What does a person think about
during a drive across Kansas? It depends on when you take the drive, and on
your definition of “when.” When you don’t want to, but have to because your
sister just called to tell you that your father has gotten so weak from his
cancer that he can’t take his addictive painkillers so is having withdrawals?
When you don’t have to but want to because you’re sick and tired of the
Nebraska winter and just have to see forsythia blooming and leaves starting to
push out of their sheaths? When you feel an obligation to visit relatives, just
to keep in touch, personally, just to make sure they know you’ll drive across
Kansas to see them? When Genevieve has finally died? When your only surviving
paternal relative is having her 90th birthday? Yes, on all these
occasions, something has to be thought about during the drive across Kansas,
something that will take your mind off the fact that you’ve packed yourself and
your family into America’s major public health hazard and are now zinging it across
the prairie at up to 70
miles per hour.
That “something,” it turns out,
is one’s life as remembered, memories that are presumably “true” but in fact
are shaped strongly by parents who assembled the environment in which those
memories were formed. From a father who searched for oil, I learned that
automobiles were more than mere transportation. Thus you never just went somewhere; you had to also be doing something by going there, if that
something were only—and I used the word “only” advisedly here—studying local
landscape and distant clouds. From a mother who sought comfort in books, good
books, interesting books, I either learned or inherited the need to also be thinking about something along the way.
And what is there to think about on a drive across Kansas? The answer is: many
things, ranging from Coronado’s early explorations in search of Quivira, to
what those prairies must of looked like to Native Americans before the
Spaniards brought horses again to the New World, to the post-modern devolution
of American science education symbolized by the cultural clashes over—of all
things—evolution. But in all those decades of driving across Kansas, studying
and thinking, what occupied my thoughts most of the time was the evolution of
cars.
Because of changes in automotive
technology during the time since Bernice and John bought their first one, the
historical narrative that follows is one no sixteen year old, just having
passed his or her first driving test, will ever be able to write fifty years
from now. Fifty years is just a blink, even in a human life. It has been longer
than that since a strange man grabbed my arm in the downtown Oklahoma City
Library on May 17, 1954, and shouted “They gonna make you go to school with the
niggers! Whataya think uh that!?” It has been more than fifty years since the
launching of Sputnik I, the event that ushered in the age of truly meaningful
space exploration. It has been more than fifty years since President Harry
Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his command in Korea and the
general then uttered those memorable words “Old soldiers never die, they just
fade away.” It has been more than fifty years since the Joseph McCarthy House
Un-American Activities Committee hearings, since the last undisputed American
Civil War veteran died, since the last Jew was gassed in Auschwitz II, and
since an atomic weapon was last used in war. Fifty years ago, a carburetor was
one of the most mysterious of all automotive devices; fifty years from now the
word “carburetor” will have vanished from the average American’s lexicon and
migrated over into the realm of antique automobile collector and NASCAR garage
crew and Museum of Science and Industry staff argot, if it has not done so
already.
Thus driving across Kansas for
most of the last half of the 20th Century is actually a lifetime of
research on the United States’ addiction to fossil fuels and the devices we
developed after WWII to help maintain that addiction. Any person who has lived
through post-war American cultural, economic, and political evolution, and has
spent most of that time outside one of our inner cities, has enough expertise
and experience to write the car tales found in the next few paragraphs. If what
I have to say about our family automobiles sounds familiar, indeed so much so
that you ask “what’s the point?” then your mind has become so connected to the
physical world we have produced and in which we now live—the design of our
current society—that this connection obscures the fact that when the subject is
ground transportation, family history from 1945 to 2007 also is national
history, rapidly becoming military history because of global forces over which
no human has control, namely, the burial of Mesozoic algae and the drifting of
continents, forces that delivered the American way of life into Middle Eastern
hands.
For the time being, at least
until the oil runs out, we Americans, our environment and our behavior have
merged into a single entity that includes a supply of petroleum, a service
industry, and an automobile; that “single entity” is our identity. Of those
three components—fuel, service, car—I was born into one, married into another,
and bought the third. Thus like the great majority of United States residents,
automobiles have been an integral part of our extended family relationships
ever since Karen and I had our first date in which, of course, the automobile
was a central player—a friend offered to drive some girls to Dallas if they
would buy the gas; I went with them and she was one of the girls. But this
trite assertion, which almost any American family could make, has a special
quality, not only because of the petroleum industry of which my father was a
part, but also because of Karen’s father, Glenn Oneth, who was service manager
at the Ford agency in El Reno, Oklahoma.
Obviously, after I met Karen, I
drove Fords, although my family had owned two Chevrolets—a 1948 two-door
Fleetline and a 1953 four-door, blue and white, Model 150. I learned to drive
in the Fleetline, although in a clear violation of company policy, my father
taught me the rudiments of clutch work in his company car—a 1952 4-door Ford. I
loved the Ford, tolerated the Chevy; both were, of course, standard shift.
Standard shift is no longer a necessity in a personal or family vehicle; if they
fulfill any useful role for typical Americans today, standard transmissions are
life style statements.
In 1949 we drove the 1948
Chevrolet Fleetline to California. This vacation was to visit my mother’s
sister Velva and my maternal grandmother, Myrtle Locke. Velva lived with her
second husband, Dan Baldwin, a Yugoslavian immigrant who played the horses and
won more that you’d predict based on statistical evidence alone. My grandmother
was a “practical nurse.” Nowadays, I suppose, she’d be called a caregiver; we,
or at least I, had never heard of Alzheimer’s at the time. Her husband, Edgar,
had died of pneumonia when I was a tiny baby, or maybe even before I was born;
I’m sure Myrtle was completely uneducated and unprepared for life as a widow,
so that caregiver was about the only profession open to her. But evidently
there was plenty for a “practical nurse” to do in California and I distinctly
remember believing that she was engaged in a noble profession. I have no idea
how she got to Oklahoma on her visits; it was certainly not by automobile;
perhaps it was by bus. Knowing what I know now about the Southwestern American
landscape, I hope for her sake there were plenty of rest stops.
Traveling west on U.S. Highway
66, we encountered the Mojave Desert. As we approached Arizona, cars coming out
of the desert had canvas water bags hanging on their grills. At one filling
station, we bought such a bag and hung it somehow on the front of the car; at
another station, the temperature was 120oF. The water bag seemed more
like a fashion statement than an essential emergency item to me, and
fortunately we didn’t need it. For years afterwards it hung in our Oklahoma
City garage, a reminder of the California vacation taken when my mother Bernice
was young and beautiful and healthy. For the California trip, my father also
bought an evaporative cooler that fit in the passenger’s side window, where my
mother rode. I remember fighting with my sister all the way to Los Angeles. My
mother must have been truly miserable, but when we got there, we had a great
time. I still have small books on California birds and mammals that I bought at
the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. My father, however, would never
stop at any of the roadside zoos that advertised, on large, hand-painted signs,
that they had THE BIGGEST RATTLESNAKE IN THE WORLD. On the way home, we took
the southern route and stopped by Carlsbad Caverns, another thrill. Eventually
he traded that 1948 Chevrolet for the 1953 model, which later gave way to a
1955 Ford, my favorite of all cars because it eventually became mine,
personally, my first automobile, bought with my own money from my own father in
1959. None of these cars came with seat belts.
The 1953 blue and white Chevy
felt solid and I liked the way it shifted, but the first time I drove it to El
Reno to visit the girlfriend who would eventually become my wife, her whole
family teased me unmercifully about driving a “Chiv-uh-lay.” So I never drove that car to El Reno again. Glenn
Oneth, my future father-in-law, had worked as a mechanic in small Oklahoma
towns for all his life, eventually ending up the service manager at the local
Ford agency. He never finished high school, and when Karen and I got engaged,
he seemed genuinely disappointed, and immediately started talking about his
hopes that she would finish school. “School” in this case meant college. Karen
would be the first of Glenn’s children to get a college degree, but she was two
years away from graduation, so that engagement ring must have looked like a memory
of what marriage can do to one’s educational plans.
In November of 1959, when I gave
her that ring, I was in the army at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, driving the 4-door,
green and white, 1955 Ford that I’d bought from my father for $800. I was
determined that Karen would be my wife, and I had money in my pocket—namely, my
second lieutenant’s uniform allowance—so spent it in Lawton, Oklahoma, on an
engagement ring and matching wedding band. The rings had an unusual emerald-cut
design that I though she’d like. When I drove from Ft. Sill to Norman it was in
a Ford; one did not deliver an engagement ring to Glenn Oneth’s daughter in a Chiv-uh-lay.
The seat belts in this
particular 1955 Ford were ones that I’d installed myself, and of course they
only belted around the waist, not over the shoulder, too. I consider it
enormous good fortune to have never needed them, nor any others, for that
matter, as of this writing. The seat covers were vinyl, and torn in a place or
two. I bought my first set of tires for that particular car, with my own money,
and my driving habits changed within minutes of writing the check. My own
father showed me how to replace the points and plugs, and how to adjust the
valves. I learned from experience how to replace fan belts, heater and radiator
hoses, brake shoes, a fuel pump, and a water pump. A few days after my officers
training course at Ft. Sill was completed, now at home at my parents’ house in
Oklahoma City, I got into this particular 1955 Ford for a trip to Columbus,
Georgia, and Ft. Benning, where I was to start parachute training. But the car
was not running very well, so I messed around a little bit with the carburetor,
discovering, in the process, that the housing was cracked. It soon became
obvious, however, that if I pushed the whole carburetor-air cleaner apparatus
to the left then the car would run much more smoothly. So I found a coat
hanger, attached it to the carburetor, wired it tightly to something on the
left side of the engine compartment, and started off toward Memphis.
An Army buddy, Basil Cronin,
rode with me. After we were both mustered out, Basil returned to Boston. I
wrote a letter or two, and when we each got married, our respective wives
always sent Christmas cards with the annual Christmas letter, sometimes with a
family picture, enclosed. Thus although I’ve not seen him since April, 1960,
I’ve followed him through his career as a math teacher, the birth and growth of
his children and grandchildren, and Boston politics, and he’s done the same
with us. Among the items packed for my trip to Ft. Benning was a terra cotta
sculpture of a reclining female nude that Karen had made in one of her art
classes. Because it was about the only place left for this terra cotta lady, I
put her up in the back seat window ledge. If I’d hit anything, that little
statue would have flown forward and decapitated one of us, but I kept watch on
her during the trip, thinking of my fiancé, and worrying not at all about my
1955 green and white 4-door Ford whose carburetor had been fixed with a coat
hanger for a cross-country trip. Somewhere along the way, the nude lady’s foot
got broken off, but she still had that relatively seductive look, especially in
the rear view mirror, that a 22-year old Second Lieutenant, separated from his
bride-to-be, would appreciate.
The terra cotta reclining nude
remained a part of my away-from-home life for the next 35 years. She stayed
with me through research on bird malaria and mosquitoes, commuting regularly
across half of Kansas, through another cross-country move to New Brunswick, New
Jersey, and halfway back across America to Lincoln, Nebraska. She rode along in
several subsequent Fords, watching over my shoulder, a silent back seat
non-driver. When we settled into Nebraska she became a part of my office decorations
and remained in this role through most of my academic career. She watched me
struggle through those first research projects as an untenured professor, those
first grant proposals, first graduate students, first committee assignments,
and first 300-student biology classes. As my office plants grew, she acquired
the aura of a jungle goddess, nestling among the philodendron leaves on top of
my file cabinets, watching the parade of young people through my office.
Periodically I’d glance over at her, thinking about Karen’s fingers as they’d
pressed the clay bits into the shapes that would become her arms and legs—back
in 1958.
Finally one day I took the clay
lady home and put her away high up on a shelf. Why? Times had changed. My
nation had evolved. It was no longer politically correct to have a terra cotta
nude in a university science professor’s office (= state owned building,
constructed with tax money). John Ashcroft, the United States Attorney General,
after all, had the bronze breasts of a statue covered so that he would not have
to appear on national television with a piece of hackneyed sculpture typical of
any art museum in the world. If the United States Attorney General could not
stand to be in the same room as a statue with uncovered breasts, then my
students shouldn’t be in a room with an uncovered terra cotta butt. As I put my
hand around my little lady’s waist, and retrieved her disconnected foot, I
could not help but think about the truly fundamental contrasts between art,
basic biology, and politics. Clay figurines—female nudes with exaggerated
breasts and hips—have been collected from Cro-Magnon sites. At least four
billion people must see an unclothed member of the opposite sex every day,
sometimes several times a day. Certainly the amount of damage done to society
by an artistic rendition of a nude must be relatively immeasurable, especially
compared to the damage done by men fighting with real weapons.
But global cultural forces had
come home to Middle America via information age technology. A few blocks down
the street from my office, horror, war, sex, and violence—much of its realism
computer-generated—fill the screens of 13 movie theaters. My cable channel, and
indeed my network channel, offerings contain a more than ample supply of gunfire
and story lines built around infidelity, thievery, murder, child abuse, war,
and narcotics. But at some point, because of something that was simply in the
air, sort of like greenhouse gas emissions, I took my terra cotta jungle
goddess home and put her on a shelf in my basement office. The United State’s
attorney general at the time would have been proud. He was embarrassed by
bronze breasts; no telling what kind of a reaction he would have to a naked
lady hiding beneath the philodendron on my file cabinet; who knows when a coed
might accidentally see that thing on a Friday when she and her boyfriend were
headed to the downtown movie megaplex later that evening to take in Bruce
Willis and Die Hard 4.
If the nation’s Attorney General
was embarrassed by some bronze breasts, I was even more embarrassed by his
inability to talk about Hellenistic sculpture in a casual way that might be of
minor educational value to a national audience if asked about his sculpture
companion, but I was determined to not be reprimanded because of a small piece
of art with enormous personal significance. There was only a miniscule chance
this reprimand would happen, of course, but the cultural evolution indicator is
the fact that I was concerned enough to actively avoid the possibility. I even
envisioned a Bill O’Reilly piece about obscenity in tax-supported professor
offices using my sculpture as Exhibit #1. I imagined myself bemoaning the fact
that her leg was broken instead of responding to questions about her posture
and non-existent clothing.
The literary journey from a
10,000 year old Cro-Magnon fertility idol to an imagined propriety violation in
Nebraska may seem greater than one from the Big Bang to SuperBowl XLI, but it’s
no further, in my mind, than either the changes in automotive technology since
WWII—a measure of our determination to burn oil in order to move—or the
cultural distance between populations presently occupying various geographical
regions of Earth—populations in possession of oil that other populations seem hell
bent on burning. At the same time as culture warrior John Ashcroft stood
demanding that a bronze breast be clothed, there were places on Earth where, by
virtue of religious tradition turned into national law, girls were not allowed
to go to school, work outside the home, or drive a car. These two places might
represent the extreme points of a fossil fuel compass—the major consumers and
the major suppliers—but were she alive, Bernice Locke would lay down her book
of English literature and pass immediate, scathing, judgment on both cultures.
Among her toxic prescriptions would be a volume of Shakespeare; she’d probably
pick it up and turn to a page, reading out loud some passage about the
arrogance of power and the ability of men to demonize not only women, but also
one another.
It doesn’t take an avant guard
artist to take information from the last few paragraphs and produce a picture
made of oil, religion, and sex, categorized respectively as birthright, law,
and evil. Nor does it take much effort to ask interesting questions about our
current global socio-economic interactions, questions such as “What would the
world be like today if the internal combustion engine had never been invented?”
or “Was the invention of such an engine inevitable, given the development of
metallurgy and the discovery that petroleum would actually burn?” And finally
we could ask: “What would the land of Oklahoma be like had engines and oil not
been a part of the human experience?” Would Oklahoma have been, in historian
Angie Debo’s words, a place where “. . . all the American traits have been
intensified.”? And would Debo have been able to claim that “The one who can
interpret Oklahoma can grasp the meaning of America in the modern world.” I
believe the answer to these last two questions is “no.”
Since that weekend when we drove
to El Reno with an engagement ring on Karen’s finger, we have had a long
relationship with Ford Motor Company, and our family ties have been maintained
as much as anything by driving across Kansas for three and a half decades in
various Ford and Mercury vehicles. Why do I feel that our cars should be
included in a narrative that is ostensibly about my parents but is actually a
portrait of my evolving nation? Because some people will read this book, I hope,
and see their own story of how various automobiles have controlled their lives,
while at the same time giving them unparalleled freedom, for a short period in
human history. And if the scientists are correct, children born in Nebraska in
2010 will live to see the end of petroleum as a factor in human lives, although
just prior to that end, these same scientists might predict that petroleum
would be the factor shaping the human
experience.
Paleontologists tell us that
there have been easily recognizable human beings, probably doing things we
would consider extremely common and, well, human,
for at least 250,000 years, and surprisingly, thus hauntingly, human-like
species for several million years before that. We know that for at least 50,000
years humans have been producing spectacular art that stands the test of time,
which in itself is a litmus test for being human. But we’ve only had cars for
about a hundred years, and if the pundits are correct, petroleum to allow this
luxury may last for another hundred years at the most. So unless Detroit, or
Tokyo, or some other fair industrial city, learns how to produce cars that can
run on seawater, the rather stunning mobility of modern humanity will come to a
grinding halt. Instead of rolling blackouts, we’ll have rolling stay-at-homes.
In another 50,000 years, paleontologists will be studying the plastic
dashboards and door panels they’ve dug up from the rubble that used to be New
York City and wondering what in the hell humans actually did with them. Thus
the record of what this contemporary 0.004 fraction of human history was like
needs to be as rich as it can be made, because when it’s over, we’ll be back to
horses and our own two feet.
There is one other reason why
I’m telling this story, however, and that is because it documents one family’s
interaction with an extraordinarily expensive, highly dangerous, pervasive, and
rapidly evolving technology that has finally become institutionalized. By
“institutionalized” I mean that today almost nobody works on his or her own
cars. The vast majority of people who own and use automotive products daily
have become extremely dependent not only on the vehicles themselves, but also
on the service industry. We don’t do our own tune-ups now any more than we do
our own appendectomies. Furthermore, unlike the case fifty years ago, even a
reasonably well educated person today has virtually no way to correctly
diagnose what’s wrong with his or her vehicle, unless, of course, it’s
something blatantly obvious like a flat tire. Only the computer “knows,” or at
least can find out—so we believe, what’s really happening under the hood. And
only a complete idiot would work on a modern vehicle without specialized
training, itself a career move.
But this extreme dependence on a
defining body of technology was not always the case. The pejorative term “shade
tree mechanic” is a familiar one to older folks, but it’s now passing from our
lexicon. For me, the hands-on part of this story of techno-human evolution
ended in 1998. That’s when I bought a 1997 Dodge Dakota pickup truck, the first
automotive product I’ve owned that I simply did not, because I could not, work
on. Its immediate predecessor, a 1993 Dodge Dakota pickup, was my first
rebellion against Ford Motor Company and I worked on it. Before I bought it, in
the small western Nebraska town of Ogallala, I called Karen’s brother Eddie,
who builds cars from the frame up, and asked him for advice. He told me that
police departments often bought Dodges and drove them 200,000 miles without
much trouble.
When I stopped at service
station for $5 worth of gas for the 1993 Dakota before taking it out on the
interstate for a requisite 100MPH test, the guy who took my money asked if I
was actually thinking about buying it. When I answered “yes; my brother-in-law
says the cops drive them 200,000 miles” he simply shook his head. I asked him
why and he said “because it’s a Dodge.” After my 1993 Dakota had 130,000 miles on it,
I vowed to buy another one just like it, and did, except the newer one was
white instead of blue and gray. Both of these pickups are, or were, in Karen’s
words, “that damned Dodge.” Thus she preserves the essence of her father in our
daily lives, using my truck, even as we both pass into the new automobile age
together, she with her new white Sable and me with my damned Dodge, neither of
which is amenable to self-repair or owner maintenance beyond replenishment of
windshield washer fluid and the airing of tires.
Anyone who has lived through
most of post-war American history, coming of age in the 1950s, and finding
reasonable employment, could write this tale of gasoline prices, home and
highway repair jobs, and fond memories. Among the same Americans, at least two
million of us, since 1950, could also write stories of tragedy, incredible sadness,
and loss, all stemming from our interactions with the automobile. I encourage
all of you who may be reading this book, and are over sixty, to put it down,
fire up your laptop, and start your own memoir in which the motor car is a
central player. Then send your long letter off to your children, and donate
copies to the archives department of your local library. A hundred years is not
very long. Most of us senior citizens know people who are in their nineties.
But a hundred years from now, the nation’s supply of narratives about our
personal interactions with a vanishing technology will be extraordinarily
valuable.
This chapter of Bernice and John may not be particularly
exciting—no tales of violence, unrequited love, crime, deception, and
duplicity, i.e., the daily prime time television fare. It is, however, a unique
slice of human, American, and Oklahoma history that will never again be
repeated, and will be gone from the human experience by the time our great
grandchildren get to retirement age. And if you were born into one industry,
committed to the finding of petroleum, and married into another industry, this
one committed to burning petroleum, then our collective stories of post-war,
and sometimes pre-war, travel around the country in personal vehicles will
comprise a database of stunning uniqueness. Unlike art, which springs from deep
within a human soul or mind, and can be dabbed on a Spanish cave wall or
splattered on a canvas on the floor, thus repeatedly generated as long as
humans live, the oil will be used up; gone; forever. The oil will be gone; forever and forever, at least as human measure
“forever.”
And if you are lucky, your great
grandchildren will not be living when it happens. But don’t bet the farm.
BERNICE AND JOHN is available as an e-book on all readers.
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