After supper on a damp, mild Wednesday night in February of 1955, my father said he had to go somewhere and that he wanted me to go with him, highly unusual. We took the Twenty-Six car up Rising Sun Avenue, getting off at Knorr Street, the same stop I would get off to visit my current steady girl friend. My first panicky thought was that her parents had figured out what was going on in their basement while her mother was at work. But no, my father turned the other way and began walking toward the showroom of the Ernest Jones Ford agency. I still had no idea of what was going on. As we went through the front door, my father turned and said, “I bought a car.”
My father was forty-four years old, and by this time I had just assumed that if anyone in our family were ever to buy a car, it would probably be me. Years earlier, on a cold, overcast New Years Day, we had gone to a matinee at the Carmen Theater at Germantown and Allegheny. Going to the Carmen was a big deal, a holiday treat. At the Carmen, you not only got a first run movie, but after the movie, the stage lit up, the curtain opened to a live orchestra with an emcee and you got three or more acts of vaudeville. My mother had put the traditional New Year’s roast of pork in the oven on low, and we’d gone off for the show. Coming home, we had to change trolleys at Fifth and Allegheny. Light snow began falling as we shivered in the fading light on the deserted corner waiting for the Forty-Seven car. Behind us, a timer clicked the lights in the showroom windows of Ronan Motors. It was a Dodge dealership and the brand new 1949 models were on display. My father began talking about each of the models in the window, which one would be a better purchase, which the more practical. I didn’t know it then, but had he been describing the qualities that differentiated Indian elephants from African elephants, the bases of his expertise would have been every bit as sound.
“You bought a car?” I was stunned. All of the wonderful possibilities began flooding my mind. I was already behind the wheel, already making an impression, already a big deal. Before I could ask the next question, “what kind of a car?” A guy in a suit was pumping my father’s hand and leading him into a cubicle. While my father sat filling out papers, I wandered the showroom looking at the new cars, hardly able to contain myself. My father and the salesman came out of the office and I fell in behind them. Through a door and into a semi-darkened shop, we stopped at a shiny gray and blue 1954 Ford, a four-door Victoria. Only a year old, it looked brand new. As soon as I saw the Victoria logo, I knew that even though it was a four-door sedan, it still had the minor cachet of being a V-eight. Ford had gone to overhead valve V-8’s in 1953, and the higher-end Victoria had the big engine. Any car would do, but my image might have taken a hit if the car, a car I hadn’t yet been told I’d be allowed to drive, had come with a wussy little six-cylinder motor. I started projecting cool improvements on the car my father hadn’t yet gotten to drive. How would it sound with a set of dual exhausts and a couple of discreet chrome echo cans protruding from under the rear bumper? I‘d really look cool rumbling around in something like that. The salesman handed my father the keys and began raising the big garage door.
Getting into the car, I started peppering my father with questions about my being allowed to use the car, and could I go tomorrow after-school and get my learner’s permit. That he might have been nervous didn’t enter my mind. He raised his hand to shush me and began trying to figure how to start the very first car he had ever owned. The ride home approached harrowing. Other than his driving test with a state trooper sitting next to him, this was his first time on his own behind the wheel. It was before seat belts and his first attempt at stopping, the red light at Martins Mill Road, sent me flying forward into the dashboard. Although accustomed as I was to riding with some of the most irresponsible automotive lunatics in the neighborhood, this was a different order of scariness. “Pop! Pop! For Christ’s sake it’s a red light.” Or, “he’s blowing his horn at us because you’re doing fifteen in a thirty-five zone.” After two abortive attempts at parallel parking in front of our house, he pulled back out into the street and told me to go inside and get my mother and my brother. During the third trip around the block, punctuated by at least two of my mother’s “Jesus, Mary and Josephs,” we convinced him to try and park the car and let us out.
The next night, Thursday night, was my mother’s novena night over at the Immaculate Conception Church in Germantown. That I might be the primary cause of her having to make novenas hadn’t yet occurred to me. The weather had turned cold again, and at the supper table, I said, “We’ll Mom, tonight you don’t have to take the trolley car over to Germantown.” I went on painting my father into a corner. Whether it had occurred to him to drive my mother to the novena, I didn’t know. But I was in the process of making a more compelling case to take out the new car than just, “hey let’s go for a ride.” I applied the next layer, “you know Mom, if Pop drives you over, you won’t have to stand on that dark, windy corner waiting for a trolley after church.” Switching to the collective plural, I added, “we’ll take you over and then come back and pick you up.” My brother had gone into the living room to practice his clarinet, another good reason to get out of the house.
We drove over Olney Avenue in the February darkness. In the magic passage of a single day, we rode past those now less fortunate than us, the huddled masses waiting for trolley cars on an icy night. With the heater on and the radio playing, we had arrived. Then my father almost ran the light at Broad Street. I shouted, “Stop. Stop!” My mother gasped, and my father managed to stop just inches from the speeding cross traffic. With no further adrenaline surges, we arrived safely in front of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Rolling down the window, I stuck my head out and shouted, “See you at eight-thirty, Mom.”
Before the arrival of instantaneous universal access to standardized mass media, city people were presumed more sophisticated than their rural counterparts. Perhaps we were the exception that proved the rule. Until 1955 when my father bought that used Ford, we only occasionally ever got more than a few miles outside the neighborhood. The belt of suburbs, the nearby towns and small cities that surrounded the city might as well have been in another hemisphere. I had no more idea of our location vis-à-vis the communities adjacent to the city’s boundary lines than I had of the latitudes or longitudes of the antipodes. If I hadn’t been carried past a place on a trolley car or bus, it was all the same to me. And if anything, my father was more geographically challenged than I was.
About twenty minutes into our Thursday evening joy ride, I began to lose my bearings. The familiar lettering on the signs that had read “Germantown Avenue” had changed to a different script and a different color. Now it read “Germantown Pike.” And, the tracks for the Route Twenty-Three car had disappeared from the street. I couldn’t read the name of the detour that sent us a dozen blocks down a darkened side road. When we emerged back onto a major, but unknown thoroughfare, I knew we were in trouble. And, I didn’t want to say anything that would make the already nervous driver anymore rattled than he seemed to be getting. Now at every intersection, my father would ask, “What do I do here? Turn, go straight?” How the hell did I know? It was dark, nothing looked like any place I recognized, and in fifteen minutes my mother would be out on that freezing cold, windy sidewalk looking for us.
Like storm-blinded sailors, we plunged on. Eight-thirty came and went. At last, at an open gas station, I ran inside; not asking, but begging for directions. It was twenty minutes after nine when we passed slowly along the deserted sidewalk in front of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. In the nervous silence going back down Olney Avenue, I went into my “we couldn’t help it. We got lost. It wasn’t our fault.” My father knew better. We turned the corner and saw my mother walking up the street. She was less than twenty feet from the house. She refused to even acknowledge the explanations I offered from the passenger side window of the car. As my father began the first of the many attempts he needed to successfully park the car, my mother went up the steps and into the house, slamming the door behind her.
She had stood in the cold for almost forty minutes before taking a trolley car home. Half-frozen and almost sick with worry, she knew only that my father and I were lying dead somewhere in the wreckage of what she now referred to as “that goddamned thing.” She didn’t talk to my father for several days, and it was over a week before he was able to get her back into the car.
Whether because he started driving so late in his life or because he just couldn’t manage it, my father was an awful driver. And for as long as he lived, we had to supply him with simplified, detailed directions that only rarely kept him from getting lost. But he and my mother both came to love having a car. It was the official, tangible sign that the bad luck and hard times that had marked the first nearly twenty-years of their marriage were really over. They developed a routine of simple pleasures built around riding in their car, one that lasted as long as my father was alive. For almost two decades, there would be a Saturday afternoon trip to a shopping mall and a Sunday afternoon ride through rural Bucks County, ending each week with the same early dinner at the same dairy restaurant. The heart attack that killed my father in 1973 at the age of sixty-two, hit him while he was behind the wheel, driving south on Second Street, just above Erie Avenue. My mother was banged up in the ensuing crash, but that was the least of it.
Tags: 1945-1955, 1954 ford victoria, 23 trolley car, 26 trolle car, 47 trolley car, allegheny avenue, broad street, bucks county, carmen theater, dodge automobiles, erie avenue, ernest jones ford, germantown avenue, germantown pike, immacualte conception church, knorr street, martins mill road, memoir, novena, olney, olney avenue, philadelphia, rising sun avenue, ronan motors, second street, v-8 engines, vaudeville
