Car Culture

With gasoline currently running $4.25 a gallon locally, it is fun to turn one's memory to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when, as a dewy-eyed teenager, I could buy petrol for a quarter a gallon. Back in the day, a big hunk of Detroit iron, six-passenger sedan, got eight or nine miles a gallon, but when you could fill the car for five or six bucks? Not such a big deal.

And we all rode in Detroit iron back then. Sure, there were some funny-looking little pregnant roller skates -- German bugs, Swedish, French, and even English sport cars, but they were few and far between. Nothing Japanese or Korean on the road I can recall.

In those halcyon times, if you were solidly middle-class, you bought a new Ford or Chevy or Plymouth or DeSoto, or Buick or Olds or Pontiac -- there were a lot more choices -- kept it for a couple of years, and then traded it in on a new model.

If you've seen American Graffiti -- and if you haven't you should -- then you know what it was like in our town on a Friday or Saturday night during the summer. Everybody piled into a car and went cruising. There were drag races, spectacular crashes, and no such things as seat belts.

Yeah, you went to the drive-in or to a dance or roller skating or whatever, if you had a date, but even so, you went out cruising afterward. Hit Hoppers', then went to the submarine races ...

The seats in those steel dinosaurs were benches, front and back, like small couches, long enough to stretch out on, and if you were out with your best girl, she slid over and sat hip-to-hip with you as you drove. You had the window down, left arm draped over the door frame, and baby, you rolled ...

If you couldn't get a date, you would usually clump together with five or six other stags and cruise with whoever had the hottest car. Everybody chipped a buck each for gas, and you could ride all night long. Even at nine mpg, a twenty or twenty-two gallon tank was good for a while. It was cheap entertainment, the summer night prowls.

Round, round, get around, I get around ...

There were three Hoppers' drive-ins in town. One on Florida Boulevard, one on the Airline Highway, one on Scenic Highway. You and your five buddies would cruise through two of them in sequence several times each night. (The one on Scenic, over by the Plant, wasn't good for that, there was no drive around.)

One of the most fun games was, if you were three guys abreast in the front seat and happened to be riding shotgun -- sitting next to the passenger door -- would be to make the guy sitting next to you look gay. How you did this was, as you pulled into Hoppers', you'd say, "Shit, I dropped my cigarettes!" and you'd hunch way over, ostensibly to find them.

This would leave your buddy to your left sitting next to the driver, hip-to-hip, and from outside the car, it would appear that they were alone. Two guys alone, next to each other on the wide seat? In Louisiana, circa 1964?

We're here and we're queer ...

Of course, if your buddy realized what you were up to -- you could only pull the trick once -- he would start pounding on your back and yelling, "Sit up! Sit up, you fucker! Sit up!"

Okay, so we were easily amused back then. You had to be there. If you weren't, you missed something special, because those really were the good old days ...