The Cars We Had…The Times We Lived

I awakened this morning believing baby boomers are quite literally the last generation that has lived America’s exciting post-war car culture. Today’s car culture isn’t like ours was in the mid-20th century. We loved automobiles for their styling and power because they had a lot of both. We revved our engines and postured proudly for all our friends.

We opened hoods and compared engines. We cruised downtown streets and watched ourselves go by in store windows – which was called “profiling” for a good look at ourselves in those days. We would wrap up our profiling – pulling into local cruising spots, revving the engine and shutting it down in a blast of underburned hydrocarbons.

If you drove a “hand-me-down” clunker, you just didn’t profile. It was bad for image. You didn’t want to be seen in the worn out family sedan or station wagon your parents loaned to you to drive. For some – non car people – it didn’t matter. They drove what we called “hackers” which were old beat-up vehicles no one wanted to be seen in and we didn’t care who sat on the hood.

A buddy of mine – Jim Shanley – brought his father’s ’69 Plymouth Fury III to Hilltop Plaza where we hung out on Friday and Saturday nights to put on a show for all of us. He did donuts all over the parking lot with this huge sedan. How Shanley never struck a light pole is beyond me. And how on earth did he dodge the police?

Today’s young bucks call it “drifting…”

I call it stupid despite being a national pastime.

I imagine Jim’s father wondered why his bias-ply rear tires were always bald. Today, a set of high-end performance tires run at least $1,000-$1,500 a pair. I see this reckless nonsense and I don’t get it. We liked fast cars in our youth, but most of us understood how expensive it was to lay down rubber. The foolishness out there today gets a lot more expensive.

When I watch how young people drive today, I have to wonder – were we this bad?

Oh sure, street racing and exhibitions of speed are nothing new. We would stage street races out on Maryland’s Route 3 or Central Avenue just south of my hometown and hope we didn’t get caught. There were certainly the fatalities and seriously injured like you see across the country today.

Not everyone survived.

In those days, we had drag strips around the area before real estate became too valuable to ignore. Many of our favorite racing haunts are gone today. Enthusiasts in New Jersey grieve the loss of Englishtown and Atco – two legendary tracks that had been around for generations. Local residents complained about the noise and politicians answered the call.

Another point is the value of real estate. As a result, we have an even larger problem problem – epidemic street racing casualties – and the masses concerned about what to do about it. Atco, as well as others in the Mid-Atlantic, had been open for more than a half-century, with most opening right after World War II. These days, enthusiasts have nowhere to race.

Drag racers between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore wonder of the fate of Capitol Drag Raceway, which opened in the early 1950s when it was way out in the middle of nowhere. Today, civilization has come to Capitol and it’s only a matter of time before it will be gone. The same can be said for other extinct drag strips around Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis.

As boomers and as car enthusiasts, we’ve enjoyed the good fortune of the post-war years, exciting and fast automobiles, and an era long to be remembered for generations to come. It leaves one wondering what the car enthusiasts following us will do when there’s nowhere to race.