Vital Viewing (Horseless Carriages Edition)

 

Now that the pandemic is finally (or allegedly) winding down, we may see many more of these contraptions out and about once again. As someone who had to use a car to commute to work all throughout this quasi-apocalyptic ordeal, I can tell you the number of automobiles on the road really did diminish significantly in March and April of 2020, the initial lockdown months. Not that I did, but I felt like I could drive in the wrong lane all the way to my place of employment and back without hitting another car, and  the most traffic I encountered at that time was in the lane that snakes around McDonald's. You know, the one where you have to stop, read a menu/sign, and talk into an intercom before picking up your food. It makes me wonder if this whole thing hasn't been a boon for the fast food industry. True, you weren't allowed inside, but those places do most of there business in the drive-thru, the dining room being more of an afterthought (I worked at a Mickey D's in my 20s, and the managers always referred to it as a "store" rather than a "restaurant".) Since the pandemic began, both a Burger King and a Starbucks have popped up around the corner from my home, and an Arby's is now under construction at the very end of my street. While fast food has always been a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine, and it's nice to have so many dining options so close by (it's not the most well-known burger chain in the world, but there's also a Culver's and their onion rings are to die for--especially if you already have a problem keeping your cholesterol down), I do worry that so many drive-thrus combined with the ending of the pandemic is going to increase traffic in my area exponentially, and there's going to be all kinds of cars getting in the way of my car on the trip to work. As a way of confronting my fears, I present to you these four automobile-related videos...

  Though it may have seemed that way to people living in 1901, cars don't run on magic. It's technology based on hard scientific principles that gets you to work each day. The kindly gentleman in our first video explains:

Well, did you conduct those experiments like the man asked you to?...Good, let's move on...what's that?...The fire marshal wants a word with you?...OK, now let's move--...You want to crash at my place?...No, I don't expect you sleep in a pile of ashes...So how long you want to stay?...Homeowner's insurance, I see...How would I know if those experiments violated your policy?...I don't have a sofa but if you put two easy chairs together...OK, now can we move on?...

Remember public service announcements like these? Remember Mothers Against Drunk Driving? Well, that organization still exists, and drunk driving is still a leading cause of highway-related deaths. Yet in recent years that concern has been superseded by...

 ...an entirely new fear, one that needs not involve a single drop of alcohol in the bloodstream:

My, how those suddenly-fogged up windshields took those Lexus drivers by surprise. But it should have come as no surprise to anyone who's ever driven a junker with a faulty thermostat. Been there, hit that.

 Global warming and/or the prospect of the world running out of oil has led to new calls for smaller automobiles. But just how small can you shrink a car? We can't all be Stuart Little. Maybe we don't have to. There's an enterprising dude in the Southwestern United States who's figured out how to make the compact car of the future by looking at the behemoth autos of the past:

I'd like that car. First let me clear off the top shelf in my closet.

The automobile continues to evolve. Though not necessarily fast enough for some folks. Now and then I hear people express disappointment that "the future", i.e., their adult lives, does not have the flying cars promised by the science-fiction of their childhoods (somehow airplanes and helicopters don't count.) I think the reason it hasn't happened, and probably won't happen, has less to do with technology than practicality: we live our lives on the ground. Take the mail truck, the kind that goes from mailbox to mailbox. Were one to fly, it would have to be like a dive bomber, going up and down, up and down. True, you could do like they did on The Jetsons and put an entire city up in the sky (including, paradoxically, the sidewalks), but that would take some of the novelty out of flying, don't you think? What's the thrill of soaring to great heights if you're already living those great heights in the first place? There'd be no place to go but down.

 However, there are some things about the present day-future that the producers of The Jetsons (and, for that matter, the original Star Trek) did not predict. The internet, for one. The aforementioned texting is another. And I keep reading about these driverless cars. Sounds like a great idea. Now you can drink, text, fall asleep at the wheel, have sex, and you don't have to worry because...

...the car will do the crashing into things for you.

Anyway, automobile innovation doesn't have to be as dramatic as all that. It could be something very simple, like a minor change in the dashboard, as this mainstay of the golden oldies concert circuit will soon discover:

Shows you how long I've been driving junkers. So a key's not needed to start a car anymore? Good thing it's Gary U.S. Bonds birthday today or else I wouldn't have known that.

Wheels of Fortune

Way back in 1985, I was looking for a new car. Or, rather, a new used car. I wanted a different car than the one I was already driving and that was beginning to fall apart faster than I could get it fixed. I had three criteria for the new used car I wanted. First, that it cost under $5000. Second, that it was in decent condition. Now, I'm no mechanic, so how would I recognize this decency? Well, it couldn't be too dirty under the hood, and there should be a minimum of rust. As neither guarantees against indecency, this brings us to the third criteria: the car should be no more than five years old. None of this criteria was iron clad. I could break my own contract with myself, and almost did.

It happened when I was looking through the classifieds and saw a 1977 Cadillac for sale in "good condition for only $2000." Good is certainly better than decent. True, it would be older than 1980. Three years older, but that would be at a savings of $1000 a year, or so I rationalized. What was really driving me to drive a Caddy was that at the time I was a big Bruce Springsteen fan, and "Cadillac Ranch" was my favorite song off The River album. Had the Boss sung about a Ford Pinto, I'm sure I would have wanted that. I decided to look into the ad. I called the number and found out the guy who was selling it lived in Gates Mills.

Gates Mills?

To those of you unfamiliar with Northeast Ohio, Gates Mills is a suburb of Cleveland. But it's very different from other Cleveland suburbs such as Parma, Lyndhurst, Shaker Heights, or Lakewood. Gates Mills is where all the rich Clevelanders live: the movers and shakers, CEOs, captains of industry, jet setters, high society types, and downtown parking lot owners. And now some tycoon had a $2000, instead of $5000, Cadillac waiting just for me. Maybe he was the head of some new foundation that provided used cars to needy Bruce Springsteen fans.

Getting to Gates Mills on the northeastern edge of Cuyahoga County from North Royalton on the southwestern border, where I was living at the time, wasn't all that easy. I borrowed my mother's 1979 Bonneville (I didn't trust my junker to make the trip) and took I-77 to I-something else to I-whatever until I got to Mayfield Heights and just took a regular road into the village. That's what Gates Mills is, a village. The places nearby where other rich folks live, Hunting Valley and Chagrin Falls, are villages, too, whereas Parma and Shaker Heights are considered "municipalities". The rich may want to create, develop, invest in, and control the municipalities, but they just as soon live in villages themselves.

I soon found myself on this long country road. Except unlike other long country roads, there were no corn, wheat, or barley fields. Nor were there any woods. There were just acres and acres of lawn. You know, what you mow. And mowed it was. I've seen more weeds at Disney World. It must have taken a whole fleet of Toros to keep Gates Mills free of dandelions. Every 20 yards or so I'd see a long driveway that seemingly led to nowhere, the houses were that far from the road. I would have mistaken them for side streets if not for the mailboxes in front. Finally, after a turn here and there, I came to the right address. Not that I could stop my car. In fact, I put my foot on the gas, as there was now no place to go but up.

 Not many people know this about Greater Cleveland, including many Greater Clevelanders themselves, but it's located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It's hard to see those foothills when you have machine shops, fast-food joints, tract housing, and shopping plazas in every possible spot. However, thanks to strict zoning laws, Gates Mills was free of all that, and I found myself driving up a small mountain. This little part of Cuyahoga County would have indeed looked like the Appalachians of popular imagination, if only hillbillies drove Toros.

About half-way up the summit I came to a garage, of all things. An older type garage where you had to pull the doors open rather than roll them up. I peered into a window. There was a car inside, but it was too dark to see what kind of condition it was in, or if it was even the car I had come to see. I got back into the Bonneville and continued my ascension.

I eventually came to a very big house. I hesitate to call it a mansion, simply because it had no Doric columns. In movies and TV, mansions always have Doric columns. This house didn't look anything like what the Clampetts or Blake Carrington lived in. It looked sort of looked like the house on Eight is Enough. Just imagine the house on Eight is Enough with 50 extra windows. And I only got to see it from the front. Whoever owned it had money. Now, I can't say for sure if the owner was a millionaire. At the very least, though, that person was a nine-hundred thousand and nine-hundred ninety-nineaire.

A middle-aged man as well-trimmed as his lawn and wearing a green sports shirt and white pants stepped out from behind a topiary and greeted me:

"Hello! Are you here to look at the car?"

"Um, yeah."

"Well, it's in the garage. Can we take your car down?"

So we both hopped in my mother's Bonneville, and drove half-way down the well-manicured Appalachian foothill to the garage to get a good look at the 1977 Cadillac, which, according to the owner, they didn't make like that any more. It was also as good as new, and in mint condition. I always imagined millionaires mainly reading The Wall Street Journal, but this fellow had the Trading Times down pat.

We arrived at our destination. We got out of the car, and the millionaire opened up the garage, turned on a light, and proudly let me examine the mint condition, good as new 1977 Cadillac which they didn't make like that anymore.

It had recently been painted in a god-awful light-blue, the shade you might find in a cell block. But that in itself was no big deal if it was other wise good as new. I took a close look and saw a wrinkle here, a fold there, a bubble somewhere else, along with bumps, lumps, and crumpled bits of metal all over the place. This guy had tried to hide the rust by painting over it!

I'd seen enough. I was too polite to tell him this made my own rust bucket back in North Royalton look like it had just come right off the assembly line, without even a fresh coat of cell block paint. So I drove him back to his huge, humble abode, and told him I'd think about it. I did in fact think about it, but probably not in the way he would have preferred.

Painting over the rust. Sheesh!

I had been looking for a new set of wheels for a while, so it's not like I hadn't come across this kind of thing before. If it had been some guy with unruly sideburns and an unkempt mustache wearing a checkered sports coat and striped pants at a used car lot across the street from an adult book store in a run down neighborhood who had tried to pull a stunt like that, I would have understood.

But a millionaire in Gates Mills?

He must have made all his money in junk bonds.