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Mel and I were having a discussion recently about how seldom you see cars or trucks broken down alongside the roads anymore. When we were growing up, it was a common sight.
"Lotsa tahms, it wuz flats. You had 'em ol' tahrs with tubes that attracted nails an' sharp rocks like magnets. Man, Ah changed a many a flat fer mahself an' other folks stranded an' lookin' pitiful by the sahd of the road. Most o' th' tahm, Ah'd hafta taxi 'em to the service station to have it fixed 'cause they didn't have a spare. Actually, most o' the tahm, they wuz runnin' on th' spare. They shore wudn't git vury far on one nem li'l donuts they give you nowadays.
"Other tahms, you'd see 'em with the hood up, leanin' over, bangin' on somethin' with a tahr tool or smoke boilin' up. Sometahms they wuz vapor locked. A lotta tahms, outta gas. Seems lahk ever'body back then carried a gas can with 'em. The thang is, in those days, you could at least work on a car er truck yoreself when sump'n went wrong. These days, you cain't eban locate the spark plugs! With everthang computerahzed, an' oddball size sockets, you may as well call the towtruck or roadside assistance.
"Still, in alot o' ways, cars an' trucks has come a long ways since the 1950s," my husband commented, recently. "Some of 'em seem flimsier, but in the ol' days, at 50,000 miles, yore car wuz plumb wore out. But in a lotta ways, they wuz a better bargain."
"The thing I remember most," I said, "was how long it used to take a car to get warm. We'd be freezing, and the heater would just blow cold air forever. It would begin to get warm about the time we arrived at our destination. What I wouldn't have given to have had heated seats back then."
"Yeah. The only seatwarmer we had wuz the one in the principal's office," Mel snorted.
"Today's vehicles are much more fuel efficient," I added.
Mel smiled. "You'd be surprahzed at how creative folks wuz back then when it come to improvin' fuel efficiency—eben when gas wuz 15 cents a gallon. Ah remember yore grandpa used to turn up the air an' cut down the fuel. He'd git the cows loaded up an' that ol' truck wouldn't pull the trailer. He'd have to get out an' fiddle with it so it'd git 'nuff gas to pull.
"It wuz almost a ever'day deal pushin' off an' ol' auto with a dead starter, which remahnds me, yore Daddy's ol' blue tractor never did have a starter long as Ah remember. We always parked it on a hill an' popped 'at clutch to git her goin'."
"Lots of times Dad would hook a long chain to the car and pull it to get it going," I said. "If I recall, you had to get going pretty fast before it would work."
"Yeah, but that wuz one o' the advantages of th' old standard transmissions. You could almost always make sump'n happen, although whut happened wudn't always good."
"I recall seeing guys open their car doors, take off running to get the speed up, and then jumping in the driver's seat. Did you ever do that?"
"Lotsa tahms," Mel said. "But the thang is, our ol' beat up cars wuz so blame slow, it wuz 'bout as easy to jist keep on runnin' an' pushin'!"
