SAVE THE WHALES!

You see the most amazing things at small-town grocery stores sometimes. The other day, I stopped at the grocery store in Horicon for a bottle of chocolate milk (shut up, I like to pretend I’m ten years old sometimes) and there it was, parked right next to me: a simply gorgeous 1971 Buick LeSabre 4-door. No collector plates, no car-club stickers, just a clean, semi-shiny, unmolested, rust-free survivor from my birth year. Avocado green, of course.

I wanted to stick around for a while to see if I could spot the owner, maybe ask them a couple questions. When you see a car like that in the rural Midwest, it’s safe to assume that the owner’s had the car since it was new. But 33 years? My gosh, that’s almost stretching beyond the point of credibility. However, I was running late for an appointment, so I didn’t wait.

Time was that the Big Green Car was a universal indicator of poverty or ruralness or studenthood or all three. The newspapers used to be full of them. My two favorite classified ads of all time read as follows:

1971 PONTIAC, must have sense of humor, $125.

1972 FORD LTD, old, ugly, will run forever, $250.

Note that neither ad mentions color. But why guess? They were either avocado green or harvest gold. They just had to be. Was it something about the pigmentation of the paint that made anything and everything painted either of those hues–not just cars, but appliances, furniture, et al.–last just shy of forever? Because that stuff held up much better than all the almond or gunmetal-grey colored stuff people bought in the 80s.

Truthfully, the Big Green Car wasn’t a bad choice for people at the desperation levels of poverty. Body-on-frame construction and rear-wheel drive, combined with severely outdated technology, made the Big Green Car both reliable and cheap to maintain, something you have to think about when $500 is all you’ve got to spend on a ride.

But times change, and not even a ‘72 LTD lasts forever. By the time I graduated high school, Big Green Cars were being replaced in my downwardly-mobile neighborhood by Chevy Citations and Renault Alliances, two rides that quickly became the Poverty Specials of the American midwest. The Alliance didn’t have enough power to get out of its own way, while the Citation and its ilk were rushed to market so quickly that they might as well have called it the Chevy Beta Test. Both cars cost a fortune to fix, the Renault because nobody under American skies could get parts for it, and the Citiation because most routine maintenance tasks began with the instructions “After removing the transaxle . . .”. Still, both cars were overrepresented among the parking lots of my alma mater.

I will admit to owning a Big Green Car myself once, a 1974 Ford Gran Torino which I drove exactly thrice, costing me $66.67 per trip. The latch on the glovebox was the only piece of metal in the entire car that wasn’t rusted, pitted, or corroded. It was this car which taught me an important life lesson: Never buy an unlicensed car from the back entrance of a trailer park. If not for a catastrophic wiring failure, however, I’d have driven it more. I am that rare person who actually prefers haring around in an ugly old car to motoring confidently in a newer one.

But alas, the lumpy, loping rumble of a giant, low-revving, out-of-tune V8 is a sound not much heard in this country any more. In its place, we have the flatulent buzz of a thrashy little four-banger with a rusted-out muffler. Now the people who have the most to lose financially from a car crash wind up driving cars that can’t survive a 6 MPH fender-bender. You can drive a car that’s not firing on all eight cylinders; good luck with one that’s not firing on all four.

It’s kind of sad how this element of our automotive heritage is getting bypassed. I think, for example, there are now more 1970 SS Chevelles on the road than there were in 1970. Great car, but you know what? I’ve seen ‘em. I’ve seen enough of them that I don’t even think that admittedly-cool car is particularly cool anymore. And I just wonder, who’s preserving the legacy of the plain, big, haul-the-family sedan from the 60s and 70s? An awful lot of these car have already been crushed and recycled; many have given their lives to provide restoration parts for the more-ubiquitous muscle cars lurking in Boomer garages. Will that ‘71 LeSabre be the last one I ever see on the road? Will we ever convince our children that people used to haul their families around in giant 2-door cars with Brobdingnagian overhangs both front and rear? Or that dashboards used to look like larger versions of the radios they contained? Will my little one never see a thing as lovely as a fake tree? Is elk-grain vinyl more endangered than the elk?

Or will our kids remember family cars as the things Mom and Dad rented when the Explorer was in the shop?

I like fast cars as much as the next person, but there’s a lot more to automotive history than Boss Mustangs and Z28 Camaros. Somebody save the Big Green Car!