The cars I've loved and lost
This essay is long enough to choke your email, so it’s a good idea to read it directly on Substack. -JS
‘Nowadays you can’t be too sentimental
your best bet’s a true baby-blue Continental’
-Billy Joel
Holly and I were standing in front of Walmart waiting for a car to pass so we could cross to the parking lot.
What a car. The best car. The platonically perfect car. A shiny, waxed, polished, forest green 1971 VW bug with whitewall tires and chrome platter-style hubcaps. It passed by making that beautiful metal-glass tinkling chirp in the twin tail pipes.
“That is the world’s most perfect car,” I told Holly, musing about the one just like it Jennifer’s mom used to drive us to school in when I lived in Southern California. “The world was a much prettier, happier place to look at when I was that age.”
The world was much more aesthetically pleasing in almost every way. Our built world in the 21st century is gray, white, silver, and black. Young homeowners paint their interior rooms in the flattest gray possible, and call that “freshening” the look. That look is Millennial Mortuary. We’re living in the modern world’s version of the aesthetic and cultural malaise of the 1970s that made everything terminally brown and fuzzy, frayed looking.
The cars have a lot to do with it. Nearly every model on the market today is hideously ugly, if you can even distinguish a Nissan from a Chevrolet. They’re all bloated jelly beans that look like they’re popping out of a panty girdle, or they’re—I cannot believe this is taken seriously, it’s absurd—”luxury trucks” that we call SUVs.
Because everything that’s even a tiny bit old is Bad and Doing Harm in 2025, we’re not even allowed to call a station wagon a station wagon. A 35-year-old man will correct you and tell you that it is a “cross-over.” That means it’s on its way to being an SUV, which is the only Acceptable Kind of Vehicle To Love for about the past 20 years. The non-station-wagon is partially absolved of being boomer-lol because at least it aspires to be another Chevy Suburban clone weighing two tons and standing as tall as a commercial tractor.
Not so when I was young. Now, it’s true that cars have always followed the design trends of their peers over the years. When Virgil Exner came out with Chrysler’s “forward look” cars, suddenly all American cars were forward look for the next few years.
The bulbous, feminine curves of 1950s sedans were replaced with sleek slabs in the 1960s aiming to look like rocket ships or airplane fuselages.
And so on throughout the decades. But it was still possible to identify a car’s make and model from a block away. They had similar styling themes, but distinct personalities. Cadillac always had fins or the suggestion of them. Buicks had portholes on the side. Oldsmobiles often had vertical cathedral-style tail lights.
Go into a parking lot today and try to find your own car. I’ve gotten into several Subaru wagons and Toyotas that did not belong to me, and the same can be said for almost anyone with a car built after 2000.
Do little boys fall in love with cars anymore? If they do, how do they do it with stuff like this?
When I was a little boy I gave my heart to cars when I got my copy of Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. That links to the 50th anniversary edition; I had the original published the year I was born, 1974. Parents, run and buy this book for your young kids. It’s magic.
Cars are easy to love compared to people. As Juice Newton said, love’s been a little bit hard on me, but cars have never failed me in the romance department.
And they were especially easy to love as a kid in the late 70s and early 80s when you lived in Southern California. The snow and salt-free climate meant that cars that limped into the junk yard after 10 years in upstate New York were still tooling around your neighborhood 30 years later. The streets around me were filled with late 50s Chryslers, Buicks from the 60s, VWs of all sorts in candy colors, and barges from the the 1970s, the last gasp of the American Land Yacht.
I loved every one of them for something. As steam locomotives seem to be alive compared to modern diesels, the cars of my childhood had distinct personalities. Quirks good and bad made them fascinating.
Take a ride with me to the past. Some of these cars were my parents’, some of them belonged to grownups on our block, and some of them were mine. I loved all of them and wish they had real graves I could put flowers on.
Most of these pictures are sourced from someone else, but each of them represents the make, model, year, and color of the cars I’m talking about. A few of these photos are my own, where indicated.
1967 VW Type I (“bug” or “beetle”)
“Goddamn whore,” my stepfather cussed on his knees in the gravel behind the car. “Son of a BITCH!”
Rrr-rrr-rrr-rrrr-rrrr. Click. Rrrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr.
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