rating Old Dog's rides

TorqueFlight  transmissions, 354 hemis, I remember that  talk.  When I was walking my 55th to Kedzie to 59th and back, haunting the little drug stores for their racks of lurid paperbacks I'd pause at the automobile magazines and browse through their contents so I was a little familiar with what was going on under the hood.  But not to any depth because I was chiefly interested in what the cars looked like.  I liked the customized cars the best, especially I recall when they worked on old Mercuries, they had the best deep-set eyes.

I was disappointed when I looked up Old Dog's 56 Imperial.  What a lunk, just one year later it sprouted those luxuriant fins and slim swept trunk, and oh my those taillights shooting flame from halfway up the fin.

Ah, but the 60 Falcon, what  a cute little playful pup.  Oh wait a minute a Ranchero which was also some kind of pickup truck, odd little thing isn't it?  Still, clean lines, not pretentious, confident in knowing who it is, I give it three and a half out of four. I don't know about painting it camouflage though, but if it impressed those lovely drawling, southern belles well I reckon that is fine, just fine.

And of course the VW bus is a classic.  You could always count on your brother or sister hippie to give you a ride when you were hitchhiking, and of course a few tokes were the expected hospitality like Bedouins offering dates and sweet tea in the middle of the desert.  Sometimes we would hitchhike back and forth between San Francisco and Berkeley just to get high.

While my 63 Fairlane might have been boxy and stodgy, the 67 is an ugly brute.  Stacked headlights, I don't think so, and what a nothing grill.  And no fins for Chrissake, and square taillights, cut me a break.  Just barely one and a half stars.

Cut me a break, that was an expression that was popular around that time,  A bit awkward since give me a break says the same thing more clearly, but cut sounded a little cooler, a little more with it Man.  I don't hear it much these days.

53 Studebakers, way cool, but I also have a fondness for the earlier ones with the third eye in the middle and the tapered rear end.  The other two are just muscle cars, nothing much to look at.  Ruby Dew has one of those new-fangled new cars.  I have been in and out of it hundreds of times, but every time we leave the convenience store with our pops and Slim Jims I can never pick it out among the other grey shapeless blobs in the parking lot.

Another big storm up north, or maybe it is some other problem with the connection?  We shall wait and see.