". . . but what kindacar is is that?”
In 1970, a friend of mine and I flew to the District of Columbia to pick to pick up his car and drive it back to Memphis, Tennessee. The car was a 1957 Chevy Bel Air and the route back took us through some of the most hilly, mountainous country I had ever seen. I grew up in central Kentucky - a land with it's fair share of knobs and curvy two-lane roads; roads consisting of a single unmarked asphalt lane that begged you to flash the high-beams to check for on-coming traffic at every curve; a place where the Interstates have grass growing between the concrete slabs. In my Kentucky, if you could survive until your 18th birthday, you were an expert driver and were qualified to drive anywhere, anytime. Indeed, while driving across the Fjord-filled Norway, I was asked how I got my 'Italian Race Car Driver' skills and found it difficult to explain how I found the roads in Norway to be fairly easy to navigate compared to the roads of my youth.
The '57 was every kid's hot rod; big tires lifting the rear end high in the air, small tires on the front barely wide enough to provide steering traction, a floor-mounted 4-speed with suicide reverse shifter, and dual glass-pacs protruding out the sides just under the door sills. The entire car was held together with bailing wire and duct tape.
Navigating the monster was a real challenge and we fought over who would get to drive most - both of us wanting to test our skills on the curves. We finally decided that we would swap out at every fill up. That seemed reasonable, since the old girl drank gallons through her dual-holly 4 barrels and we never wanted to let up on the gas pedal... until we almost ran out of gas a few times - both of us pushing that 'empty' needle a bit too far.
And so it was that we ended up on a small unmarked country lane somewhere deep in the bowls of West Virginia with a gas gauge that been on 'empty' for about an hour when we spotted a single old gravity-fed gasoline pump at the edge of the road. We pulled in and an old man and his young son came out to pump gas. They also were checking out the car - nothing unusual about that. She may have been held together with that bailing wire, but she looked good and sounded even better. We were expecting the normal "What'cha running in that thing...?" but what they asked took us both by surprise.
"Excuse me, but whut kinda new-fangled car is that?"
They weren't kidding. The latest model car they had seen in the area was a '53 Ford that one of the boys 'in the next holler' owned. Even the local gasoline delivery used an old International with a tank on the back.
I always wondered what they would have thought if we had been driving a Corvette...
