the rocket ship of 1963

I only had two cars in my life, the Corvair I bought  when I went  down to Herrin so I could drive up to Champaign on my weekends to visit my beer drinking buddies in Champaign, and the Ford Fairlane I bought to replace it  after I rolled it a few months after I got it.  The Ford Fairlane I brought back to Champaign with me after my CO work, where half dead at this point, I let die all the way because I could walk to the bar so I didn't need it for anything.

The year 1963 sticks in my mind for the Fairlane, I went back to the google machine to look it up, but I couldn't be sure.  The Fairlane was maybe what you would call a mid-sized compact.  I don't think they use those terms for cars today, but it was in between a regular Ford and the Falcon.  The Falcon was kind of cute, maybe even sporty in its humble way. The Fairlane on the other hand, was kind of boxy and awkward in the manner of things that are supposed to be blends but turn out to be neither this nor that.

I don't reckon I could get the dawgs. who apparently have no interest in poetry or the way the past envisioned the future, to look up the 63 Fairlane so here is a photo.

There it is next to the trailer I called home for a couple years.  Boxy yes, but note that streak of chrome from front to back tracing the path from the headlight to the taillight. We can't see the front end, which I admit is nothing special, but note how the metal curves as you leave the rear wheel headed for the back to enfold and emphasize the taillight which is round and red, and if you think of your car as a rocket ship. which people did in those days, and to judge current car commercials many in the current day do also, then this is where the flames would shoot out to propel you as you boldly go forth.  And note the fin, not as large as it should be, but likely enough just enough to cleave the air in such a way as to keep your rocket ship on an even keel.

Now look at the 2017 Ford Focus which I guess is the equivalent of the Fairlane, 57 years of progress, like Yeats' twenty centuries of stony sleep have brought us this?

Gentlemen, I rest my case.


I don't remember anything like getting a better grade for offering divergent opinions in high school.  My memory of my opining is that it was never welcomed within the unived halls of Gage Park High.  In fact I see 1963, to paraphrase Hemingway on Oak Park, as a time of large fins and small minds.  And just now looking up the quote about wide lawns and small minds, I discover that Ernest probably never said that in so many words.  Well I know how he felt anyway.