When Muscle Cars Were Cool: Politically Correct Bullies Weren’t A Bother

 

By Tom Poland

My high school years unfolded in a time when hanging out at drive-ins and burger joints was all we had. We played 45 RPMs by the Beach Boys and William Jan Berry and Dean Ormsby Torrence. You know them as Jan and Dean of “Dead Man’s Curve” and “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” fame.

Surf music was the craze back then in the era of steering wheel suicide knobs, but catching a wave in eastern Georgia wasn’t easy. Cars, though, now that was a different matter. Candy-colored cars possessing names like GTO, Chevelle, Firebird, and Thunderbolt mesmerized us. So there we were come weekends at the drive-in, skinny, pimply faced boys wolfing down burgers and fries and vanilla milkshakes as we lusted fort the muscle cars that ruled the era. Like moths, older guys with greased-back hair circled our little drive-in revving their motors. Gas was cheap and big engines swilled petrol like there was no tomorrow. Hydrocarbons and emission controls belonged to the future. Nobody gave a damn about global warming and the Middle East. To hell with ’em.

 

 

I never had a “muscle car,” i.e. a high-performance car, but I saw plenty and one night five of us climbed into a souped up Chevelle and headed toward South Carolina. We tore down a Highway 378 straightaway topping out at 146 miles per hour. Perfect fools, we wore no seatbelts. George Anderson, the driver, bottomed out on the Soap Creek Bridge scraping off the oil pan and the car died outright, slowing to a stop accompanied by the sound of grinding metal. Only by the grace of God did we survive. To this day when I drive that stretch of Highway 378 I realize that it is where my life could have ended.

 

 

What set these memories—good and scary—in motion was a trip I made to Darlington last Thursday. On a hot July afternoon with time to kill, I drove to a place that until that day had lived only in boyhood memories. Before NASCAR exploded, before TV brought “racin’ into living rooms, Dad and I listened to races Sunday afternoons on the radio. The network’s “eye-in-the-sky” brought the action to us and for me it was easy to picture the string of colorful cars flying past the wall inches away. Dad and I didn’t hunt, we didn’t golf, but we shared a fondness for Sunday races on the radio, and our idol was the King, Richard Petty.

I’m sure the greasers listened to the races too and back at the drive-in they acted out their fantasies, getting wheels, laying down rubber, and dragging other hot cars. No one that I recall got killed. I do remember one fellow spinning out and sliding his Chevelle through the front of a dilapidated beer joint the next county over. The foolish ride we took at 146 miles per hour could have turned catastrophic … a blown tire and we would have been done.

We young guys with pitiful little cars didn’t race. We had to be content (and blessed) to shove change in the drive-in’s jukebox where 45 RPMs played the hits of the day. There may have been a pinball machine and some dimly powered part of my brain wants to remember a bowling machine. We slid a heavy metal disc through powdered sawdust at pins hanging from a wildly lit Vegas-like platform. Bowl a strike and all the pins disappeared to a clatter of metal. There was no pool table. Of that I’m sure. In a carryover from the late ’50s, the girls who frequented the place, I believe, wore bobby socks and saddle shoes. My chief memories, however, involve the cars that shook the air cruising round and round, crunching gravel, where cries of “get a wheel” sent departing drivers off into gas-guzzling stardom. Rumors of boys winning and losing drag races ran rampant. Blown engines too.

 

 

We lived on the precipice of change. The ducktail haircuts were doomed to surrender to Beatle hairstyles. The 45 RPMs would give way to eight-tracks and later cassettes. The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean? Well, the British Invasion proved to be a wave they couldn’t surf. Free style dancing would unseat the shag, and later recreational drugs would make a cold PBR passé. Muscle cars yielded to smaller cars and in time Japanese automakers would deal big cars a deathly blow. The quaint mom-and-pop drive-ins’ juicy-greasy burgers succumbed to McDonalds and Burger King franchises’ consistent-and-dry burgers. Franchise places proved too convenient, cheap too, and today America’s waistline bloats like never before. The pinball machines would give way to video games. Racing changed too as did the drivers. Richard Petty let his clean-cut kid of the 1950’s look go, glitzing up to a mustache and a toothpaste-commercial-worthy grin and Roy Orbison-like shades all topped off by a cowboy hat a country music star would kill for. TV took over and radio retreated. The era got left behind. Back then the bigger and faster a car was, all the better. That would have bedeviled today’s namby-pamby do-gooder lynch mobs poised to strike down those who dare speak, live, and drive as they wish.

 

 

Where did all the muscle cars go? Among their ranks roared the Pontiac GTO coupe and the Chevrolet Chevelle. I recall a few Dodge Chargers, Thunderbirds, and Corvettes around town in my day. For a while all had been part of the classic car era. As well there were some classic 1957 Chevys with roll and pleated seats. Plymouth unleashed its 426 cubic inch Hemi V-8, a monster of an engine and Sir Richard would ride that horse to fame. That car was the one I wanted but it never came to pass. With my ear glued to the radio I was in No. 43 on those Sunday afternoons at Darlington.

Just where did the muscle cars disappear to? Dusty sheds? Classic car museums? Maybe Al Gore ate them like the character Herman Mack in Harry Crews novel, Car. Mack eats a 1971 red Ford Maverick from bumper to bumper, six ounces a day, he says, “because it’s there.”

All these memories and a few foolish thoughts came in fits and starts as I was driving back from Darlington. Every generation has its hangouts and for many babyboomers in the 1960s weekend nights meant cruising the drive-ins. That was our era and those were the places. It was all we had, but it was more than enough.

 

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

Tom Poland is the author of seven books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press will soon release his and Robert Clark’s book, Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.

 

 

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