The fins, long, sleek and ending in a sharp-angled sideways “7” pointing toward the ground, defined this car. My older brother’s ’57 Chevy was a cherry red jewel posing in front of our house. It was the coolest coupe yet in those days of automobile architecture that changed each year like fall dress fashions.
It was an era that underscored Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, a socio-economic phenomenon that epitomized capitalism and the financial well-being it could produce if only Americans would just buy, baby, buy.
We did, especially cars — one a year was how it was done then.
A recent story on National Public Radio told of a longtime San Francisco dealership that had stopped selling new Chevrolets altogether and was converting to a used-car outlet. Besides describing the pain of firing 45 long-time employees, the dealership spokesman reminisced about learning to drive his first Chevrolet at the age of 12, taught by his grandfather on the dealership lot. He said that while he would no longer sell new Chevrolets, he would continue to drive them exclusively.
That sort of brand loyalty was nurtured by advertising tied to appeals to patriotism that branded not only an automobile but a lifestyle. Remember Dinah Shore’s anthem to see the USA in your Chevrolet because America’s the greatest land of all?
We were a Chevrolet family. My mother always bought her cars from a West Denver Chevrolet salesman she had dealt with for nearly two decades. My first car was a used, olive green, four-door 1951 Chevrolet that I fueled at a self-serve station where a dollar’s worth of tokens filled a glass container nearly to the four-gallon mark. I dispensed the gas into my tank and then did what Dinah implored.
Like Kerouac’s car-crazed Neal Cassady, I drove the streets of Denver, around Sloan’s Lake, up and down Colfax Avenue into Bear Creek Canyon and Evergreen, to the top of Lookout Mountain.
That California dealership’s market-driven decision is but the latest pang in a painful divorce in the century-long romance between Americans and automobiles they invented. The romance cliche is apt; novels have been penned and films produced adoring the car and the open road.
The Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar loan to the industry seems more of a last-ditch counseling effort to prolong this doomed relationship, which has been on the skids for the last three decades, than the long-term solution the carmakers desperately need.
Car consumerism has detoured into another direction. Asian and European manufacturers, encouraged by high gas prices and angst over carbon-fueled global warming, long ago steered the automobile conversation away from mag wheels and four-barrel carbs toward long warranties, controlled emissions, fuel efficiency, hybrids and voltage.
Simply, Americans stopped wanting what the American car dealers were selling. Because of their stubborn insistence on pushing the fuel-hungry, power-boasting behemoths of yore, the domestic manufacturers are experiencing the economic consequences of a passe business strategy based primarily, like the elements of a failed marriage, on looks and status.
It was a blast, in those days of my Denver driving youth, hanging dice from the rear-view mirror, dangling arms out the rolled down window that let in a summer breeze, blaring KIMN radio’s electric guitars on car speakers and gunning the engine as we shifted our four-on- the-floor down 16th Street on Friday nights. Our cars then were the centers of everything, where deals were made, hamburger-and- fries meals devoured at the Sheridan Boulevard A&W, movies watched at the West drive-in, kisses savored in parks.
The slogan then, that what is good for General Motors is good for America, is now a plea. Instead of “See the USA,” the song became: “Save the USA; Drive a Chevrolet.”
But the American public stopped buying into it, and it is questionable whether they will come back.
Steve Hallock, a University of Colorado graduate and author of “Editorial and ap: The Dwindling Marketplace of Ideas in Today’s News.” He teaches journalism at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.
