Classic Cars With Bob Gelber

Life’s become too complicated. Just take the simple act of going to sleep at night. I don’t know about you, but our bed has eight pillows on it. My wife says that’s the latest trend. What really aggravates me is that these are not normal-sized pillows, but really large Miata-sized puffy marshmallowish things. Every night and every morning we have to stack these babies up, store them, and then re-stack them on the bed again in the morning. We almost need a guest bedroom for the pillows. Also, have any of you tried to hook up a flat screen television? The old fat TVs, which worked fine, thank you, with just two antenna cable wires in the back have now been replaced with a Starship Enterprise flat screen that needs about 10 color-coded wires just to get a picture. Sound needs more color-coded wires. Good luck.
In real car time, in the days when dinosaurs roamed the highways, all Americans drove American cars. Life was easy. You were either a GM, Ford or Chrysler buyer. Dinah Shore merrily sang, “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet” as she smacked a big kiss to the audience. On the Milton Berle show the neatly uniformed gasoline filling station men from Texaco also happily sang, “Oh we’re the men from Texaco, we work from Maine to Mexico” as they filled your tank, cleaned your windshield and checked your oil when you got gas. All for 25 cents a gallon. Today, you gotta pump your own gas and pay over four bucks a gallon for the privilege, while listening to Lady GaGa on the gas station’s loudspeaker.
In those days, most American cars had simple stick shifts. Three speed shifters, usually on the steering column. Three on the tree, as it was called. Some small trucks had four-speed floor shifters. Four on the floor. Simple stuff. It even rhymed. Most all American iron had either a six-cylinder or eight-cylinder engine. Some luxury cars , like Cadillacs and Lincolns, had 12-cylinder engines. You could actually open the hood of any car in those days and immediately see the engine and how many cylinders it had. Try doing that today.
Things got complicated when those foreign automobiles started coming into America after WWII. The names of the cars themselves were confusing. First it was simple, easy-to-remember names like MG. What can be simpler then two letters, and capitols at that? Then it became a little confusing with names like Alfa Romeo, Mercedes Benz, Ferrari and Volkswagen. The strangest new name was a funny German one called Porsche. To this day, no one really knows how to pronounce it properly. These cars were also quite different from our cars. Generally, they were kinda small with strange engines. The Volkswagen and Porsche had the motors where American cars had their trunks. Those silly Germans, no wonder they lost the war. The Ferrari and Alfa Romeos had engines made of aluminum, unheard of here in America. Also, no one here knew how to repair these foreign cars, because compared to American cars, mechanically they were certainly more different than complicated, with the exception of the bizarre air-cooled VW and Porsche and the extremely complex Ferrari V-12.
The European foreign car invasion was nothing compared to the Asian car invasion. It started small with Mr. Toyoda’s strange-sounding new car, the Toyota. Then came the little Hondas, and the Datsun whose name was soon changed to Nissan. But what’s in a name? To paraphrase Shakespeare, a Toyota or Honda or any other automotive product of any name would still smell as sweet if it were inexpensive, dependable and ran forever. At first no one in America took these unattractive Asian small cars seriously, until their stellar reputations and a gas crisis in 1973 made them a real force in the American and world automotive arena. There are so many car models in the world today with so many different names and numbers that it boggles the mind. KISS no longer applies.