Cars Cars Cars

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Cars. Cars. Cars.
By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor

No country on earth has had a more torrid love affair with cars than America.
My own infatuation with the genre, however, has been somewhat fickle.

In 1925 when I was two years old, my Daddy bought a brand new 1925 Model T Ford. He paid $439.69 for it according to the receipt which I still have, with the charges broken down: $355 for the “Ford Touring” car itself, $63.90 for freight, $17.40 for tax, and $3.39 for nine gallons of gas and six quarts of oil. This car was just a normal part of my early childhood until the Great Depression. We sold it in 1930 without fanfare when we could no longer buy gasoline for it. Don’t cry for the Model T, Argentina. Life went on.

A few years later our family bought a 1935 Ford sedan, which I, as a teenager, neither wrecked nor killed myself in. It is best remembered for its simple utilitarian purposes: hauling tomatoes into town to the market, transporting our family to and from church services, and, with my older brother driving, carrying me and my small suitcase off to Baylor to start to college in 1940. I attach no stars or streamers, bells or whistles to it, although the car did have some saving graces, which ought not now to be denied or denigrated or basely forgotten.

In late 1944 I was called to be pastor of the Baptist church at Golden, some 120 miles from Fort Worth where I had launched into a five-year program of seminary studies. Fate, and I suppose a bit of hard luck, brought into my life at this time a 1937 Dodge sedan, which usedmachine I employed to go back and forth between Fort Worth and that wonderful church field in East Texas. Here this plot begins to thicken.

W.F. Howard at that time was head of Baptist student work for Texas Baptists, and he wanted to put a youth revival team to work across the state so as to try to spread abroad some of the remarkable revival stirrings that had begun at Baylor in Waco. I was chosen as one of the two preachers for that first youth revival team of five. The aforementioned Dodge may well have been a factor in that choosing and definitely was a major player in that hot summer of 1945. The car was big, it had a large trunk, and it gave some promise of being able to waltz across Texas for eleven revivals in eleven weeks. So it did—from Galveston to Breckenridge, from Texarkana to Harlingen, and from Ennis to Sulphur Springs with five (5) people and all of our paraphernalia. The load was heavy, however, and the old car resisted the burden. It often overheated, hence its name, the Van Zandt County Fireball.

But the saga proceeds and the plot further thickens.

I also used this old Dodge to shuttle back and forth from Fort Worth to Houston to see Mary Louise. I had proposed marriage to her on our second date, having postponed this momentous matter as long as I could have reasonably been expected to drag it out and wait around one bit longer. In spite of weekly drives from Fort Worth to Houston, it took her an agonizing two years to say “Yes.” Hasty decisions have never been her long suit. But the old Dodge was, again, a major player in my successful courtship of this lovely young woman who became my wife.

In the fullness of time, the Van Zandt County Fireball, bless its sainted memory, was traded in for a new 1947 Plymouth, for “to everything there is a season.” In short order that car was traded in for a new Chevrolet. Then there was another trade for another new Chevrolet. Then quite soon there was a new Buick. In fact, I traded cars so fast and furiously in those halcyon days of my callow youth that my excesses put a not inconsiderable strain on the happy marriage that Mary Louise and I were beginning to negotiate. With four children and the help of Baptists firmly committed to keeping preachers poor if not humble, however, I came off that new car-buying binge. Cold turkey! By 2001, I had not bought a new car in 17 years. This latter day excessiveness, negatively calculated, once again put a not inconsiderable strain on the aforementioned happy marriage which by this time had endured for 54 years

One evening a couple of months ago in rather uncharacteristic huffiness, Mary Louise shared with good friends over an unfriendly game of Scrabble, “Foy is NEVER going to buy a new car.” I had no earthly idea she cared. So I went out the next day and bought a new car. You can’t imagine how cars have changed in the last 17 years: automatic transmissions, air conditioning, power windows, power seats, thermostats, CDs, variable speed windshield wipers, tinted glass, and other accoutrements remaining to be explained or even discovered.

But please don’t go away yet. There is a piece de resistance yet to come. Along the way yet another car came into my life. And as Robert Frost said in the closing line of The Road Not Taken, “That has made all the difference.”

The year was 1960. I had built a cabin in 1958 at 9500 feet altitude in a blue spruce valley about 20 feet from a rushing mountain stream at Red River, New Mexico. Now, honestly, I’ve never really been much for coveting things. I must confess, however, that I developed a downright prurient craving for some sort of old four-wheel drive vehicle that would be happy in that special Rocky Mountain environment.

My Red River friend, Mont Dalton, found one in a barn near his ranch in Chattanooga, Oklahoma. It was a 1946 Willys Jeep painted a bright turquoise over the original coat of army green, with fine yellow wheels. The owner was willing to part with it for $350. My friend shook hands with the owner and towed it 400 miles to Red River where I lovingly embraced it, pressed it to my bosom (it didn’t have a top), and adopted it into my family as one of our very own natural-born children.

I built a small shed for it, put new tires on it (they are still on it, of course, for it has been only 41 years), became accustomed to its idiosyncrasies (such as turning on the ignition by pulling the switch labeled “Lights”), and proceeded to haul children and friends up and down old gold mining roads, through uncounted mountain streams, around hair-raising switch-backs, and through fantastic adventures which were more fun than Training Union and Deacons’ Meetings put together.

From this old Jeep we have seen elk, bear, deer, bighorn sheep, badgers, coyotes, wolves, and once a big mountain lion slinking furtively across the trail right in front of us. We have seen choke cherries, wild raspberries, mountain strawberries, gooseberries, and blueberries. And we have driven up on patches of delicate irises, clumps of exquisite columbines, meadows full of deep purple gentians, brilliant purple asters, colonies of daisies in full bloom, fields of butter-and-eggs which any self-respecting florist would fight for, and breathtakingly beautiful mountainsides of great quaking aspens in their frost-blessed garments of solid gold.

When we offered to give the cabin to our youngest daughter on her fortieth birthday with all the rights and privileges and heartaches appertaining thereto, she readily accepted the gift on the condition that the Jeep go with it.

And so it did. It continues to start every year after having been left for the winter in temperature dropping to 40 degrees below zero, as it has for 41 years. A thing of beauty and a joy forever.

If you even start to think them not lovely, then pause for a little while and consider what life would be like without cars.

Cars. Cars. Cars. Long live cars.