Buying a car with dad

Two aspects about growing up in the 1950s and 1960s are not repeated today-- how we buy cars and mothers who do not drive (OK, city born and raised folks still excluded.)  I accompanied my father on several car buying journeys.  He was a salesman who needed a new car every two years and, since his credit was good, never had a problem buying one.  He was a Pontiac man, although for a few years in the early 1960s he flirted with Ramblers.  But he was never a top of the line buyer.  No Super Star Chief or Bonneville for him. The Star Chief, Chieftan and Catalina were good enough.

Flush with money due to the successful 1950s economy many Americans bought new cars in record numbers. Detroit, was the icon of post-WII industriousness. (Alas, unions have done in the Big 3.) The Greatest Generation, while all not flush with cash, was looking forward to better jobs and more disposable income. And they found it.

Eager to move out of the high rise housing projects built for the men of a returning army and their new families, everyone wanted to be mobile, especially if they had their eyes on living outside the narrow confines of New York City. Not everyone could afford a new car but even purchases of used cars provided the buyer with a newer car than he ever had before.

Buying a new car in the 1950s and into the 1960s was an adventure.  Unlike today's dealerships, dealers then did not keep storage lots full of cars in stock for two-day or even next-day or same day availability. They couldn't because their credit was still tight, financing floor plans as we know them today were not in existence, and cars were sold stripped of items we today would describe as "of course it has it."  In those days, your car had to be built with the "options" your dad desired, not with packages as they are today. While a buyer today might have only 3 complete packages to choose from, a new car then might have more than a dozen options to choose from.

And what were they?

1. A heater (forget about air conditioning being standard until the 1980s.
2. Whitewall tire.

Whitewall tire

 3. An AM radio with push-button settings. FM was added later on.

Push-button Radio

4. Back-up lights.
5. Chrome trim.
6. Clock (my father never bought it because they broke after a month.)

Dashboard mounted clock

7. Side view mirror, on the driver's side.
8. Automatic transmission.
9. Windshield washers (another dubious purchase because the hoses corroded and collapsed.)
10. Manually operated Day-night review mirror.  (It had a button to switch between the two settings.)
11.  Steel belted radial tires.
12.  Air-conditioning.
13.  Lap only seat belts. (A 60s innovation.)
14.  Power steering.
15.  Power brakes.

The list can still go on but I wanted to give you a small idea of then and now.  What hasn't changed, in my humble opinion, is this fact -- no matter how much research you do, no matter what sources you review and download, no matter how much you get the sales rep to bring down the price -- the dealer is still making hefty dollars on your car purchase.  No one gives cars away at a loss.

So the next time you go shopping for a car, ask the sales rep if the car comes with back-up lights.  But, be careful, he might try to charge you for them.

Time of the long distance call

"These are the days of miracle and wonder
"This is the long distance call."  Paul Simon, "The Boy in the Bubble."

Driving down the Garden State Parkway listening to this song, part of Paul Simon's Graceland album, got me thinking about the true days of miracles, wonders and long distance calls.  It was the 1960s and long distance calls were expensive and something to be avoided by any and all means.  Long distance was any call outside of the towns in your immediate exchange calling area.  Calls to different area codes, when those beauties were introduced, were a dead giveaway that the call was going to cost you more than 14 cents.

My Uncle Lou would call the out-of-town relatives, that is those who lived in Rockland County area code 914, from his company's office on Long Island in area code 516.  He was an on the road salesman but was in the showroom at least once a week, so that was the day we got the call.

My father had this early version Dymo Label Maker.  It was a hand-held little thing through which you would pass the label tape, move the dial to the sought after letter and squeeze the handle.  It looked something like this:

He wrote a label for each telephone in the house, "is this call really necessary?"  Long distance was expensive!


Back to the theme.  As a baby boomer in the 1950s, as many others I was attuned to all that was happening in space and science.  Nothing seemed impossible, the nuclear powered submarine Nautilus under the North Pole, and the exploits of the Trieste were awe inspiring. Where we lagged was in space exploration.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the talk on the block among the World War II vets was about the commies leaping ahead of the U.S.  No one knew how many failed rocket launches the Soviet's attempted before Sputnik, but every American failure was caught on film.  Depressing, to say the least.

I remember the excitement engendered by the selection in April 1959 of the country's first astronauts, a new word in the lexicon, to form the so-called the Mercury 7 astronauts.  The front page magazine photos of names soon to be known to all, Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, et al, gave us all a new sense of adventure.  All their positives were paraded on the front pages of Life and Look magazine (I remember the photo of Life.)


Yet there was a debate surrounding the launch of the first Mercury capsule piloted by Alan Shepard in 1961-- should the launch be watched by school children?  After all, what would the reaction be if the rocket blew up on launch?  Not to worry though, the launch and the re-entry minutes later was flawless.  An American hero in Alan Shepard was created over night.

With Mercury, American scientists proved they could get it right, but it also opened up a whole new field of using outer space to advantage.  And that brings us to Telstar.

It's hard to accept the fact that all of what we have today is based on one invention. I'm speaking of the transistor. Others might dispute my choice but they're free to be wrong.

Anyone who has looked into the guts of a pre-1970s radio or amplifier knows what a simple thing it looked like-electron tubes of different sizes neatly aligned in rows of sockets of different configurations. underneath were resistors and capacitors of different sizes that acted as switches. Turn on the power and the the tubes would start to glow and get warm, actually hot, to the touch. Minutes later, the radio would begin to play or the amp would power up the stereo system.

If you can imagine the first computers, they were room sized monstrosities requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of electron tubes, etc in various arrays. The transistor allowed for the miniaturization of electronic equipment and it continues today in circuit board technology.

So Telstar, developable because of the invention of the transistor, allowed for the expansion of long distance calls and the eventual lowering of costs until today we think nothing of calling cross country or around the world.

Progress is good, don't you think?


Well, that's what I have to say. Stephen M. Flatow

Bloomberg, the Second Amendment and the police

stephen flatow
NYC's Mayor (or would-be-if-I-could-Emperor) Michael Bloomberg has slipped again when he called for police to go on strike over the lack of stringent gun controls.  This was his reaction to the horrific movie theater shooting rampage in Colorado.

Mr. Bloomberg's self-appointed role as the leader of the anti-gun movement among politicians is mostly self-financed and I have no beef with that.  What I do object to is his non-stop use of his elected pulpit to spout nonsense about gun violence and gun control in the U.S.

This editorial from the New York Sun brings home the point that the mayor is operating in his own universe.

Mayor Bloomberg and Ice-T

Anyone out there sorry that Mike did away with term limits?

Well, that's what I have to say.

Stephen M. Flatow

Living kidney donors deserve our admiration

The New York Times features a story about the efforts of one man to make a difference in organ donation by establishing a registry to match donors to recipients.

Rick Ruzzamenti admits to being a tad impulsive. He traded his Catholicism for Buddhism in a revelatory flash. He married a Vietnamese woman he had only just met. And then a year ago, he decided in an instant to donate his left kidney to a stranger. alisa flatow stephen organ donation

It's a fascinating story of connections and paying forward, worth a read.

Well, that's what I think.

PS - I submitted a very short comment on the article and was pleasantly surprised to see it was the second most recommended comment.

Sticky things on my newspaper

Where'd they come from?  You know, those sticky notes that block out the headlines of my home delivered daily newspaper?
It seems readers of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Florida had the same question.

Those sticky notes that appear atop the front page get a lot of attention - and they generate reader complaints.
The 3-inch-by-3-inch squares often obscure parts of carefully crafted headlines and stories, somewhat to the chagrin of journalists who think of the front page as sacred ground.
Worse, when readers try to peel them off, the newspaper sometimes tears right through the headline.
How smart is it to allow such a thing to intrude on the normalcy of daily reading? Not very, according to some.

According to the story, the advertising works well, but the paper had to respond to complaints that the glue was too strong because it lifted text or tore the paper.

As for me, well, I just peel off those little suckers, roll them into a ball and toss them.  Maybe, instead, I should make them into a ball and use it to play catch.
Well, that's what I have to say. Stephen M. Flatow