or take over their father’s hardware store upon graduation—eagerly took on the debt associated with new car ownership. Those peacocks had no need for the refinements of higher education or polished culture; they merely had to adopt the brash attitude that indicated good health and a certain potential for income to seduce the peahens who were just then reaching their full flush of breath-taking beauty. They’d acquired all the ’riting and ’rithmetic they needed in elementary school. High school was for those few arcane subject matters that remained: shop class, phys. ed., and driver’s ed.

The rough edges of this elemental male would wear off within the bonds of holy matrimony and the challenges of raising a clutch of children in future years. With a reasonable amount of success, the couple could expect take a trips to Vegas later in life to see the elderly Elvis or one of his imitators. If all went well, the aging peacock might score one final reward—a restored Chevy Corvette or a classic Ford T-Bird—a reminder of the good old days, proving that while there is no going back, at least they did it their way.

Those of us going on to higher education, with little visible means of support in the near term, had to make do with deferred gratification. If we got a car at all, it would be an older car, often paid for by our parents. At the age of sixteen, I became eligible to get a driver’s license, but first I had to pass the driver’s ed class. Of course, driver’s ed. didn’t actually teach us how to drive; instead, we learned the rules of the road mixed with veiled threats of punishment for failing to follow them. Almost everyone knew how to drive already.

I had learned to drive in New Hampshire two summers earlier, or so I thought. During my first winter-driving experience, I hit a patch of ice on a curve, and the car kept going straight ahead, no matter what I did with the steering wheel or brakes. In the very midst of this incident—with my mind racing at the speed of light—I became morally outraged. It was of those rare times when I had actually been driving under the speed limit. Nevertheless, there I was, smashing my father’s car into a telephone pole. As I walked home, I planned to plead nolo contendere and throw myself on my father’s mercy. While he was relieved that I was uninjured, my father was highly annoyed about the inconvenience and cost caused by his wrecked car. Ignorance of the rules or lack of experience didn’t turn out to be much of a defense.

I didn’t have my seatbelt on during this or any of the other accidents I was involved in back then; there were no seatbelts in those days. Ford did offer them, I believe, but nobody bought them. In those days, safety was synonymous with performance. We wanted suspension that was strong and flexible enough that we wouldn’t lose a wheel in a tight corner or fishtail into a ditch. We wanted enough horsepower so that we could get out of the way of trouble. Horsepower was even more important than good brakes, which is why braking technology always seemed to lag behind engine technology. Buick did introduce finned, aluminum brake drums in 1957, and NASCAR driver Fireball Roberts made the Buick Roadmaster famous, proving that at least some people noticed that efficient braking actually did count for something. Most of the racing we did as teenagers was straight-out drag racing, to see who could go faster in a straight line. Brakes were just an afterthought in these races. They occurred in a great state of tension and secrecy on the new interstate highway outside of town, which was largely empty after dark, perfect for drag racing.

Another little driving skill that I had somehow not learned in New Hampshire was how to brake and start again on a hill when driving a stick shift: that quick little toe dance on the brake, gas, and clutch pedals. My advanced lesson in this area came as I was driving the back route to high school for the first time. At one point the road went up a sharp grade to an intersection with a stop sign at the top. I had a moment of panic upon approaching the situation, a situation whose resolution was not apparent. After stopping at the stop sign, at some point I would have to engage the clutch with one foot and use the other one to depress the gas. How would I keep from rolling back down the hill while I was doing that? If Sally Rand, the famous stripper, needed an extra hand, I was one foot short.

As I came to a full stop with my foot pinned to the brake, I saw a high-school acquaintance named Bud walking down the street. I called through the window, What do I do now? Never at a loss, Bud loped across the street, opened the driver’s door, and said, Hey, Rog. Move over. In a tricky maneuver, I slid over to the passenger’s side of the car seat while Bud flopped into the driver’s seat and took control of the car. Bud then proceeded to get the car through the intersection and, as it started to roll on down the other side of the street, he jumped out, saying, All yours. Of course the driver exchange we had just completed was considerably more dangerous and complicated than the brake, clutch, gas maneuver needed to get past the stop sign. What I learned from Bud was not a sequence of moves—one, two, three; what I learned was that such a move was indeed possible, especially if you didn’t stop to think about it too much. You just had to fake it.

That was how we learned to drive in those days; we did our best to avoid learning how to drive from our fathers.

In 1956, my father bought a Dodge Coronet, a four-door sedan. The Coronet was a mid-range Chrysler product, and it marked the beginning of the Dodge hemi-engined muscle cars. The domed hemispherical head at the top of the cylinder of the Chrysler V8s created a free-breathing combustion chamber that gave a nice boost of top-end horsepower, particularly useful in high-speed racing. The ’56 Coronet offered two interesting innovations. One option was the D-500 engine, a 315-cubic-inch, overhead-valve, hemi-headed, full-race cam, twin Carter four-barrel carburetor monster mill that went from zero to sixty miles per hour in nine seconds. The D-500 designation indicated the number of cars that had to be sold before the vehicle could be raced at NASCAR.

Another Coronet option was the La Femme, a model designed to appeal to women. It came in a two-tone combination, misty orchid (lavender) and regal orchid (purple), along with several unique options for upholstery. The La Femme also had a purse that could be stowed in a special compartment behind the passenger seat. The purse was coordinated with the car’s interior and included a lipstick case, cigarette case, lighter, and change purse, designed by someone named Evans.

My father’s Coronet had the standard Red Ram V8, but he was able to relish the victories Chrysler racked up by the D-500 in stock-car racing. He was relieved that his car came in colors other than purple and lavender; he opted for a waspish two-tone, black-over-yellow combination.

An innovation found in all Chrysler cars was a push-button automatic transmission. The buttons, located on the left-hand side of the steering wheel, covertly conveyed the impression that the vehicle had somehow transcended the limitations of a machine: the levers, shafts, and gears that remained its actual mechanical imperatives. This unfortunate delusion became clarified after one rugged workout of quick-time acceleration, braking, shifting, and tight cornering. I was at a drive-in-movie with a sexy young girl who had finagled me into asking her out. As I tried to drive away after the movie, the buttons fell out of their housing, leaving us stranded among the empty popcorn boxes between two rows of remote speakers dangling silently from their stands. With a bit of fumbling and mumbling, I was able to put the buttons back in place and I used a dime to tighten the screws that held the faceplate in position. My date was impressed. This was the beginning of a growing realization that a guy who can put a car back together again appeals to the female gender at least as much as a misty- and regal-orchid color combination or even a black-over-yellow combination. Most of the new cars were the products of slap-dash engineering and had been thrown together on rapidly moving assembly lines. They benefited from having a shade-tree mechanic as their owner.

Two precipitating factors convinced my father to buy me a car: the havoc that I wreaked upon his car combined with the fact that it was considerably easier for me to get to school with a car. He decided it was the better part of wisdom to purchase a car for the teenage driver. My first car was a white, ’48 Ford, Super Deluxe convertible with fat front fenders and hood. One of the post-war Fords, it was nothing more than a warmed-over 1940s model. I loved it dearly. It had the old, flat-head V8 and running boards. You changed the stations on the AM radio using a switch on the floor next to the headlight dimmer. It had automatic windshield wipers and a heater under the dash that roasted your feet while your ears turned blue from the cold.

I became friends with a small group of fellows from Morrisville High School, including Louie Cohn and his friend Donny Schwarz. Donny wore braces and his parents didn’t buy him a car. He was a good student and eventually became an electrical engineer. He was what we would call a nerd today. When we went anywhere, we picked up Donny—unless girls were involved. In that case Donny stayed home. Louie knew how to be sociable in general and how to talk to girls; in fact, he got dates for me when we went out on double dates. Best of all, Louie played jazz trombone. He said things like I’m hip, and used words like chick, copasetic, cool, and jive. Louie often summed up our conversations by performing a jazzy paradiddle on the table with his fingers. At the end of a gig, he would say, Later! Louie had a primer gray, 48 Mercury four-door sedan with the same bathtub styling as my convertible, lowered in the rear, with skirts covering the rear-wheel wells. Cars established the group’s social-pecking order: Louie on top; me, second; car-less Donny, a distant third, but our skill as amateur mechanics went in reverse order. Donny knew more about cars than I did, and I knew more about them than Louie.

Although Louie, Donny, and I were firmly on the Ford side of the car dialectic, Donny had a friend who bought a sparkling new ’58 Chevy Impala the year after he graduated high school. In 1958, Chevrolet moved from the sharp detailing and pleasing balance of its ’57 model to a fat car that we subjected to some justifiable ridicule. In a matter of months, Donny’s friend’s was having trouble with the Chevy’s speedometer, specifically a plastic gear in the speedometer. My ’48 Ford convertible represented the end of the wooden-parts era. Only the crossbar at the front of the convertible top was made of wood. The Impala ushered in plastic-parts era. The car’s defective plastic part inspired our first philosophical discussion about the decline of civilization, as we knew it. Little did we imagine that the Impala marque would eventually become one of the best selling cars in history.

It was always summer when I drove my Ford convertible. There were spur-of-the-moment trips, for example, out to Montauk Point at the end of Long Island to eat crab, drink beer, sleep in the sand, and watch the sun rise. Or we headed west in the direction of Pennsylvania, to find such oddities as a quaint Victorian town buried in the Poconos called Jim Thorpe. We always stopped to eat cherry cheesecake at the Easton Diner at the state line. Nothing resolves issues past, present, and future more comfortably than a piece of cherry cheesecake and a cup of coffee. Once we drove down to the Jersey shore to see the ponies run. We ran right onto the beach in the moonlight so we could watch the waves roll in. When we woke up in the morning with dry eyes, we found ourselves stuck in the sand. We got off the beach by raising the car’s rear end with a scissors jack—one of the first tools I purchased especially for working on cars—and placing a piece of storm fence under each rear wheel so we could back out onto firmer footing.

We applied girls to this essential fabric of life like baubles. The girls we knew were not the highly desirable girls that gravitated to the jocks; we preyed on younger girls whose male age-mates were not driving yet. I had as much trouble relating to the girls that were my heart’s desire as ever, but discovered that I could approach less-desirable younger girls without going into complete rigor mortis. This situation created a rustic mating ritual similar to a conga line in which everyone looks at the rear end of somebody else. In short, no one was completely happy. When actual sex did occur, however, in the rear seats of our trusty personal conveyances, with slim, and naked legs kicking in the air, all cylinders hitting in nature’s secret hideaways, it was sweeter than sugar. As was the case of with seat belts, we used no condoms, diaphragms, or pills. We were completely at the mercy of the goddess of the moon.

Besides the music, the weekend dates, and midnight television (only when absolutely nothing else was happening), the maintenance, repair, and customization of the Ford kept my little mind occupied. Customization made cars our own personal rides, and the older cars that we drove were perfect for bull nosing. First, we removed the chrome trim to give the car a cleaner look. Then, we filled the holes where the trim had been attached with bondo. After the bondo set up it was sanded. The repaired area was sprayed with gray primer in anticipation of a final paint job. This last step never happened, of course; it was too expensive. It was easy enough to lower the rear end, using longer shackles to connect the frame to the leaf springs. Adding chrome tips to the exhaust pipe ends was mandatory; the kits were available at the local parts store. Trips to the store took us to areas of Morrisville that we never visited with our parents. Going to the car parts store was like walking into a candy store when I was a kid. Visions of full-moon hubcaps, fuzzy dice to hang from the mirror, replacement seat covers, floor mats filled my eyes. There were shelves full of car wax, oil, and filters. I liked the aisle where the special tools were located; their weird shapes vaguely suggested the nature of the repair they could perform.

On one occasion Louie, Donny, and I gathered on a Saturday afternoon to do a break job on the Ford. I had finished cleaning and repairing the brakes outside my house. A coffee can of gasoline I’d used for cleaning parts still sat on the driveway. Donny almost gave Louie and me a shit fit by lighting a match and throwing it into the can of gasoline. Contrary to our expectations, the match went out. Donny, who knew more about things than we did, explained that the flash point of gasoline in liquid form was too high to be ignited by a match. We relaxed and begin to clean up. I dumped the gas out on the driveway. Basking in the glow of his stunning demonstration, Donny lit another match and threw it into the great volume of gas fumes now vaporized over the driveway. A great ball of flame whooshed up. The fire was out before the fire engines arrived, but the front of our house, including the garage door and the outside of my room were nicely browned. It had to be repainted. My father was exasperated once again, but this time I could blame it on Donny.

Around this time a distant uncle, a successful plastic surgeon, came to visit, arriving at our house in a 1940 Lincoln Continental. This was the car that Edsel Ford had designed for himself to drive the boys down at the yacht club crazy. By some miracle of divine intervention, the uncle allowed me to drive it. I called the boys, and we agreed to meet at Donny’s house for the viewing. When I arrived, Louie, Donny, and Donny’s father were all there to greet me. We wandered around the liquid-black cabriolet in a state of amazement. The next shock came when I raised the hood for the boys. The Continental body had been dropped onto a Buick Roadmaster frame and running gear. We were looking at a 322 cubic-inch V-8, with a four-barrel carburetor, Dynaflow transmission, power brakes and steering! As true-blue American teenagers Donny, Louie, and I all took a silent oath to our most private gods that we would do whatever was necessary to acquire such a vehicle some day. Donny’s father observed that to own such a vehicle he would have to change his wardrobe and buy a new and much grander house, which we thought was strange. After all, cars didn’t come with contracts that required a lifestyle to match.

Back to reality.

My Ford started to lose power on hills. It lost power even though the engine sounded like it was racing. The car’s do-it-yourself repair manual identified these symptoms as due to a worn-out clutch. The clutch was slipping. I turned to the section that described clutch replacement. It didn’t seem that difficult. I could go to a gas station and get the clutch repaired for twenty-five to thirty dollars or I could buy the parts and do it myself for around five dollars. Time was not money at this point in my life, at least not very much money. It seemed like a job I could do.

Since the weather was chilly, my father allowed me to pull the car into the garage for the duration of the job. I jacked up the front of the car and put a large stump of wood under each wheel, creating enough room to slide myself under the car on a piece of cardboard. I found the universal joint behind the transmission and disconnected it. I identified the clutch and the transmission linkages that had to be disconnected. It’s a piece of cake, I though. The linkages came off easily, and I noted that things generally went back together one way only. Dirt falling into my eye was the first thing that the repair manual failed to mention.

The clutch was located inside the bell housing that was the front of the transmission. That had to be unbolted from the engine. Two of the bell-housing bolts were a challenge. It was easy enough to reach most of them, but the ones at the top were only accessible from the engine compartment above. With the car raised up a foot, however, it wasn’t so easy to get to the engine. I had to hop onto the fender to find the top bolts, which I did mostly by touch. Solving this challenge by touch rather than by sight gave me a jolt of confidence. Two bell-housing bolts on the right side did double duty. They also held the starter motor to the engine. This meant I had to remove the starter motor, even though it was otherwise not involved. This annoyed me. "Couldn’t they have thought of another way to connect the