Published: February 13, 2010 10:08 pm      

Town Crier: American ride

In the 1970s there was a brown van that came to the neighborhood about once a week or so. It never stopped at our house, just our neighbors. The truck had “Charles Chips” written on the side and they would deliver potato chips, pretzels, cookies and other snacks right to your house. (your house, not mine) The snacks came in these cool tin cans like the cans you get popcorn in at Christmas. The chips were really good and actually won blind taste tests across the country.

My mom wasn’t about to pay extra for home delivery of something we could pick up cheaper at the Green Spot ourselves. The truck, the chips, the can and the fact that the neighbors got them but we didn’t, made them that much more exotic, rare and desirable. When I would go visit the neighbors I would often notice the can in the kitchen and wait to see if I would be offered any. Occasionally, if the grownups were out of the room, I’d ask my friend if I could have some. Sure, they’d say nonchalantly, because they had them all the time. Just my luck, more times than not I’d open the lid and the can would be empty! At the end of the day, they were after all, just potato chips. But, they were potato chips we didn’t have.



Magic memories

There was a certain automobile that held the same allure for me. Our family never had one. Several of my friends’ families did. You don’t see them so much anymore as they’ve been transformed over the years by Detroit, Japan and the needs of the American family. To me they were low, long and sleek, kind of like a space shuttle. They had room, could be changed around inside and the back seemed to me like a rumpus room on wheels. I’m talking of course about the American station wagon. The old ones, where that wonderful back seat faced the rear of the vehicle, could be folded down to create a small room for hauling kids or groceries , and was WAY at the back end of the car away from grownups’ comments, corrections or lectures. When I was 10 or 12, you could have your port hole T-bird or your Cadillac Eldorado. My dream car was a big Buick station wagon! Ah, the rare times I got to ride with my friends that had one still bring back magic memories.



The mobile playroom

Station wagons meant fun. The aforementioned rear-facing seat allowed you to sit there and look out the back at the following traffic and make wisecracks and monkey faces at the people following. Or, if there were four or more of you piled back there, it was like a rolling wrestling match just like we watched live on Saturday nights out of Chattanooga. And we were far enough away from the front-seat adults to be able to teach each other whatever new rude noises we had learned to make that week at school.

In the summer, the back window on some models would roll down and it was like being the tail gunner on a B-17. In retrospect, I realize now that the way the air currents flow around a moving automobile means we probably sucked down enough carbon monoxide fumes from the leaded gasoline coming out of the tailpipe in the backdraft created by that open window that perhaps the lack of oxygen contributed to some of the giddiness I felt in the station wagon. I’d hate to think that some of the affection I feel for those cars are based on some type of residual substance addiction.



Station wagons meant adventure

Usually if I was riding in one, I was on my way to a birthday party, a sleepover or maybe a camping trip. Friends would be piled in and I can’t remember a single time I had to ride in a station wagon to go to school. Think about your pet dog or cat that only rides in your car once a year. And where are you taking them? To the vet to get a shot, be around strange animals and animal smells, and maybe even have to spend the night in a cage. No wonder dogs chase cars! But my experience with station wagons was just the opposite, I was always going somewhere fun with pals I liked.�

But station wagons, because of the transport room in the back, also got called on to make special missions. My friend’s mom drove one and back in the 1970s when Dalton High put on the musical play “Oliver.” There was a scene in it that needed an old, wooden 1800s-style coffin. After the play was over she was asked to return it. They slid it in the back, but couldn’t close the back door because it was too long. With the casket secured in back, albeit sticking out, she headed out. Talk about adventure. She managed to turn at a traffic light, not noticing that she had pulled into a long line of cars with their headlights on. Yep. She was driving along in a funeral procession with coffin hanging out the back. She didn’t realize it for a while but was wondering why she and the cars around her were making such good time in all that stopped traffic. And the onlookers had to wonder if the dearly departed was a pauper or did they just have a bunch of cheap kids not wanting to spend any of the inheritance on a silly thing like caskets and hearses. Maybe even it was a do-it-yourself funeral. I’m sure plenty of folks checked the obits in the paper that night to see who the “poor” soul was.

My dad didn’t need a station wagon for a lot of kids, for golf clubs with his buddies or for my mom to drive around town and do lots of errands. My dad liked fishing. So he got a large vehicle that got way up in the mountains to the trout streams without any trouble. He drove home with an early ‘70s Suburban. It had high wheel clearance, three rows of seats with plenty of room still in the back and a rack on the roof. Suburbans are all over the place now and live up to their name, but back then I had only seen them at highway construction sites being driven by road crews. When he pulled in the driveway with it, I didn’t know civilians could even own one. �



My first station wagon

Then, in the early 80s and just out of college, I went with some friends to work the winter at a ski resort in Colorado. When I told people here they would ask, “are you going to be on the ski patrol?” NO! I’m from Georgia, I’ve skied three times at Gatlinburg. I’m going to cook french fries at a restaurant like SpongeBob. Anyway, at the end of the ski season there, as the spring thaw was starting, my buddy and I were trying to figure out how to get back home. Neither one of us had a vehicle and we just bummed rides while we were there or rode the bus the resort supplied for the workers. One of our bosses heard us talking and told us he had a car he would sell us. For $400. It was a Buick station wagon. My mouth watered like the melting glaciers on the mountain tops of the Rockies. At last. My very own station wagon!

I pooled my $200 and my pal pooled his $200 and off we went. It was brown with faux woody style stick’um applications on the side. It was big. It guzzled gas. The back seat that faced out the back was stuck shut with rust and the compartment it folded into was full of water from the leaky back window. But I was driving a station wagon!

A 3,000-mile circuitous route across country, stopping in to stay overnight and mooch free meals from relatives in Kansas and Nebraska, and having to drive continuously with only one unshaven buddy that you just spent all winter holed up with in a snow-buried mobile home we rented for cheap, was not the carefree 12-year-old’s trip to a birthday party that was my station wagon fantasy. It was a long, grueling, dipstick-checking, 30W-oil buying, interstate marathon. There we were in the flattest, loneliest, most cop-absent interstate sections in America and we couldn’t get her to go over 82 mph.

After two weeks driving with the windows down (no a/c) and listening to the spring melt water slosh around back there in the fold-down seat compartment, I was about done with station wagons. The final straw came when we were driving across Missouri on a fine warm day in spring and we realized the mosquito larvae in back were hatching. If you and newborn bloodsucking baby mosquitos are sharing a station wagon, believe me, there is no place to hide. Roll the windows up and they swarm you. Roll the windows down and the breeze they have to fly against just makes them stronger and hungrier when they get to you. And roll the back window down and the aforementioned wind currents blow them effortlessly to the front and your awaiting neck.

When we pulled in to Dalton I tossed the keys to my buddy and gave him orders to sell that swamp on wheels. He took it and every week or so would ask me for another injection of funds to get it into sellable shape; $25 for spark plugs, $40 for a new battery, $38 for a new spare tire. I finally told him all we needed to get it into shape to sell it and get our money back was a hammer and nail so we could punch a hole in the back floorboard and drain the water out. He finally gave it away to somebody for parts and I never saw a dollar from it.

Oh, well. They say the best things in life are free. Maybe the truth is, the best things in life are somebody else’s.



Mark Hanna, a Dalton native, works in film and video production.