Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars
America was made manifest by its cars. From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the open roads of Route 66 and Jack Kerouac, America's history is a vehicular history—an idea brought brilliantly to life in this major work by the acclaimed author of Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster.One of the nation's most eloquent and impassioned car nuts, Paul Ingrassia offers a wondrous epic in fifteen automobiles, including the VW Beetle, the Chevy Corvair, Robert McNamara and Lee Iacocca's Mustang, the Pontiac GTO, Honda's Accord, the BMW 3 Series, and the Jeep, among others. Through them, the author shows us much more than the car's ability to exhibit the particularly American tension between the lure of freedom and the obligations of utility; he takes us through the rise of American manufacturing, the suburbanization of the country, the birth of the Hippy and the Yuppy, the emancipation of women, and so much more, including the car's unintended consequences: trial lawyers, energy crises, and pollution. Narrative history of the highest caliber, Engines of Change is an entirely edifying new way to look at the American story.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Formerly the Detroit bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, Paul Ingrassia is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a former executive of Dow Jones.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Engines of Change INTRODUCTION
In the 1990s Chrysler executives used to joke that they could tell a Jeep driver from a minivan driver just by looking at his or her watch. Timex watches were for practical people, those utterly unconcerned about putting up appearances and thus unworried about driving a mommy-mobile. Even if they were mommies.
But Rolexes signaled people whose self-image couldn’t cope with a minivan and who wanted to flaunt their rugged, outdoor lifestyle. Even if ruggedness only meant hitting potholes en route to the mall in their Jeep Grand Cherokee Orvis Edition. With a skinny Venti Latte in the cup holder, of course.
For decades, the connection between cars and self-image has been understood and appreciated by prominent philosophers. Consider the Beach Boys. Their song “Fun, Fun, Fun” (1964) wasn’t so much about the Ford Thunderbird as about the free-spirited teenaged girl who drove one.
Other songs celebrated drivers whose personas defied the stereotypes of their cars. “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” (Jan & Dean, 1964) was about a granny who flew around the freeways in a “brand new shiny red Super Stock Dodge.” In researching this book I learned about a real-life grandmother who terrorized other drivers just like the one in the song, except that she drove a Mustang. She lived in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, which probably explains why she didn’t wind up in a song. “The Little Old Lady from Oconomowoc” would have left a whole generation of Americans tongue-tied.
A handful of cars in American history, however, rose above merely defining the people who drove them. Instead, like some movies (e.g., The Big Chill) and some books (The Catcher in the Rye, etc.), they defined large swaths of American culture, helped to shape their era, and uniquely reflected the spirit of their age. These cars, and the cultural trends that they helped define, are the subject of this book.
The underlying premise here is that modern American culture is basically a big tug-of-war. It’s a yin-versus-yang contest between the practical and the pretentious, the frugal versus the flamboyant, haute cuisine versus hot wings, uptown versus downtown, big-is-better versus small-is-beautiful, and Saturday night versus Sunday morning. The elemental conflict between these two sets of values is amply evident in the contrast between the first two cars in the book, the Ford Model T and the General Motors LaSalle. The inexpensive Model T was the pinnacle of practicality, the first people’s car.
It didn’t have much style. But during its remarkable twenty-year run, from 1908 to 1927, the Model T gave farm families unprecedented mobility and a taste of the city lights. Even if they were only the lights of Muncie.
The LaSalle, in contrast, was the first mass-market designer car, an early yuppie-mobile that was intended for getting attention as well as for getting around. It debuted in 1927, the very year that the Model T died. The two cars were perfect bookends. They’re the only pre–World War II cars in this book, because American cultural evolution hit a roadblock in the 1930s and 1940s.
Those decades, of course, were dominated by Depression and war. Production of civilian cars was suspended during World War II, and Detroit’s factories were converted to produce planes and tanks. American cultural upheaval, at least overtly, took a time-out, too. During the Thirties and Forties Americans were mostly focused on finding food and work, and on staying alive.
But twenty-five straight years of virtually nonstop Depression and war came to an end with the armistice in Korea in 1953. By then Americans were ready to let loose, which made the timing perfect for the Chevrolet Corvette, the first modern American sports car. The pivotal figure in Corvette history was a Chevrolet engineer who had been raised as a Bolshevik boy in Russia before coming to America and winding up at General Motors.
The defining design statement of postwar America’s sky’s-the-limit ethos was tail fins. Chrysler actually sold them as safety devices, and the company’s top designer was honored by the Harvard Business School (really). Chrysler almost won Detroit’s great tail fin war, but General Motors struck back in 1959 with Cadillacs that had the biggest tail fins ever.
The man who designed them, Chuck Jordan, died in late 2010, at age eighty-three. I was fortunate to have interviewed him before he passed away. Nearly half a century on, Jordan told the tale of the fins with relish.
Corvettes and tail fins were all about pretension, but an import from Germany, America’s erstwhile wartime enemy, pulled the pendulum back toward practicality. The little Volkswagen Beetle, which was the ultimate anti-Cadillac, debuted in the 1930s as Adolf Hitler’s “people’s car.” Decades later it became the unofficial car of American hippies, completing an automotive and cultural journey of epic sweep.
Volkswagen marketed the Beetle with clever, self-deprecating advertising. One ad told how a farm couple in the Ozarks, living in a log cabin, bought a Beetle to replace their dearly departed mule.
GM’s belated response to the Beetle was the practical but problematic Chevrolet Corvair, launched in late 1959, which fared less well. It inspired an unknown young lawyer named Ralph Nader to write a book called Unsafe at Any Speed.
The Corvair’s lasting legacy has been America’s greatest growth industry: lawsuits. The car sentenced millions of Americans to watch personal-injury television commercials from law firms, unless they’re really quick with the remote control button.
Every vehicle in this book represents either practicality or pretension, although a couple of them straddle the great divide. Pickup trucks started out as down-and-dirty work tools until Detroit discovered it could make billions by selling lavish designer trucks. The seats on some of them have more leather than most cows.
For many people, especially those under thirty-five, cars aren’t nearly as important as iPads, iPods, cell phones, apps, personal computers, and BlackBerries. The modern fascination with electronic devices might make the idea of writing about the social significance of the Ford Mustang seem quaint, a relic of an era when “laptop” wasn’t a high-tech term.
But cars continue to provide unique personal freedom and mobility. They spawn powerful emotions, experiences, and memories, of family road trips, one’s first car, or one’s first sexual adventure.
Hardly anyone keeps the purchase papers for their first computer, or gives the device a name. But some Americans do both for their first cars. The Beach Boys sang a song about a drag race called “Shut Down,” but nobody has yet recorded one called “Download.”
This book reflects my fascination with cars and car culture, which grew slowly, over many decades. As a boy in 1950s Laurel, Mississippi (where our family was known as the EYE-talians), I learned about the early explorers through our cars: Hudsons and DeSotos. It took me years to realize that not all cars were station wagons.
In 1960, when I was ten, we moved to suburban Chicago and became a two-car family for the first time, just like millions of other Americans. Our station-wagon treks to visit my two grandmothers back East created a family tradition: the annual breakdown on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I cherish the memories . . . sort of.
I wasn’t a hot-rodder in high school. In fact, I wasn’t a hot anything. But automobiles were taking on important dimensions in my adolescent psyche.
In 1964, the year that the Mustang and the Pontiac GTO debuted, I found myself in Mr. McGowan’s freshman math class at St. Francis High School in Wheaton, Illinois. I hated math, but Mr. McGowan, bless him, gave us boys an occasional break from dreary decimals and unfathomable fractions to talk about cars.
We discussed whether Pontiac or Chevy had the better lines that year (it was Pontiac, as I recall), and whether anybody’s dad had bought a Mustang V8 (yes, but not my dad). Alas, I learned to drive on Dad’s pedestrian six-cylinder Chevy Bel Air with a three-speed stick shift on the steering column, the proverbial “three on the tree.”
I didn’t buy my first car until college at the University of Illinois. It was a 1969 Chevy Nova with an anemic six-cylinder engine that made passing on the two-lane roads around Champaign a death-defying adventure. That Nova cost around $2,200, about the price of a new fender today.
The hot car in college, a ’69 Pontiac GTO, belonged to my friend Dale Sachtleben. Once we took it on a road trip out East and Dale got a speeding ticket in Delaware for going ninety miles an hour, which was his slowest speed of the entire trip.
More than thirty years later, when Pontiac launched an updated version of the long-dead GTO, I reconnected with Dale for a nostalgia-trip test-drive in the new model. He had gray hair, I was a cancer survivor, and we were both (gulp) Republicans.
We drove the new GTO to tiny Greenview, Illinois, his hometown just north of Springfield, best described as sitting at the corner of corn and soybeans. There we raced up and down the little farm road that once served as the local drag strip, and for a while we were kids again. Cars can do that.
My first job out of college was in 1973 in Decatur, Illinois, where our next-door neighbors, the Whitneys, owned a 1960 Thunderbird. By then Ford had added a backseat to the ’Bird, which had been a taut two-seater when it debuted in 1955, but the low-slung, boulevard-cruiser styling remained. The Whitneys’ son Clay, then a boy and now a business owner, still keeps the classic car today.
The first car in this book that I owned was way more pedestrian and practical: a 1984 Chrysler minivan. My wife and I were in Cleveland, where I worked for the Wall Street Journal, and we had three boys under age six.
The minivan’s interior was so spacious that it seemed to have designed-in demilitarized zones that kept the kids from killing each other, and from driving us nuts on road trips. For a few years, before they became mommy-mobiles, minivans actually were cool. (No kidding.)
In 1985 my boss, Journal managing editor Norm Pearlstine, transferred me to Detroit. It wasn’t clear what I had done to be sentenced to Detroit after living in Cleveland, but the truth was I loved it.
I felt like an anthropologist living among exotic natives who worshipped strange gods called “Multivalve Engine,” “Zero to Sixty,” and “Pound-Feet of Torque.” Not to mention the twin deities “Intercooler” and “Supercharger,” devices that boosted the power of internal combustion engines, and thus made them worthy of worship at the automotive altar.
In Detroit I discovered the nuts and bolts, pardon the pun, of the car business, from balance sheets to balance shafts. Covering the auto industry was a journey of discovery that led to a Pulitzer Prize. Our son Charlie, then in grade school, told his teachers his dad had just won the “Pulitzer Surprise.” In my case he was about right.
In 1994 I left Detroit to become an executive with the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones. But my fascination with the automobile industry and its culture continued, partly because I wrote occasional car reviews for one of the company’s magazines, Smart-Money.
One vehicle I tested was the Ford Excursion, launched in 2000 as the largest SUV ever. The Excursion was so big that Ford held the press preview in Montana, about the only place the vehicle would fit.
I skipped that event and, instead, drove the Excursion through the somewhat tighter confines of Greenwich Village, where I managed to parallel park it on a street. Of course the two curbside wheels climbed onto the sidewalk, but the Excursion was so obscenely heavy (about four tons) that I didn’t even feel the bump.
The Nissan Titan pickup truck, which I reviewed in late 2003, was almost equally massive. I attended that press preview, held in Napa Valley, as much for the wine as for the roads.
Around that time I started thinking about this book. Automobiles are ubiquitous. But there’s little appreciation of how certain cars have reflected the way we think and live, becoming shapers and symbols of their eras. I found the stories of the cars and of the people behind them to be full of surprising twists and turns, even though I had been writing about the auto industry for nearly twenty-five years.
The research, which I began in 2007, took me all around America. I drove Priuses in Michigan, Jeeps through Colorado, and pickup trucks around the Texas Hill Country and Midtown Manhattan, feeling right at home in the former and like an alien invader in the latter. At least the pickup I drove in New York didn’t have a Confederate flag decal or a gun rack.
I attended a slew of car conventions and shows, including the centennial celebration for the Model T Ford in Indiana in the summer of 2008. One man there had driven his Model T from “UCLA,” which he explained meant the “Upper Corner of Lower Alabama.”
His hometown there happened to be Monroeville, also the home of the reclusive Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a book that, like the Model T Ford, had reshaped American life and thought.
At one car show a man displaying his AMC Gremlin told me his favorite story: about a woman who confided she had been conceived in the backseat of a Gremlin. Not a good start in life. Later comedian Jon Stewart told me his first car was a 1975 Gremlin, and that his cat peed in the backseat on the day of his high school graduation. No wonder he can laugh at anything.
The annual Bloomington Gold Corvette exhibition in Illinois and the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky provided memorable visits. The museum, complete with relics and records from the car’s history, should be called the Corvette Cathedral.
The epitome of car shows is the annual Concours d’Elegance held every August at Pebble Beach, California. There’s nothing like gathering at 6 a.m. to feel the cold mist rolling in from the ocean and watch the priceless Hispano-Suizas and Delage De Villars Roadsters—names that shouldn’t be pronounced without an affected accent—rolling onto the 18th fairway for the show. Sacred cars on sacred ground.
I also tackled the more mundane but ultimately rewarding work of delving into the depths of automotive archives. They included the Benson Ford Research Center in Dearborn, Michigan, the Collier Museum and Library in Naples, Florida, various branches of the New York Public Library, and the National Automotive History Collection at the Detroit Public Library.
My research was hitting high gear when, suddenly, I took a detour. In the fall of 2008 Detroit’s car companies careened into a crisis that resulted in the bankruptcies of two of them: General Motors and Chrysler. These were historic, albeit tragic, events, and I was pulled into writing about them.
The result was Crash Course, my 2010 book about the bailouts and bankruptcies, which was really a book about human behavior. So is, in a different sense, Engines of Change.
When I returned to this book, after my hiatus, I travelled to the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, a shrine to native son and Nobel Prize–winning author John Steinbeck, who often put cars in his books. Cannery Row says the Model T revolutionized sex and marriage. The Grapes of Wrath describes a bitter trek westward in a makeshift pickup truck. The Steinbe...
In the 1990s Chrysler executives used to joke that they could tell a Jeep driver from a minivan driver just by looking at his or her watch. Timex watches were for practical people, those utterly unconcerned about putting up appearances and thus unworried about driving a mommy-mobile. Even if they were mommies.
But Rolexes signaled people whose self-image couldn’t cope with a minivan and who wanted to flaunt their rugged, outdoor lifestyle. Even if ruggedness only meant hitting potholes en route to the mall in their Jeep Grand Cherokee Orvis Edition. With a skinny Venti Latte in the cup holder, of course.
For decades, the connection between cars and self-image has been understood and appreciated by prominent philosophers. Consider the Beach Boys. Their song “Fun, Fun, Fun” (1964) wasn’t so much about the Ford Thunderbird as about the free-spirited teenaged girl who drove one.
Other songs celebrated drivers whose personas defied the stereotypes of their cars. “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” (Jan & Dean, 1964) was about a granny who flew around the freeways in a “brand new shiny red Super Stock Dodge.” In researching this book I learned about a real-life grandmother who terrorized other drivers just like the one in the song, except that she drove a Mustang. She lived in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, which probably explains why she didn’t wind up in a song. “The Little Old Lady from Oconomowoc” would have left a whole generation of Americans tongue-tied.
A handful of cars in American history, however, rose above merely defining the people who drove them. Instead, like some movies (e.g., The Big Chill) and some books (The Catcher in the Rye, etc.), they defined large swaths of American culture, helped to shape their era, and uniquely reflected the spirit of their age. These cars, and the cultural trends that they helped define, are the subject of this book.
The underlying premise here is that modern American culture is basically a big tug-of-war. It’s a yin-versus-yang contest between the practical and the pretentious, the frugal versus the flamboyant, haute cuisine versus hot wings, uptown versus downtown, big-is-better versus small-is-beautiful, and Saturday night versus Sunday morning. The elemental conflict between these two sets of values is amply evident in the contrast between the first two cars in the book, the Ford Model T and the General Motors LaSalle. The inexpensive Model T was the pinnacle of practicality, the first people’s car.
It didn’t have much style. But during its remarkable twenty-year run, from 1908 to 1927, the Model T gave farm families unprecedented mobility and a taste of the city lights. Even if they were only the lights of Muncie.
The LaSalle, in contrast, was the first mass-market designer car, an early yuppie-mobile that was intended for getting attention as well as for getting around. It debuted in 1927, the very year that the Model T died. The two cars were perfect bookends. They’re the only pre–World War II cars in this book, because American cultural evolution hit a roadblock in the 1930s and 1940s.
Those decades, of course, were dominated by Depression and war. Production of civilian cars was suspended during World War II, and Detroit’s factories were converted to produce planes and tanks. American cultural upheaval, at least overtly, took a time-out, too. During the Thirties and Forties Americans were mostly focused on finding food and work, and on staying alive.
But twenty-five straight years of virtually nonstop Depression and war came to an end with the armistice in Korea in 1953. By then Americans were ready to let loose, which made the timing perfect for the Chevrolet Corvette, the first modern American sports car. The pivotal figure in Corvette history was a Chevrolet engineer who had been raised as a Bolshevik boy in Russia before coming to America and winding up at General Motors.
The defining design statement of postwar America’s sky’s-the-limit ethos was tail fins. Chrysler actually sold them as safety devices, and the company’s top designer was honored by the Harvard Business School (really). Chrysler almost won Detroit’s great tail fin war, but General Motors struck back in 1959 with Cadillacs that had the biggest tail fins ever.
The man who designed them, Chuck Jordan, died in late 2010, at age eighty-three. I was fortunate to have interviewed him before he passed away. Nearly half a century on, Jordan told the tale of the fins with relish.
Corvettes and tail fins were all about pretension, but an import from Germany, America’s erstwhile wartime enemy, pulled the pendulum back toward practicality. The little Volkswagen Beetle, which was the ultimate anti-Cadillac, debuted in the 1930s as Adolf Hitler’s “people’s car.” Decades later it became the unofficial car of American hippies, completing an automotive and cultural journey of epic sweep.
Volkswagen marketed the Beetle with clever, self-deprecating advertising. One ad told how a farm couple in the Ozarks, living in a log cabin, bought a Beetle to replace their dearly departed mule.
GM’s belated response to the Beetle was the practical but problematic Chevrolet Corvair, launched in late 1959, which fared less well. It inspired an unknown young lawyer named Ralph Nader to write a book called Unsafe at Any Speed.
The Corvair’s lasting legacy has been America’s greatest growth industry: lawsuits. The car sentenced millions of Americans to watch personal-injury television commercials from law firms, unless they’re really quick with the remote control button.
Every vehicle in this book represents either practicality or pretension, although a couple of them straddle the great divide. Pickup trucks started out as down-and-dirty work tools until Detroit discovered it could make billions by selling lavish designer trucks. The seats on some of them have more leather than most cows.
For many people, especially those under thirty-five, cars aren’t nearly as important as iPads, iPods, cell phones, apps, personal computers, and BlackBerries. The modern fascination with electronic devices might make the idea of writing about the social significance of the Ford Mustang seem quaint, a relic of an era when “laptop” wasn’t a high-tech term.
But cars continue to provide unique personal freedom and mobility. They spawn powerful emotions, experiences, and memories, of family road trips, one’s first car, or one’s first sexual adventure.
Hardly anyone keeps the purchase papers for their first computer, or gives the device a name. But some Americans do both for their first cars. The Beach Boys sang a song about a drag race called “Shut Down,” but nobody has yet recorded one called “Download.”
This book reflects my fascination with cars and car culture, which grew slowly, over many decades. As a boy in 1950s Laurel, Mississippi (where our family was known as the EYE-talians), I learned about the early explorers through our cars: Hudsons and DeSotos. It took me years to realize that not all cars were station wagons.
In 1960, when I was ten, we moved to suburban Chicago and became a two-car family for the first time, just like millions of other Americans. Our station-wagon treks to visit my two grandmothers back East created a family tradition: the annual breakdown on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I cherish the memories . . . sort of.
I wasn’t a hot-rodder in high school. In fact, I wasn’t a hot anything. But automobiles were taking on important dimensions in my adolescent psyche.
In 1964, the year that the Mustang and the Pontiac GTO debuted, I found myself in Mr. McGowan’s freshman math class at St. Francis High School in Wheaton, Illinois. I hated math, but Mr. McGowan, bless him, gave us boys an occasional break from dreary decimals and unfathomable fractions to talk about cars.
We discussed whether Pontiac or Chevy had the better lines that year (it was Pontiac, as I recall), and whether anybody’s dad had bought a Mustang V8 (yes, but not my dad). Alas, I learned to drive on Dad’s pedestrian six-cylinder Chevy Bel Air with a three-speed stick shift on the steering column, the proverbial “three on the tree.”
I didn’t buy my first car until college at the University of Illinois. It was a 1969 Chevy Nova with an anemic six-cylinder engine that made passing on the two-lane roads around Champaign a death-defying adventure. That Nova cost around $2,200, about the price of a new fender today.
The hot car in college, a ’69 Pontiac GTO, belonged to my friend Dale Sachtleben. Once we took it on a road trip out East and Dale got a speeding ticket in Delaware for going ninety miles an hour, which was his slowest speed of the entire trip.
More than thirty years later, when Pontiac launched an updated version of the long-dead GTO, I reconnected with Dale for a nostalgia-trip test-drive in the new model. He had gray hair, I was a cancer survivor, and we were both (gulp) Republicans.
We drove the new GTO to tiny Greenview, Illinois, his hometown just north of Springfield, best described as sitting at the corner of corn and soybeans. There we raced up and down the little farm road that once served as the local drag strip, and for a while we were kids again. Cars can do that.
My first job out of college was in 1973 in Decatur, Illinois, where our next-door neighbors, the Whitneys, owned a 1960 Thunderbird. By then Ford had added a backseat to the ’Bird, which had been a taut two-seater when it debuted in 1955, but the low-slung, boulevard-cruiser styling remained. The Whitneys’ son Clay, then a boy and now a business owner, still keeps the classic car today.
The first car in this book that I owned was way more pedestrian and practical: a 1984 Chrysler minivan. My wife and I were in Cleveland, where I worked for the Wall Street Journal, and we had three boys under age six.
The minivan’s interior was so spacious that it seemed to have designed-in demilitarized zones that kept the kids from killing each other, and from driving us nuts on road trips. For a few years, before they became mommy-mobiles, minivans actually were cool. (No kidding.)
In 1985 my boss, Journal managing editor Norm Pearlstine, transferred me to Detroit. It wasn’t clear what I had done to be sentenced to Detroit after living in Cleveland, but the truth was I loved it.
I felt like an anthropologist living among exotic natives who worshipped strange gods called “Multivalve Engine,” “Zero to Sixty,” and “Pound-Feet of Torque.” Not to mention the twin deities “Intercooler” and “Supercharger,” devices that boosted the power of internal combustion engines, and thus made them worthy of worship at the automotive altar.
In Detroit I discovered the nuts and bolts, pardon the pun, of the car business, from balance sheets to balance shafts. Covering the auto industry was a journey of discovery that led to a Pulitzer Prize. Our son Charlie, then in grade school, told his teachers his dad had just won the “Pulitzer Surprise.” In my case he was about right.
In 1994 I left Detroit to become an executive with the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones. But my fascination with the automobile industry and its culture continued, partly because I wrote occasional car reviews for one of the company’s magazines, Smart-Money.
One vehicle I tested was the Ford Excursion, launched in 2000 as the largest SUV ever. The Excursion was so big that Ford held the press preview in Montana, about the only place the vehicle would fit.
I skipped that event and, instead, drove the Excursion through the somewhat tighter confines of Greenwich Village, where I managed to parallel park it on a street. Of course the two curbside wheels climbed onto the sidewalk, but the Excursion was so obscenely heavy (about four tons) that I didn’t even feel the bump.
The Nissan Titan pickup truck, which I reviewed in late 2003, was almost equally massive. I attended that press preview, held in Napa Valley, as much for the wine as for the roads.
Around that time I started thinking about this book. Automobiles are ubiquitous. But there’s little appreciation of how certain cars have reflected the way we think and live, becoming shapers and symbols of their eras. I found the stories of the cars and of the people behind them to be full of surprising twists and turns, even though I had been writing about the auto industry for nearly twenty-five years.
The research, which I began in 2007, took me all around America. I drove Priuses in Michigan, Jeeps through Colorado, and pickup trucks around the Texas Hill Country and Midtown Manhattan, feeling right at home in the former and like an alien invader in the latter. At least the pickup I drove in New York didn’t have a Confederate flag decal or a gun rack.
I attended a slew of car conventions and shows, including the centennial celebration for the Model T Ford in Indiana in the summer of 2008. One man there had driven his Model T from “UCLA,” which he explained meant the “Upper Corner of Lower Alabama.”
His hometown there happened to be Monroeville, also the home of the reclusive Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. It was a book that, like the Model T Ford, had reshaped American life and thought.
At one car show a man displaying his AMC Gremlin told me his favorite story: about a woman who confided she had been conceived in the backseat of a Gremlin. Not a good start in life. Later comedian Jon Stewart told me his first car was a 1975 Gremlin, and that his cat peed in the backseat on the day of his high school graduation. No wonder he can laugh at anything.
The annual Bloomington Gold Corvette exhibition in Illinois and the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky provided memorable visits. The museum, complete with relics and records from the car’s history, should be called the Corvette Cathedral.
The epitome of car shows is the annual Concours d’Elegance held every August at Pebble Beach, California. There’s nothing like gathering at 6 a.m. to feel the cold mist rolling in from the ocean and watch the priceless Hispano-Suizas and Delage De Villars Roadsters—names that shouldn’t be pronounced without an affected accent—rolling onto the 18th fairway for the show. Sacred cars on sacred ground.
I also tackled the more mundane but ultimately rewarding work of delving into the depths of automotive archives. They included the Benson Ford Research Center in Dearborn, Michigan, the Collier Museum and Library in Naples, Florida, various branches of the New York Public Library, and the National Automotive History Collection at the Detroit Public Library.
My research was hitting high gear when, suddenly, I took a detour. In the fall of 2008 Detroit’s car companies careened into a crisis that resulted in the bankruptcies of two of them: General Motors and Chrysler. These were historic, albeit tragic, events, and I was pulled into writing about them.
The result was Crash Course, my 2010 book about the bailouts and bankruptcies, which was really a book about human behavior. So is, in a different sense, Engines of Change.
When I returned to this book, after my hiatus, I travelled to the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, a shrine to native son and Nobel Prize–winning author John Steinbeck, who often put cars in his books. Cannery Row says the Model T revolutionized sex and marriage. The Grapes of Wrath describes a bitter trek westward in a makeshift pickup truck. The Steinbe...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherTantor Audio
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 1452607354
- ISBN 13 9781452607351
- BindingAudio CD
- Rating
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want