Dad Drove an Oldsmobile

This is true from me the blogger/author's life. 

Growing up I saw the end of the muscle car era of driving. The GTOs and Oldsmobile Cutlass 442, the Chevy Impala were still on the roads, but the car manufacturers didn't make them. The ones I saw on the road everyday were getting rust. Some of the cars were driven by older people that didn't change the engine and drove slow. I grew up around men that had muscle cars that talked about fast cars and where they would see them.

My father drove station wagons before I was ten years old. Station wagons weren’t fast, sporty, or interesting. We had used (pre-owned) Ford LTDs during the 1970s. It was great for trips to Rickel or Channel hardware stores to buy paneling. Paneling was popular in houses in the 1970s. The back seats folded down so the back of the car could be loaded with things. These cars were good for family trips where supplies were needed. 

On a day to day, when we saw a rusted loud muscle car these station wagon cars were so lame. 

My father changed jobs around 1982 and he got a company car, the 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass. It may have been the four door version, but I liked that car. It had a long hood, a smooth front end with square headlights. The trunk was huge. The motor purred. The car was boxy in design, but it was all straight lines, the long hood straight back to the trunk. The windshield was slightly tilted but looked straight. I remember gray cloth seats that stayed cool in summer. The car may have had a cassette player, which was fairly new in cars that were phasing out 8 track tape players. 

It wasn’t a station wagon.

We would go on Route 21 and it felt like the car could go fast yet totally within legal and safe driving speed limits. Those station wagons felt slow and dragging. The car fit in the garage in the winters. I don't remember those station wagons in the garage. 

I wouldn't get a driver's license for another five years and he had a different car by then. The Cutlass was still a good selling car so it wasn't affordable to 17 year old me who worked at McDonalds. It was still the car I dreamt of getting. 

All these years, never got one