Mark - IN.
Well-known Member
Its going to be Christmas in a few days, so there are lots of old Christmas movies on. I just watched “Miracle on 34th Street”, and at the end of the show, after Santa let the little girl down and didn’t get her the house she wanted, her mother and her lawyer boyfriend were driving the little pouting girl home. Remember when they found her house and she started yelling “Stop, Stop, Stop”? Well here’s what I mean about the good old days. They were driving down the road in I’m guessing a 1940ish Ford Coupe that had no seatbelts, everything inside of it was painted steel, and the little pouting girl sat scrunched next to a passenger door that probably didn’t lock so well, while her mother sat in the middle next to her boyfriend, the driver. The good old days.
When I was a kid, we had a ’61 Chevy Impala wagon, ’62 Chevy pickup, a Jeep Forward Control, and because we lived near South Bend, various Studebaker Hawks and Larks, every last one of them painted steel interiors, no seat belts, and the passenger doors on the pickup and one of the Hawks not only didn’t lock well, they used to fly open if Dad rounded a corner too fast. The good old days.
These days? Cars have nice soft and quiet everything in the interiors equipped with televisions, air conditioning, heat, doors that not only lock when you tell them to, they have child proof windows that don’t go all the way down, and not just seatbelts, but child safety restraint systems. Heck, I’ve seen commercials where cars parallel park themselves, and have cameras in the tailgates so you can watch how well they park themselves on one of the televisions. Oh yes, they even dial 9-1-1 if they think you need a cop or fireman, and tell you that they just did after they do it.
My point? I used to stand up on the floor of the passenger side of them, chin on the all steel dashboard as Mom or Dad used to drive down the road. And if they came to a screeching halt after driving too fast when one of us kids yelled, “Stop, Stop, Stop” we would get flipped from the back if we were sitting or standing in the back, thrown over the seats, and bounced off of the all steel dashboards, and end up with a few cuts, bruises, maybe concussions, or had to stop by the hospital to get a few stitches and a cast on the freshly broken arm on the way home. But, it was fun and toughened us up. It was always adventurous. The good old days. Kids these days will never get to experience the good old days as I remember them.
It was that old Ford at the end of Miracle on 34th Street that made me think of this. Great Christmas movie.
Merry Christmas is almost here all.
Mark
When I was a kid, we had a ’61 Chevy Impala wagon, ’62 Chevy pickup, a Jeep Forward Control, and because we lived near South Bend, various Studebaker Hawks and Larks, every last one of them painted steel interiors, no seat belts, and the passenger doors on the pickup and one of the Hawks not only didn’t lock well, they used to fly open if Dad rounded a corner too fast. The good old days.
These days? Cars have nice soft and quiet everything in the interiors equipped with televisions, air conditioning, heat, doors that not only lock when you tell them to, they have child proof windows that don’t go all the way down, and not just seatbelts, but child safety restraint systems. Heck, I’ve seen commercials where cars parallel park themselves, and have cameras in the tailgates so you can watch how well they park themselves on one of the televisions. Oh yes, they even dial 9-1-1 if they think you need a cop or fireman, and tell you that they just did after they do it.
My point? I used to stand up on the floor of the passenger side of them, chin on the all steel dashboard as Mom or Dad used to drive down the road. And if they came to a screeching halt after driving too fast when one of us kids yelled, “Stop, Stop, Stop” we would get flipped from the back if we were sitting or standing in the back, thrown over the seats, and bounced off of the all steel dashboards, and end up with a few cuts, bruises, maybe concussions, or had to stop by the hospital to get a few stitches and a cast on the freshly broken arm on the way home. But, it was fun and toughened us up. It was always adventurous. The good old days. Kids these days will never get to experience the good old days as I remember them.
It was that old Ford at the end of Miracle on 34th Street that made me think of this. Great Christmas movie.
Merry Christmas is almost here all.
Mark