Look at the picture above. My friend Sherry posted this on FB last week. It’s not often that blog fodder falls right into your lap, but this was Manna from Heaven! She took this picture at a gas station across from her office. Now, call me old. Call me cynical. Call me irresponsible, but I simply do not understand this. By this, I mean taking a perfectly good Camaro… I guess it’s a Camaro, that’s the closest resemblance I can see… and putting stagecoach wheels on it, doors that look like something off of a Piper Cub, and painting a graphic of The Flash on the side. As I have stated, I love cars. All makes and models, shapes and sizes. I especially love the custom and concept cars. Without the work of the visionaries who created these works of engineering and art, many of the car models we know today would not exist. And, I love the low riders. particularly the pickup trucks. But the trick above baffles me. I went to a barn wedding once and there was a stagecoach there that didn’t have wheels that tall or tires that skinny.
I get it, I’m a Boomer. I, like my parents before me, their parents before them and so on, am clueless. I’m an aging old codger with absolutely no idea about anything at all, certainly not about whatever is cool. I grew up in the sixties, when Muscle Cars and long sleek Cruising Vessels were available straight from the factory and right off of the showroom floor, so obviously I am completely lost when it comes to the slick rides of today like the one pictured above.
Okay, I realize I’m sounding like some grumpy old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn, so let’s look at it from a different perspective. I know that the cars we drove as kids probably looked hideously stupid to our parents, particularly mine. My father went absolutely nuts when I jacked up the ’65 Fairlane I had inherited from them and put slotted disk wheels on it and big fat tires. It sure looked cool to me though, a lot cooler than it looked when my mother was driving it to and from church on Sundays. When I bought my Mach 1, it was already sporting air shocks and 60 series tires (these were the bias ply days). My father told me Fred Flintstone wouldn’t be seen dead driving a piece of $#%* like that, whatever that meant. And, I’m sure in his day, his father couldn’t understand his ’40 ford convertible with baby moon hubcaps and wide white sidewall tires. Or maybe he could, my grandfather later drove a blue ’57 Bel Air.
All that being said, I simply do not see the appeal of a tricked out ’86 Chevy Caprice with a sound system featuring a bass thud that sounds like an earthquake. A buddy of mine was in management at the old GM Doraville plant where they built the ’86 Caprice. I remember him telling me when they rolled one out to show them what they would be building, and he thought maybe it was time for him to start looking into another line of work.
I don’t really get the generation after mine’s obsession with hot rodding Hondas, either. A Briggs and Stratton without a muffler sounds better than a CRX with a header and Cherry Bomb. But, I’m a lifelong Bug enthusiast, so I guess I’m in no position to point fingers there.
My guess is when these guys show pictures of their Wagon Wheel Wonders to their kids, their kids will either laugh their heads off, or politely stifle their guffaws until later. Time will tell. Who knows, I may be wrong and Lord knows, I’ve been wrong before. Maybe these customized ’86 Caprices will be around 20 years from now, maybe not. Maybe I’ll make it that far to see. Maybe not. Oh well, I’m off to take my Geritol… – Still Cruisin’!
Ha Ha!!!