ADAMCZYK: A drive down a sunnier street

The Tonawanda News

July 17, 2008 11:52 pm

— The summertime air is full of this nostalgia-inducing aroma, leaded gasoline being burned by the engines of classic automobiles gathered for car shows impromptu or well-organized. They meet every Sunday evening at the Dunkin Donuts on Sheridan Drive, at Canal Fest and on the lawn of the Powertrain plant on River Road (where many of those motors were built, years ago). St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church recently had a car show, complete with holy water blessing, in its parking lot.
The Village of Kenmore closed off Delaware Avenue twice in the past three weeks for massive events: one accompanied “Kenmore Days,” a three-day municipal lawn fete that made this tiny suburb, crowded between industrial heavyweights Buffalo and Tonawanda, feel momentarily like Small Town USA. The other was last week, sponsored by Paddock Chevrolet, and it overflowed six blocks of Delaware and spilled onto side streets and parking lots. Hundreds of cars were on display.
The vehicles — ’57 Chevys, Mustangs and Corvettes galore, DeSotos and Packards and Studebakers and the rest — are cars with personality and idiosyncrasy. They are, by turns, art objects, historical artifacts, backyard projects, the macho American version of a crafts fair, evidence of what local guys do in their basements all winter or souvenirs from the past that were lovingly left in the garage since the Johnson administration. More than ever, as the sign outside the nearby Noco station reminded us, they’re relics of an era we’ll never see again.
The cars we drive today, as opposed to the cars we visit — these events really bring out a crowd — tend to be homogeneous in design, sculpted for fuel economy instead of aesthetics, largely made of plastic and relatively disposable, at the scrap heap and in the scrap heap of memory. Except for the Corvettes, represented at the car shows by the dozen through an organization called Corvettes of Buffalo (terrific people who tend to arrive at these events en masse), there is little on a dealer’s showroom today that will belong in an exhibition such as this a generation hence.
I enjoy these things, talking with the proud owners and restorers camped out in portable chairs behind their automobiles, taking in all the examples of sometimes questionable Detroit design (while an occasional MG shows up, local car shows tend to be all-American productions), but it’s with more and more heartbreak, lately. The manufacturing industry in this country has been a slow-motion trainwreck, the auto industry its most visible example. The night of the Paddock Chevrolet show, you could buy 100 shares of the General Motors Corporation for under $1,000. A hundred shares of Ford? You might have it in your wallet right now.
It is left unspoken that what’s on display here might not only be the American car industry’s high water mark, but something of America’s as well. Take a look at that 1958 Buick Roadmaster, loaded with garish chrome and black paint so deep you feel you could put your arm through it up to the elbow. What was this country like the day its first proud owner drove it home? Yes, so many things are so much better in 2008, but that driver filled up his new car with 24-cents-a-gallon gasoline and probably rolled around with an optimism we’re hard-pressed to locate today. The large crowd buzzing around the Paddock Chevrolet show, listening to that 50s-era rock music that seems to follow these cars everywhere — Connie Francis and the Coasters and Gene Vincent, all singing about heartbreak from an American-made scrap heap of their own — never had to acknowledge a large and vacant Ford dealership to the north of them, or an empty Jeep showroom to the south.
There is something about lining up these old cars in a spur-of-the-moment museum that makes people stop and ponder their meaning. The Jetsons-style taillight of the ’60 Chrysler Crown Imperial was whiz-bang evocative of a spacecraft, as were plenty of things back then. The taillight of the ’64 Mustang was, by comparison, as efficient a use of chrome, plastic and light as you’ll ever see, and belongs in an art gallery. It’s the little things that can get a person thinking about the difference between then and now.
As dusk settled over Kenmore, the cars awoke, roared their goodbyes and wandered away like endangered animals, leaving behind a penumbra of light, blue smoke and that sweet, unmistakable bouquet of gasoline with the necessary lead additive in it. Most headed north to Sheridan Drive, a street with its own colorful history of the car culture, of illegal drag racing and burger-and-fries hangouts. The taillights receded from view, and it seemed as though I’d just witnessed a theatrical piece about the decline of optimism in America.

Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.