Reminiscenses of early cars
Eye of the Storm
Robbis Storm

Has this ever happened to you?

It's a dark night. (It could even be a dark and stormy night) You're driving on a lonely road. You haven't seen a car in 10 or 15 minutes. Your mind is wandering just bit. You see a car in the distance and you automatically move to dim your headlights.

Suddenly it's panic time! The other car is rapidly approaching. It's getting closer and closer. And closer and closer. And the closer gets, the more you start feeling like cat on a tin roof. What's the problem? What's wrong? Why don't you just dim the lights? It's simple -- your left foot can't find the @#&% switch!

No. My guess is, this has never happened to you. You're probably not old enough. But me? Well the first car that I could call my own was a 1950 Chevrolet. There was no way the dimmer switch could have been located on the turn indicator because there was no turn indicator. Or rather -- the turn signal doubled as my left arm.

What that means is that it didn't matter how hot it was, how hard was raining, or if it was cold enough to freeze the bills off of brass bluejays -- if you wanted the other drivers to know which direction you intended to turn, you had to roll your window down, stick out your left arm, and give the appropriate hand signal.

Classics at the Classic This 1977 MGB has been owned for 15 years by Ron Phelps of Lometa. He retired from the Nashville Board of Education and is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam. Phelps, who restored the car, will be at the next Classics at the Classic Saturday at 4 p.m. at Storm's Drive-In's back parking lot. Please bring canned goods for the annual food drive. The group hopes to fill the back of a truck with items to be donated to the needy.

Straight out meant "left turn"; at a right angle turned up meant "right turn"; and a right angle turned down meant "stop." (Yes, that's right -- I said "stop." Some of those older cars didn't even have brake lights.)

And if you don't remember dimmer switches on the floorboard, then you might not know what an old-timer like me means when he says something like this, "No -- don't know where that extra gas can is. Did you look in the turtle?" Turtle? What the dickens is that? Well, to those of us who learned to drive back in the late Stone Age, the "turtle" was a synonym for the trunk.

Yes -- times have changed. How long has it been since you've seen or even heard of running boards, fender skirts, Continental kits, or steering knobs? All are more or less extinct -- gone the way of the saber toothed tiger, the Siberian ground sloth, and the common Studebaker.

Now don't get confused. I'm not complaining. Just because my left foot gets itchy once a year or so, does not mean I miss stomping around on the floorboard every time I meet another automobile.

Shoot -- I much prefer today's vehicles. For example, my first car didn't have an air conditioner. Neither did my second or third. In fact, I was 30 years old before I bought a car with AC. It was long, low, and loaded -- a 1974 Chrysler New Yorker.

To someone used to bouncing along unpaved, bumpy back roads in a beat-up VW or a creaky old pickup truck, that car was pure luxury.

Another thing my first car didn't have was an FM radio. In fact, in the early fifties, an FM wouldn't have done much good. My guess is that in 1958 - the year I started driving --you could almost count the number of FM radio stations in Texas on the fingers of one thumb.

But we did have something you can't get in a modern car. Maybe we were stuck with AM receivers. Maybe the sound was primitive and the only adjustment you could make was between "bass" or "treble." Maybe it would be years before we heard of "woofers," "tweeters," or "equalizers."

But late at night, you could take that manual tuning knob, crank it over to the right all the way to 1570, fine tune it a little bit, and you found yourself in radio paradise. You were at XERF -- the Cuidad Acuna 250,000-watt super station that broadcast the low, gravely voice of Robert Weston Smith -- better known to millions of teenagers as Wolfman Jack.

Now if you never got to hear the Wolfman, I feel sorry for you. This cat was the coolest of the cool, the hippest of the hip, and he howled, growled, and played the best rock 'n' roll on the planet. I bet I hear an agreement from many an old-timer who came of age in the late '50s or '60s.

I don't miss the old cars. I don't want to go backward in time. As I've said many times, right now is "The Good Old Days." But when you momentarily forget where the dimmer is, when you step on a nonexistent running board, when you stow the spare tire in the "turtle," when you have any of those small lapses, I guess you're taking a little trip down memory lane.

It's a trip I take every now and then.

A former Lampasan, Robbis Storm is a world traveler and restaurateur. He can be contacted via e-mail at RStorm453@aol.com.