Honk If You Were Ever Devoted to a Car

I asked for a chance to say a proper goodbye to our family Plymouth. The night before we traded the car in, I slept in it.

By MICHAEL MEDVED

I recently said goodbye to a car I drove and cherished for several years, repeating an experience familiar to most baby boomers. Bringing our 20-year-old son into the garage the night before taking the vehicle back to the dealer at the expiration of the lease, I unsuccessfully invoked the bittersweet nature of the moment. "Take a good look," I said. "This is the last night he's going to spend in this garage—the only home he's ever known."

My son didn't get it. "Sometimes you're really weird, you know that, Dad? I don't think your car is going to feel the pain."

Automobiles have never been as magical to today's young people as they were to that first generation after World War II. For kids like my son, it is easy to take cars for granted: Ever since he was born, his father had one and his mother had another, and teenagers in his world got their own vehicles as a matter of entitlement.

My parents, on the other hand, didn't get their first car till I was 5, and I recall their acquisition of a slightly used '53 Plymouth sedan as a very big deal. My father had just completed his Ph.D. in physics (thanks to the G.I. Bill) and had accepted his first significant job in a San Diego aerospace firm. This meant driving our family of three across the country from Philadelphia, separating a 20-something couple and their kindergartner son from the sticky web of immigrant clans back east. The car was the vehicle for adventure, a declaration of independence. We camped in national parks on the way west, taking pictures of the gray, boxy, strikingly unstylish Plymouth in one scenic location after another.

 

Even by the standards of the time, our glorious chariot counted as underpowered—with a noisy V-6 engine charitably rated at 100 horses. "Just think about it," my father proudly observed, rumbling down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, nicknamed the "Dream Highway" and completed just before the war. "If we were riding in a stage coach, like cowboy days, it would take a hundred horses galloping together to get us to go like this one car!"

The Plymouth continued as an indispensable member of the family during our new life in San Diego, with my mother dropping my dad at work in the mornings so she could use the car for errands and shopping. For me, the gray sedan still stood for outings, field trips and fun, especially after baby brothers began to arrive in 1956. Eventually there were three of them and that meant too many people—six, to be precise—for the Plymouth to handle with comfort, even before mandatory car seats. A new station wagon became inevitable, and my parents paid little attention to my pleas that they should somehow hold on to the old Plymouth.

I was 12 at the time of separation, and I remember the last night before they traded her in as inexpressibly sad. I asked for a chance to say a proper goodbye. My mom granted permission for me to sleep that night in the back seat of the Plymouth, parked on the street in front of the house.

No other parting with an automobile has ever seemed so dramatic to me, but it is always a reminder of passing time and relentless change when you dispense with a familiar vehicle. The first car I bought with my own money, a tan-colored '73 Subaru, had seemed fresh and frisky and up-to-date when I first took it home. A mere eight years later it had become an aging, nondescript clunker. In recent years, I've been switching cars more frequently because it makes sense to lease them for business purposes, so the attachment never gets especially intense.

And for my children, those connections mean virtually nothing because cars hardly count as the potent symbols of power, maturity and self-reliance they represented half a century ago. Al Gore and his acolytes equate the internal-combustion engine with climate change, overconsumption and environmental devastation, and the mayors of trendy towns like Seattle and Portland have declared war on the automobile as the enemy of civilized values. For enlightened souls of the "Millennial Generation," cars have become surprisingly uncool—riding light rail, bicycles or even buses is a healthier, more politically correct alternative.

It should come as little surprise then that conservatives—happily tuned to talk radio while they drive—remain the great defenders of the automobile. Cars appeal powerfully to one of the most important conservative values: individual freedom. Straphangers in public conveyances can only travel in groups, moving along with hordes of strangers according to schedules imposed by others. Bicyclists, free as they may be, are clearly limited by distance and time constraints. Once you get into a car, however, you go wherever you want, whenever you want, subject only to your ability to put gas in the tank.

Those who relish that sense of freedom, and make the requisite sacrifices to enjoy it, will quite naturally ride to and from work in splendid isolation. Sure, people on the right of a certain age may prove more likely to expend emotion in saying farewell to one specific car, but we will never go along with the idea of saying goodbye to the automobile.

Mr. Medved hosts a daily, nationally syndicated radio show and is the author of "The 5 Big Lies About American Business" (Crown Forum, 2009).

A version of this article appeared March 9, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Honk If You Were Ever Devoted to a Car.

            I remember riding in an old Chrysler similar in size to the Plymouth mentioned in this article.  In this case, there were three young boys and one dog on the back bench seat, and it was an ugly picture as we set out for San Francisco from Atlanta. The year was circa 1954. Of course there was no A/C, nor interstate highways,  and being young boys, there was plenty of infighting. I still don't know who disliked it more, the kids or the parents?