Car Guy

 

 

August 22, 2022

 

Greetings from between the bumpers,

 

My first thought was: “Dad would love this.”

 The streets of downtown were blocked off, and every flat space along the curb was lined with cars.  Some were works of art, some were relics from another era, chrome and steel, and others cutting edge technology fresh from the showroom. 

 It’s a car town, Flint is.  People who like cars know this and half a million of them walk down the brick lined streets to admire the collection.  Hundreds of cars, from Corvairs to Corvettes, from Studebakers to Teslas. MG’s and Triumphs and Austin Healeys.  Tricked out Impalas, modified Cobras, decaled VW Beetles and mint, original Buicks.

 They call it ‘Back to the Bricks’, an Olympic caliber car cruise.  The people who bring their cars enjoy showing off their collection and being a part of the party, but mostly they want to talk to other car people.  Dad would love it.  Especially the models from the years that mattered most to him, from Eisenhower to Reagan, back when we both could identify a car as it drove past us on the road.

 My Dad was a ‘car guy’.  Not a gear head, not the kind that restored cars or fixed cars or collected cars, but they were in his daily life for most of his life.  If he was still with us, he would have gone down the bricks with me to admire the cars and talk to the people who showed them.

When he came to this country, still a teenager, one of his first jobs was detailing cars at Downtown Buick, in Flint.  I don’t know the particulars of the trajectory after that, except by the time I could remember things, he was the Sales Manager at East Side Buick. 

 He was around cars all the time.  We lived a few blocks from the dealership, so the division between our life and his work was a porous one.  We kids wandered among the desks, explored the service bays, walked among the cars in the showroom.  We knew when the new models were coming out.  We knew their names.  The cars and our father were almost synonymous.

 East Side Buick was a company owned dealership, in the town where the Buicks were built, and the lot behind the showroom held thousands of cars.  It was a mecca in the sixties, the place where people went to buy a car right from the factory store.  Dad put on a suit and tie, drove a few minutes, and then ran cars out of there by the truckload.

 Across the street from the dealership was the used car lot, and occasionally Dad would find something interesting and drive it home.  One of the strongest memories I have was him pulling up in a Jaguar XKE, and then taking my sister and I for a screaming ride through the city.  I can still feel the G’s from doing donuts in the parking lot of the Junior College.

 But for the most part, the cars in our driveways were Buick badges.  LeSabre.  Electra 225.  Skylark.  The Estate station wagon.  My Dad had his hands on these cars, washed them, changed their oil, tweaked the timing, wrenched a few things.  But I feel like that was simply what people did while they listened to the Tigers game.  He brought home different models, always wanted to enjoy what he was driving.

 When they closed the dealership, he locked the door and then sat at Buick headquarters a few miles away and figured out how to sell cars across the nation. And that’s what he did until he couldn’t do that anymore. 

 Cars, and all the people associated with cars, were what Dad did, nearly all of his life.  So, I know he would have loved walking between the bumpers, talking to the car owners, listening to their stories, hearing about how they got this car, or the one before, or the one they have their eye on.

 After he retired, Dad told me he would love to own a Buick Reatta, a two-seater convertible that was only made for a few years, over thirty years ago.  Even now as I write this, I can’t imagine what would have prevented him from it, but he never owned one. 

 Even with the enormous variety of cars at the show, it surprised me when I saw a Reatta parked on the bricks, top down, the perfect red, looking like it just came out of the showroom.  My tears took me by surprise too. 

 Dad was a car guy in an era when cars were what made the city thrive.  When the factories ran three shifts and built cars as fast as Dad could sell them, and everyone seemed connected to that culture.  He lived long enough to be a part of all of that, made cars the career that raised his family, bought his home, made vacations, some gifts on Christmas, a newspaper subscription.  He lived to see the end of that era too. 

 It’s a small thing, but I wish he’d lived long enough to have a Reatta in his driveway.  I think he would have loved to drive it to the bricks, hang out with the other car people.  I would have loved to see him there.

  

Hope this finds you driving something you enjoy,

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2022  David Smith