STUDEBAKER MEMORIES

The other day, I saw a less than complimentary memory test that was entitled the “Older Than Dirt Quiz”. The test named a list of seventeen outdated things and ranked those tested by approximate era according to how many of the items they were familiar with—categories were Whippersnapper, You’re Getting There, and Older Than Dirt.

I was a little depressed by the fact that I knew them all first-hand, which got me ranked as Older Than Dirt. But, at the same time, like just about everything else from my admittedly lengthy past, many of the things they mentioned brought me a certain twinge of nostalgia.

For instance, drive-in movie theaters…what wasn’t to like? Especially if you were with a carload of friends and somebody was old enough to buy a couple of six-packs. Or if you were on a date with somebody you really liked a lot and the movie was either a hot romance or something so scary you wanted to cuddle up. Although, that being said, I remember seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at the Midway Drive-in on Route 33 between Wapakoneta and St. Marys, and I was so spooked I couldn’t do anything but keep glancing into the rearview mirror to make sure Tony Perkins wasn’t sneaking up in his momma’s dress with a butcher knife in his hand.

Candy Cigarettes were a nickel a pack. I liked the ones that came in a mock Camels pack. A perfectionist, I refused to settle for the little red-dyed tip and would set a match to the end so as to give it a genuine ashy look. I’d suck away contently on the sugary end in my mouth, only slightly perturbed that my cigs got shorter from the mouth end and my father’s and my grandfather’s got shorter from the burning end. At twelve, however, I decided I’d had enough of the fake fags and started pinching the real thing from Whitie (my dad).

Remember 45 rpm records? Hell, I remember 78 rpms and recall too when 33-lps were a rarity. (Now they’re a rarity again, but are known as items of boomer vinyl nostalgia). The first one in our house was my sister’s recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and she and I played it until it was practically transparent. Then we started working on Brahms’ First.

Telephone party lines were common in my hometown of Wapakoneta when we were kids. I don’t think we had our first “private line” until I was about eleven or twelve, and it was a very big deal. There was nothing like a “private phone conversation” in that era. If you wanted to talk about anything you didn’t want all the neighbors to know as soon as you hung up, then you needed to actually meet the other party for a chat, or write them a letter and mail it at the Post Office.

Telephone etiquette dictated that if you picked up the phone and other parties were on the line having a conversation, you hung up and waited until the line was free. Patience was a virtue in the days of party lines, but it wasn’t one of Whitie’s. He was very short and to the point on the phone and expected his neighbors to be as well. I can remember several occasions on which, after he’d unsuccessfully attempted to place a call for a half-hour or so, he would interrupt some neighbor’s conversation by shouting into the receiver, “Hey, how ‘bout gettin’ the hell off the goddamn line for five minutes so somebody else can make a call!”

You could have your phone removed for that sort of discourtesy, but nobody ever dared to report Whitie.

Over in the nearby village of New Knoxville, phone communication was even more rudimentary. My Aunt Marilyn lived there back then, and still had a box phone with a crank on the side and had to make her calls through an operator. There, people knew which calls were for them by how many and what kind of rings the operator signaled them with. For instance, Aunt Marilyn’s code was “two longs and a short.” Village busybodies learned those codes by rote and knew just which neighbors would have the juiciest conversations to listen in on.

Pop machines with glass bottles were a given back then because glass was all bottles were made of. That, my friends, was a better world, in which we weren’t choking ourselves and the entire environment in plastic. Returnable glass bottles were a great invention and should be brought back. But go tell that to the climate deniers.

Butch wax—there’s a blast from the past! As long as he was paying for my haircuts, Whitie insisted that I should have either a butch, a pineapple or a flat-top. A butch was also known as a crewcut and was basically a shaved head with enough hair to see but not comb. A pineapple was essentially the same but with a little topknot up front to run a comb through. Kids that had them seldom bothered to comb them so they usually hung on their foreheads like a horse’s forelock. I thought they looked geeky and resisted Whitie’s attempts to convince me that they were “just as good as long hair but without all the bother.” (Ha! You wouldn’t have caught him wearing that haircut). The flat-top, however, appealed to me, because as short hair went, it was the most elaborate style. Crewcut short around the edges but with a square, even, brushable if close-cropped finish at the top. And you couldn’t have a flat-top without also having butch wax to make it stand straight up. I was never without a jar of butch wax in the bathroom cabinet until I was twelve, and old enough to start paying for my own haircuts, so I could have whatever style I wished.

Blackjack gum was the best. It came in an eye-catching sky-blue and jet black pack, was deliciously licorice-flavored, and was, unlike other gums, black!  My little brother and I liked to stretch it over our front teeth so that it looked like we were toothless. Very cool!

Home-ec classes weren’t something I, as a male, ever took part in—back then schools thought a woman’s place was in the home and a man’s was in an office or factory—but all the girls I went to school with had to take it. I still remember my highly intellectual sister cussing her way through all of the sewing and baking assignments.

Five and Dimes I’ve written about extensively. They were one of the most useful and incredible inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I once wrote that the G.C. Murphy’s five and dime in our town fascinated me as a boy. “When I was small, it seemed to me that there was nothing you could possibly want in the world that Murphy’s didn’t have: everything from a dazzling range of toys to a variety of ladies’ lingerie, from shoelaces and stationery to zippers and lace, from artificial flowers and dress patterns to sturdy work clothes and bandanna hankies, from floor mats and door mats to galoshes and snow boots, from wire trouser-stretchers and ribbons to dime-store cowboy novels and oilcloth tablecloths, from lavender cologne and bay rum to Sen-Sen breath mints and horehound cough drops, and so on and so forth. But the center of attention for me was the big oak and glass candy case at the front of the store. They knew right where to place it so that kids couldn’t help but feast their eyes on it both coming and going...smack in front of the door.”

Metal lunch boxes were part of my grade school years. There was never a time that we didn’t have a cafeteria in the excellent schools that Wapakoneta had to offer, but back then I was a picky eater. I knew the menu at school and on the days that there were things I didn’t like—tuna noodle casserole and rice soup spring to mind—I would “carry my lunch” (that was the expression).

I remember that I would wonder from about ten o’clock on during morning classes what Reba Mae, my mother, had packed for me. There were always, to my chagrin, carrots and celery. I ate those first to get them out of the way, so I could enjoy the rest of my lunch. If I left them in the box, I’d just have to eat them with supper because Reba Mae wasn’t one to take no for an answer. And, morally, I didn’t dare throw them in the trash because, you know, there were “the starving children in Europe” to think about in those post World War II days. Never could quite figure out how my cleaning up my plate would save a starving child in Europe, but suppose it was more about not being an ingrate.

The fare usually included a generous sandwich of cheese with bologna, summer sausage or honey-loaf ham on Wonder Bread with French’s mustard. Sometimes there would be a little bag of potato chips. There was always an apple. And there might be a couple of oatmeal, chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies if my mother had been baking. But I considered it a real jackpot if Reba Mae had been to the grocery and generously decided to include a two-unit package of Hostess cream-filled cupcakes, Snowballs or Twinkies. Nice to have two. You could share. I mean, you could if you were generous. I wasn’t. I always ate them both. In winter, a small Thermos bottle was added to the mix, filled with Campbell’s tomato, vegetable or chicken noodle soup. To drink, the school provided half-pint returnable glass bottles of milk for two cents each—in our schools’ case, supplied by the locally owned and operated Brown’s Dairy.

Books with records were the interactive tools of the day when I was a kid. The idea was that kids could listen to the record and read along in the book. It was a nice idea, but, left to their own devices, kids usually conveniently lost the book and kept the record. These were relatively expensive items, and I don’t recall our having many, but I do remember two. They were very attractive since as a novelty, instead of being regular black paste records, the stories were recorded of bright-colored vinyl. We had Alice in Wonderland, which was recorded on translucent yellow vinyl, and Mighty Paul Bunyan the record for which was bright blue—like Paul’s legendary ox, Babe.

My sister Darla loved the Alice in Wonderland record. I found some of the tunes on it catchy—I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date / No time to say hello, goodbye / I’m late, I’m late, I’m late! / I’m overdue / I’m in a rabbit stew / No time to say hello, goodbye / I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!

But I considered Paul Bunyan “my record” and played it until it was scratchy and full of skips. I particularly liked a tune about The Big Rock Candy Mountain.  It went like this: Oh the buzzing of the bees in the popcorn trees / Near the chocolate ice cream fountain / Where the jelly beans grow and the milk shakes flow / Down the big rock candy mountain. / Oh the children eat their fill of the whip cream hill /And no one's ever countin' / There's so much to eat /Life is one long treat / On the big rock candy mountain…

Boone’s Farm “wine”… Drank a lot of it the year I was stationed in Los Angeles with the Army at Fort McArthur. It wasn’t what I would consider wine today—the most famous of its “varietals” was strawberry—but it was available and it was cheap. My wife and I got married while I was stationed there. She hailed from Argentina, a country with a fine wine culture into which Boone’s Farm just didn’t fit. So I started raiding a basket at the local PX that was labeled “Wines of the World”, where you could get a passable chianti or burgundy for ninety-nine cents.

Metal ice cube trays were the best. Ours had a lever at one end that you pulled up to release the cubes. They were clean and efficient and never got that “refrigeratory” smell that the plastic ones do if you don’t use the ice right away.

Roller skate keys—why they only asked about the keys I don’t know. But these were keys (miniature wrenches actually) used with a type of roller skates that were popular in the fifties and sixties and that were strapped onto the skater’s shoes rather than having leather uppers of their own. I never had roller skates—though I would eventually get ice skates—but my sister Darla did. And she was really good on them. I can still see them strapped to her two-tone saddle shoes. And I can remember, when I was very small, the satisfying roar of her metal-wheeled skates rolling up and down the sidewalk in front of our house on North Defiance Street.

The key was used to loosen and tighten adjustment screws that permitted wearers to widen or lengthen the skates to fit their feet. It was important for the skates to fit the foot snugly, since they were dangerous enough without the added hazard of a sloppy fit that would allow the ankles to be easily twisted or broken.

Back then, just about every little girl in town had a pair of these adjustable skates. It was a skill set—like playing jacks—that middle class grade school girls were just about expected to know. There came a time that Darla sort of outgrew skating, but I can recall her skates languishing at the bottom of our toy chest for years to come.

Milk in glass bottles we got through home delivery by the Meadow Gold milkman. You left the empties out on the porch with a list of what you needed written on a roll-up piece of paper that you stuck in the neck of one of the bottles—quarts of milk, butter, heavy cream, chocolate milk, etc.—and he got the things off of his truck and left them in the exact same spot by your door.

People who knew they were going to be out all day might leave instructions for the milkman to go on into the house and leave the things in the fridge. Back in those days, in Wapakoneta, crime was negligible, and almost no one locked their back door, which was almost always close to the kitchen, so there was no need to leave the milkman a key. And everyone trusted the milkman to come in and leave the dairy order. He was the milkman, after all.

When I think about this sixteenth one, it does seem like a stretch for anyone nowadays to believe, but when I was a kid, wax Coke bottle sweets were a treat we enjoyed. Actually made of “edible” grade paraffin, the wax bottles were molded to look like miniature Coca-Cola bottles. They contained a sweet syrupy, cola-flavored liquid which, Coke generation that we were, our taste buds were attuned to love. You could either bite off the top and suck the syrup out, or you could simply chew the whole thing like chewing gum until the flavor was gone. That wasn’t our only paraffin treat. At Halloween time, we always had flavored paraffin false lips, mustaches and teeth that, once you got done looking monstrous wearing them, you could also chew.

Our mothers were wise enough to tell us back then not to swallow the paraffin—which was made from a combination of solidified vegetable oils and synthetic resins—but to spit it out like used gum once it had the “good” chewed out of it. We now know that so-called “edible” paraffin can’t be digested, so just sort of sits around in your insides. In other words, if may not kill you to swallow it, but it surely can’t help your health any either.

But out of all seventeen items, the one that sparked the greatest nostalgia in me was the Studebaker. It’s a name and a car that is always present in my memory. So when I saw that “Studebaker” was one of the seventeen items on the “Old As Dirt” list, my first thought was, “Studebaker? Who doesn’t know what a Studebaker is?” But just as suddenly, I realized that I really am “old as dirt”, since to anyone under age sixty living today, that automotive name must surely sound like when my generation heard our grandparents extoling the virtues of the Stutz Bearcat sports car. We had no idea what they were talking about.

My Grandpa Murel (Whitie’s dad) was an avid Studebaker fan. Before the South Bend, Indiana, car manufacturer went out of business in 1963, he owned at least three of their vehicles. As an insurance man who was constantly on the road, he was sold on the Studebaker Champion.

The Champion was a sedan of ultra-modern design. And although it was a fairly common family and business vehicle, it had a simple but classically tasteful interior design as well. Its body design was based on the idea that “weight was the enemy,” and as such, it was among the lightest cars on the road for its size. That combined with its 2.8-liter flathead straight-six motor also rendered it highly economical. When other major car brands considered “good mileage” to be sixteen or eighteen miles to the gallon, the Champion boasted better than twenty-five under ideal conditions. And its engine was so reliable that it quite often outlasted the car itself.

It was, however, enough for me that my grandfather was sold on it. I took his word for it and became a fan. For me, it was the best car in the world. And Grandpa Murel’s was unique, because it had a mother of pearl steering knob on the wheel, and ever-swiveling compass on the dash, and camp stools, fishing rods and tackle in the trunk.

I liked to ride along wherever he went, when he let me. Sometimes I ended up sitting in the car forever, waiting for him to get done selling a life insurance policy to someone. But there were times when the wait was worth it. Times when he’d say, “Wanna see if the fish are a-bitin’?” And we’d stop a while at Indian Lake to sit together on folding camp stools in the sunshine or under the drizzle and try to coax a fish onto our hooks. That’s what the name Studebaker means to me.

Time, as Einstein pointed out, is relative. And in a certain sense, memories are matter. What I mean by that is that things aren’t just things. They are also the stuff of memories. And no matter how outdated younger generations might find the things we “older than dirt” people can still recall, as long as someone can still feel, smell, taste, hear and see those items in their mind, they continue to exist.  Indeed, when writers write about them and painters paint them, and photographers capture them for posterity, things of the past or not, they live on forever.