Cars and Girls: My 1954 Chevy

I finally got the chance to own a ’54 Chevy. It was a 210 model, not the top of the line Bel Air and was a less cool 4-door, stick shift (three on the tree) and had almost seen its better days. To give you an idea of how much the car set me back, I paid the 2013 equivalent of $200 for it. A couple of my first few cars were only months away from becoming parts cars in a junkyard. The most remarkable thing about almost all of my early cars was the amount of rusted panels in the form of holes in the floor, rusted out rocker panels, or door posts. Rochester winters were typically severe and the city and surrounding communities used lots of salt to keep the roads from icing.

One of the cars I’ll tell you about later was rusted so badly that I had to lift up hard on the door handle to have it close properly. The ’54 Chevy was no exception. Its biggest problem was holes in the floor, which was not a good thing since exhaust fumes could leak into the inside of the car – carbon monoxide was not a good thing. Problem solved with pieces of sheet metal, and roofing shingles screwed into the good metal.

My very favorite thing about this car was the windshield wipers. It didn’t have electric wipers. It had vacuum wipers – powered off the same vacuum lines that advanced the distributor. Result: going up hills and or accelerating they slowed down. No, let me correct that, they stopped. So while stopped for a traffic light, accelerating off when the light turned green meant the wipers stopped wherever they were on the windshield because vacuum was diverted to the distributor. That was fun in a heavy rain! One thing about those non-electric wipers was they were very quiet! Imagine this when it snowed –it was magical.

While some young drivers hung fuzzy dice from their rearview mirror, I hung a rabbit skull I had found somewhere. I thought it was cool. The skull was much more interesting and a conversation piece for the girls that rode up front.

Driving with my arm around my female companion was tricky since I needed my right hand for shifting the column lever. Sometimes I let my date do the shifting while my arm remained around her shoulder. As long as the girl stayed away from reverse, the shifting coordination of my foot and her hand was usually OK and we could remain close on that big bench seat. If the girl was a frequent visitor to the car, she knew not to push the lever up too far to shift into second gear. If not the proverbial grinding of the gears would occur and the sound made my teeth hurt.

Another redeeming quality of my ’54 Chevy was that I practically had to refill the car with oil every time I stopped because it would leave a large puddle on the street. Not good for the environment but the engine oil was always fresh!

I was all for customization of cars back then but one day I was forced into a front end customization of the Chevy’s grill. My dad and I left the house at the same time one day. I was going down the driveway first since I was behind him. I reached the end of the drive and stopped because of an oncoming car but my dad didn’t. He backed into the front of my Chevy and took out the grill! Of course he yelled at me because I stopped. Why wouldn’t I? No damage to his car. So the gaping expanse of the front grill minus the chrome was kinda cool looking. It sort of looked like the engine intake of a jet plane.

I was OK with that but angry because the car suffered additional uglification.