The Machinery of Night

Posted 1:15 PM by Angie Schultz

Daddy's Car

OK, just one more car-related thing, and then I'm done with it. My dad's a car nut, he can talk your leg off about cars (or pretty much anything else, come to that), but they just don't excite me that much.

This was the car I learned to drive in. It's a '64 Imperial (I learned to drive in '78.) Ours was that color, too. The ad copy at the bottom reads:

Today, there is a totally new Imperial. Tomorrow, somebody will ask if you've seen it. It is far more than a new car. It is a new concept of what a fine car should be. The new Imperial is America's most spacious luxury car. It is also the quietest. If you admire fine cars, enter the quiet world of Imperial--The Incomparable Imperial for 1964.

People got paid to write this, you know. It reminds me of the Meat Sermon I mentioned a couple weeks ago.

Spacious, hell. A family of four could live in it, with room for Grandma in the trunk. Ours had power steering with a lot of play in it; you had to turn the wheel through about 420 degrees before there was a significant course correction. It had---no lie---push button drive; instead of a gear shift it had a row of buttons. After all, button pushing was THE FUTURE! It steered like an aircraft carrier, and had mischievous power brakes; you depressed them for four inches and nothing happened, but another quarter inch would send you through the windshield. Whee!

The power windows were dead by that time, too. When I bought ol' Sparky, I was hesitant to get power windows because of my bad experiences with the Imperial's. The salesman asked me how old the Imperial had been, and when I told him, he said, "Oh, but you're not going to keep this car that long, are you?" HA ha!