We could name them all
April 4, 2008 (Friday) (picture of Charles)
When I was a kid about 9 years old, one of my favorite pastimes was identifying cars as they drove up and down Quitman street, past the corner of Elysian. I was living with my grandparents about half a block away on Elysian. If you are wondering what it was like to live on such a busy street (now a wide one-way thoroughfare), it was quite different then, a gravel street. We used to play baseball in the street, using old broomsticks and rocks from the road. Anyway, back to the cars driving by.
A playmate (was it Troy?) and I would get together and count the cars, identifying them by make and model. We made a game of it, to see who could identify the most cars.
Some cars had names we liked to yell, like “1941 Willys!” I don’t know why those words caught our attention, but I recall each of us really liked being the first one to yell them out.*
There weren’t very many makes and models and it was easy to think we knew them all. Most were black. A few were painted with other colors, but not many. At least that’s the way I remember it.
That was around 1941, and there were still a lot of Model A’s and some Model T’s on the road. Those were Fords, but the other car makers made cars that looked a lot like them. An old standby in many of those older cars was the “rumble seat.” Many of them were convertibles, but I don’t think they were called that. Most had canvass tops, which meant parents were continually telling the kids to climb down from the top of the car where they loved to play.
I look down the road today, and cannot identify many of the cars anymore. It would help, I think, if I spoke Japanese.
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We liked the 1941 Willys because it was so streamlined. Here’s a modern hot rod made from an old 1941 Willys.
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[[How it looked back then: (They called it the “Americar”)View image]]