The summer of 1975 found a sixteen-year-old standing on a used car lot with five hundred dollars in his pocket, money earned cutting lawns and hauling pop bottles back to the corner store. The chrome bumper in front of him was the size of a diving board, and the salesman in the mustard-colored leisure suit was calling him son. Buying a first car in 1970s America was not a transaction. It was a rite of passage, and the car he drove home that day would mark him for life.
There was no internet to browse and no app to scroll. There was the classified section of the local paper, read like scripture at the kitchen table over a cup of instant coffee going cold. The print was so small it might as well have been written for ants, but it promised a 1971 Plymouth Duster for $1,797, a ’69 Chevy Nova that ran good and needed paint, a Ford Pinto with low miles and one owner. He circled the ones he could afford in red Bic pen, tore the corner off the page, and dialed the phone bolted to the kitchen wall, the cord long enough to reach the back porch.
Half the time the car was already gone. The other half, a voice on the other end gave directions involving a Sunoco station, a left at the Dairy Queen, and a house with a brown station wagon out front. The lots themselves were a circus. Strings of red, white, and blue plastic flags hung between light poles, a giant inflatable gorilla sat on the roof of the office, and a hand-painted sign promised easy credit and no money down.
The salesman shook hands too hard, called the kid sport, and slapped the hood of a beat-up sedan while swearing it had belonged to a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sundays. Everyone knew it was a lie. The ashtray was packed with Marlboro butts and the backseat smelled like a wet dog. But the price was right, a quart of oil cost $4.
19, and the buyer figured whatever was wrong with it, he could fix in the driveway with a socket wrench and a flashlight. Signing the pink slip, a flimsy carbon paper document that made the car his, turned a sixteen-year-old into a backyard mechanic overnight. He had to be one, because nothing in the 1970s ran the way it was supposed to. Anyone who brought home a mid-1970s muscle car expecting fire found a performance pretender instead.
The stripes were there, the hood scoop was there, the badges read 350, 400, or 454, but the car could barely get out of its own way. A 1975 Corvette, America’s sports car, left the factory with 165 horsepower, less than a modern minivan. Just four years earlier, the same engine had made 270. The federal government had come down on Detroit with smog rules, lead bans, and bumper laws, and the engineers responded by strangling those big V8s with vacuum hoses and a new device called a catalytic converter that nobody trusted.
Then came the bumpers. A 1971 regulation required every car to survive a five-mile-per-hour impact without damage, so Detroit bolted enormous chrome battering rams a foot and a half long to the front and back of everything it sold. A 1974 Chevy Impala carried a bumper that looked capable of landing a small aircraft. When the car stalled at a red light, and it always stalled, the owner popped the hood right there in traffic and learned the rhythm.
Tap the carburetor with the butt of a screwdriver. Wiggle the choke. Spray a little starter fluid down the throat. Cuss at it.
Try again. The skills came from an old man, an uncle, or the neighbor two doors down who always had a Pabst in one hand and a wrench in the other. And there was the smell, leaded gas sweet and heavy, mixing with the hot richness of a carburetor running too fat and the stink of burning oil dripping onto a hot manifold. That was the perfume of every Friday night of youth, and the memory of it could still surface decades later with a single whiff of exhaust.
Owning the car was only half of it. Feeding it was the other half, and starting in October 1973, feeding it became a war. OPEC turned off the spigot, and overnight the price of a barrel of oil jumped from three dollars to twelve. Gas prices shot up forty percent in a single month, and half the stations simply ran dry.
Paper bags taped over pump nozzles, cardboard signs reading sorry no gas, plywood boards nailed across driveway entrances. States stepped in with what was called the Oregon plan. License plates ending in odd numbers bought gas on odd-numbered days of the month. Even numbers bought on even days.
Flags appeared at stations: green meant fuel was available and the line could form, yellow meant rationing at three gallons max, red meant turn around and go home. Siphoning became a genuine problem. People woke on Monday mornings to find their tanks bone dry, emptied by someone with a garden hose in the night, and three-dollar locking gas caps became the best money anyone ever spent. The lines stretched for three and sometimes four hours in the summer heat, windows down because the air conditioning ate too much fuel, drivers watching their gauges and praying they would not run out before reaching the pump.
The little orange Datsun two cars ahead would be fine. The big block Buick was sweating bullets. America began to shift. Toyotas, Hondas, and Datsun 240Zs started zipping past on the freeway.
Fathers called them rice burners and refused to look at them, but when a neighbor’s kid bought a Civic for under three grand and got thirty miles to the gallon, the snickering stopped. When the tank was full, though, on a Friday night with a clean shirt and ten dollars in the wallet, there was no better feeling in the country. The vinyl bench seat hit the back like a hot frying pan in July and sat hard as brick in January. It did not matter.
An 8-track cartridge got shoved into the dashboard, Boston or Pink Floyd or Fleetwood Mac or Lynyrd Skynyrd, and somewhere in the middle of a guitar solo came that big, satisfying clunk as the player switched programs and chopped the song in half. When the cartridge would not track properly, a matchbook folded up and wedged under it held the head steady. That was 1970s engineering. Every town had a strip, a Main Street or a Broadway, and it got cruised slow with the window down, elbow out, one hand on the wheel.
At a red light next to a buddy, someone yelled Chinese fire drill, four doors flew open, and everyone ran around the cars and switched seats before the light turned green. There were no cell phones, no GPS, no parents tracking anyone on an app. The street lights were the curfew. When they flickered on, there was about an hour before mothers started calling around to friends’ houses, and an eleven o’clock arrival meant an old man waiting on the porch with folded arms.
The night ended at the drive-in, cars parked nose-out facing the screen, speakers hooked over rolled-down windows crackling out a John Wayne or Burt Reynolds picture, the smell of buttered popcorn and damp grass drifting through the air, a six-pack on the floorboards that was not supposed to be there, the seat fully reclined. None of it was easy. Insurance was a nightmare. State Farm slapped a twenty-five percent surcharge on any car with more than three hundred horsepower, which was exactly why the buddy with the 440 Charger paid more for insurance than for the car itself.
Auto loan interest ran around eleven and a half percent, and the loan term was thirty months, not seventy-two. The car was paid for the hard way, with after-school pumping at the gas station for a dollar sixty an hour, bagging groceries at the A&P, mowing lawns all summer, collecting pop bottles out of ditches and hauling them to the corner store for three cents apiece. By the end of a Saturday afternoon, a kid might have a dollar fifty in deposits, and that was a tank of gas in 1972. Nothing was wasted.
Oil changes were done at home. Points were set by hand, spark plugs gapped with a feeler gauge, and the difference between a Phillips and a flathead screwdriver was learned before long division. When a radiator hose burst on the side of Route 9, there was no call to AAA. A kid walked to the nearest house, asked to use the phone, called his dad, and they fixed it together on the shoulder with duct tape and a coat hanger.
The car taught patience. It taught grit. It taught that a thing owned was a thing cared for. Vinyl seats burned legs in summer and froze them in winter, gas was rationed, the bumpers were ridiculous, and the horsepower was a sad joke compared to what an older brother had driven a few years earlier.
But it was theirs, earned bolt by bolt. And on a warm Friday night in 1976 with the windows down and an 8-track playing and the strip stretched out ahead, there was not a kid in America who would have traded places with anyone. Yet even as that cruising ritual played out, something was changing quietly in the American driveway. The big block V8 was about to disappear for nearly twenty years.
The 8-track would die in a parking lot somewhere. And the car the next generation learned to drive would look nothing like the one hauled home from that lot in 1975.
