LEGENDARY COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER

Car Care

One of the nicest things about modern times is the automobile. I still remember two things my father told me when I was young. The first was, “The cheapest transportation you can have is a good used car.” The second was, “Never get anything you can’t afford to maintain”. These are two things he told me that I have never forgotten.

Most people today can’t remember the days when the only options you could get were a radio and a heater. The radios in those days could only get AM. There were no FM stations. The heater was usually a device that pumped hot air into the car directly from the exhaust manifold. As far back as the introduction of the Model T by Henry Ford, cars were sold with a tool kit. With this set of rudimentary tools, a driver could fix almost anything on the car. The first real advantage accessory was the electric starter. Before the introduction of this, the car had to be started with a hand crank in the front of the car. Flat tires were common place. I heard an old-timer tell about the time he went to Snow Hill from Salisbury with his family on a Sunday and had 17 flat tires. Today a flat tire is rare. If you catch it quick enough, they can put a plug in the hole and you can keep going, usually never having to replace the tire.

When I was growing up, the limit on a car was usually 100,000 miles. Some cars today are just broke in at that mileage. The options today are endless. I still remember my father telling me that the more you have on a car, the more you have to go wrong. The simplest thing nowadays costs $100 or more. And that doesn’t include the labor.

A body shop today has to paint and “clear coat” almost the entire side of the car just to repair a small dent in one of the doors. When I was young, C. F. Tull would fix a small dent for under $10. I gave Mr. Tull lots of business.

I had a set of Dodge four-bar lancers hubcaps on my old Ford. In those days you had to carry the receipt for them because the police would stop you and ask where you got them. Stealing hubcaps was commonplace then. I had stem locks to prevent this but still found my car sitting on four flats one night when someone ripped them off with a pair of pliers.

We had to take better care of cars back in the 1960’s. A weekly wash and annual wax were commonplace. When I look back at the stupidity of spending all Saturday cleaning my car, only to go out Saturday night and end up running through some farmer’s field. But the cars in those days were built like tanks. There was very little plastic involved in it, just a lot of heavy metal. Every week I would go over the entire car with a Phillips head screwdriver and tighten everything up. This was after I had gone over the railroad tracks on Priscilla Street and really rearranged things. It seemed to work pretty well.

A tank of gas cost about $3.50 so you could ride all night and still have enough for a snack for under $5. Now that will get you a gallon of gas and around town you might get 18 miles to the gallon. Ah, those were the days.