Riding In Cars

The oldest car I've ever had a chance to ride in was a 1933 Plymouth sedan. My dad owned it in the late 1940's, and after riding a Greyhound bus with my mom to Detroit where my dad worked, I had the dubious pleasure of riding the backseat of the Plymouth all the way back to Tennessee. It wasn't very comfortable.

The most "what the hell?" car I ever rode in was a 1957 Chevy convertible. This was in 1963, and there was nothing wrong with the car itself. My cousin bought it, and not being satisfied with the "top 40" AM music that was available at the time, he invested in a record player "designed" for an automobile. Any youngsters reading this may not remember vinyl records, but suffice it to say they were easily scratched and ruined. The unit played 45's one at a time; not a record changer.

It was mounted under the dash in a housing that was rubber and foam rubber dampened to keep vibration to a minimum. The tone arm with the pick-up needle was attached so that the cover for the unit held it in place with downward force, yet it was free to follow the grooves in the record. To operate it, you pulled the unit forward on gliders, much like a kitchen drawer slides open. You then raised the cover, placed the record over a very short spindle, closed the lid, and turned it on. It was transistorized and had its own tinny sounding speaker. To say the least, it didn't work well. In fact, the final thing in the instruction booklet said it was best to use the unit when the car was parked. Riding along, it would withstand small bumps on paved roads, but the ubiquitous gravel roads of the day were out of the question. The tone arm applied so much pressure to the record that it was good for only a few plays before it was worn out. After my first ride with "Bull" and his record player, I told him the man that invented the contraption was the second stupidest man in the world; I didn't have to tell him whom was the most stupid. The most pleasure we got out of it was when riding on a concrete road, he would get the car to a speed where the clack-clack-clack-clack of the tires crossing the road's expansion joints would keep time with the beat of the music. We were either poking along with the likes of Sam Cooke and Kitty Wells, or whizzing down the pike with Chuck Berry or Joe Bennett and the Sparkle Tones. We were hated every where we went!