Researchers have learned that the body’s sense of smell is directly wired to the brain, prompting immediate reactions to familiar scents. This is why mown grass on the breeze in the fall can take us back years, decades, to a ball field we stood beside as a child on our first sports team.
While that reflex serves some survival purpose—is it prey or predator on the wind?, cars are just as wired to our human hardware. Their look, smells, sounds, and overall impression stay with us, always.
Over the years I have interviewed hundreds of people about their cars . . . why they buy as classics machines that were new in their youths. Fond memories is the common thread. As much as our pals, classmates, teachers and neighbors, the automobiles that filled our driveways and garages, hauled us to movies and skiing and bowling, beaches and dates, dances and jobs, define our impressions of the lives we have led. Surprising, the details we can pull from our minds about a hubcap or a jack or a door handle or a radio knob on a car we have not owned or seen for 20 or 30 years.
The car that defined my early youth was my mother’s 1965 Plymouth Fury II, light blue with slightly darker blue interior, bench seat, three-on-the-tree column shift and bomb-proof slant six. It would hold six youthful skiers plus parent driver in the cabin and all gear in the trunk. Its sharp lines, high roof, stacked headlights, aluminum grille, and narrow, fixed hood ornament graced our driveway from the day I went to kindergarten right up to my college years. That car was as solid, faithful, dependable as any horse or cart to haul person or cargo.
This was the car, at this time of year, that my father, brother and I would take to Wetherill’s Tree Farm to dig our own Christmas tree. My father would put on the same grey wool coat, black leather gloves with grey wool liners, tan Air Force shirt, Levi’s jeans and black leather once-dress-now-work shoes, throw a couple shovels and a saw in the back of the Fury, and we’d all head off into southeastern Pennsylvania’s rolling, wooded hills–often blanketed with snow. My brother and I would be in our matching or comparable Mighty Mac coats, the brand we wore for years off the racks at J.C. Penney’s.
Broad as a church pew the Fury’s bench-seat was, so we always sat three across. In the early days I could convince my younger brother that he should take the middle, but in later years I swapped sometimes—depending on whether we were at a stage of brotherly competition or appreciation. With the column shift, Dad’s elbow was often passing through, so it wasn’t the favored spot. Good view over the long hood, though.
Wetherill’s was about ten miles away, a short hop today but a journey when you’re 10. We’d roll up the dirt drive, tell them we were there to dig our own, and then lumber off slowly down the rows. The good trees weren’t by the paths anymore, so you drove until your tree-sense tingled.
Dad was good. There were lumberjacks in his blood generations back and he could look at the pockets of trees and divine where the good ones stood. And he was picky.
While we loved these trips, my brother and I seldom made the winning pick—and “seldom” is generous. If we were experts at anything, it was finding crooked trunks and split tops and huge bare spots that didn’t show until we had already shouted out . . . and by then, well, I guess the imperfections were a little obvious.
The Fury was integral once Dad had found the annual winner. He’d collect the car, while we stood watch (guard?), and drive it as close to our pick as he could. Then from the car’s expansive trunk–with its grey-and-black plaid liner–we take the essential tools: shovels, burlap square, twine, saw. He’d saw off the lower branches first, those unneeded and in the way of future presents, then we’d dig straight down at a roughly fixed perimeter, marking out the edge of the root ball. Removing the dirt was not the fun part, though this was Pennsylvania, not Minnesota, so the ground was not earthen concrete.
Once we had it down to a beautiful tree perched on a ball of dirt, Dad would make the final shovel thrust to cut it free and we’d lift, roll, jockey and fuss until the burlap square was beneath it all. Up came the corners, round went the twine, and the three of us would again fight gravity and branches until we had that lump of burlap and dirt over the lip of the Fury’s trunk.
It was always dark when we finished this job and the drive home a one-car victory parade. When you’re small, you notice little things like how much more of the world the Fury would show us when my father hit the metal button-pedal to kick in the high beams. We’d often call out for them—“High beams, Dad! Come on!”
The final phase of the tree trek involved a vehicle more modest, yet equally helpful: the all-metal red wagon that was our family’s wheel barrow. We’d coerce the tree up over the trunk lip again and down onto the wagon for the ride up the sidewalk. Then we’d use the movers’ trick of setting the tree on an old blanket and dragging it into the living room.
The Fury’s work was done then, yet it would see that tree again. We planted perhaps a dozen Wetherill blue spruces at 24 Atterbury Drive and they sheltered the driveway and the Fury as they grew, giving approaching neighbors an alpine view, rather than our plain white garage door. Those that remain are huge now, taller than the house, but they shelter the Plymouth no more.
In the mid-1980s, a friend with a car trailer helped us tow the old Fury to Great Valley Auto Salvage, run by our school classmates, the McDevitts. Tommy McDevitt had assembled a bitchin’ red and white ’57 Chevy from that yard years before, though cars of that vintage had disappeared when the Fury came in. The old Plymouth still ran—you can’t stop a slant six—but the brakes needed work and the car was no longer licensed.
It’s surely gone now—scrapped, but it lives in many minds, solid and willing and dependable, as clear and real and meaningful as any machine in three dimensions. I can hear it still, I can picture the big thin steering wheel and the amount of play in the shifter, the feel of engaging each gear. The squared speedometer is right before my eyes, and the long hood.
There is no folly in owning a remembered classic, no mystery. It is a part of you that you have called back from the past to share your life once more.
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