It was the family car, and really a member of the family. It was the only “car member” of the family because most Boomer families in the 1950s and 1960s only had one car. Moms stayed home as a rule and dads drove the only car to work, or if mom had some shopping or errands to run, she dropped off dad and picked him up after work. Kids either walked or rode their bikes to school. The kids in the country rode buses.
The first new family car I can recall was a 1954 Pontiac 4-door sedan. After a considerable haggling session with the local Pontiac dealer, Daddy bought the car and paid about $1,000 for it. Our Star Chief model was “loaded”. It had automatic transmission, a radio, and a tinted front windshield. That’s it. No air conditioning, no power steering, no power brakes, no power windows, no cruise control, no seat belts, and no radial tires. It had lots of chrome, but all cars did back then. After all, what’s a new car without chrome?
I can remember the new-car smell of our Pontiac. Sometimes I would just go sit in the car and sniff. I wished that the car would smell that way forever, but it didn’t of course. Ashtrays full of cigarette butts will do that to a new-car smell. I also remember getting down low in the front seat and looking up through the tinted windshield. It was dark green at the very top, which supposedly reduced the glare from the sun. Maybe, maybe not, but it was green, not just clear glass and that was an important option.
The radio was just a plain radio. You had to turn it on and off with a dial and manually tune it. The simple radio picked up two or three stations in the daytime, but lots of stations at night. Sometimes the men in and close to the family would go out to the car and listen to the heavyweight championship fights. Rocky Marciano was the champion at that time. He beat everybody he fought. He was just 5-11 and fought at 188 pounds, but he was tough as nails and sounded even tougher on the car radio where you could literally hear the force of his gloves pounding on his opponents.
The family car was an important part of our lives. We piled four kids and two adults in every nook and cranny and took lots of trips. We drove it to church every Sunday and went to the beach at least once in the summer. We drove to Mama Ida’s house at Thanksgiving and put chains on the tires in winter and went anywhere we wanted and to heck with the ice and snow. We went to funerals and graduations, to the Dairy Queen and picnics at the lake. We drove it to see the Globetrotters and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus.
A family these days with only one car would likely be considered poverty stricken. We didn’t know what poverty was. Heck, if you had a television and a car, you were middle class. If your car had an automatic transmission, a radio and tinted windshield, well, that was something else indeed. What Boomer can ever forget the family car?
