Cool cars!
1950’s autos with port-a-wall tires.
By the Old
Coot, Merlin Lessler
White walls were the only tires acceptable to teenagers in
the fifties. It was “uncool” to drive, or even ride, in a car with blackwalls.
It announced to the world that the owner had no taste - the equivalent of
strutting around in a black suit, high water pants and white socks. The problem
us “cool” guys had was our fathers’ indifference to our taste in tires. They
all sang from the same hymnal when we pestered them to pay a few extra dollars
for white sidewalls. They claimed that white wall tires weren’t as strong as
standard blackwalls, that the color was achieved by bleaching and it weakened
the sidewall. It might have been true, but we didn’t care about tire safety; we
cared about our image. Good old “free enterprise” provided the solution,
Port-a-walls, those flat donuts of white rubber that fit under the rim, turning
a blackwall into a whitewall. For three dollars, we were able to convert a drab
family sedan into a "cool" machine. I spent many hours removing tires
from my parents cars, painstakingly going through a laborious process: taking
the wheel off the car, letting out the air, jacking up another car on the tire
to break the bead, slipping the port-a-wall under the rim, pumping air back
into the tire with a hand pump and then remounting the wheel. I often had to
repeat the process because the port-a-wall would shift when the tire popped
back into the rim. Then, and only then, did I feel cool behind the wheel of our
family car, my left arm hanging out the window, an unlit Marlboro hanging from
my lips and best of all, glistening whitewalls adorning the spinning wheels
below.
Even my
mother’s 1953 Hudson Jet was cool, this scaled down ¾ sized Hudson. (“A car for
the lady of the house.”) But mom’s Jet wasn’t just cool because of the
whitewall tires. It was also cool because it was a world champion coaster. It
could glide farther than any car on Binghamton’s Southside. Every day after
school we rode into the nearby hills of Pennsylvania. Traffic was light and
cops were scarce. We didn’t have much money for gas, so we sought routes where
it was possible to coast for long distances. We sped recklessly down the hills
and around the curves so we could make it over the top of the next ridge. My
mother’s Hudson Jet beat all comers; it hardly lost any speed as it coasted up
a hill that brought other cars to a halt.
When we
coasted, we turned off the key to minimize gasoline consumption. On one after
school ride, I accidentally turned the key off and then back on again while the
car was still in gear. BOOM! It backfired; I thought a cannon had gone off. I
did it again and the same thing happened. I’d discovered something that
ultimately cost my parents dearly. I made it backfire whenever I wanted to
scare or impress someone strolling along the side of the rode. I didn't know
that the bang was caused by the ignition of unburned gas in the exhaust system.
It didn’t take long before it blew my mother’s muffler to smithereens. And then,
a few weeks later, it did it again. My father became suspicious. He doubted
that replacing two mufflers on her car had anything to do with faulty equipment
or shoddy workmanship at Brown's service station on the corner of Pennsylvania
and Vestal Avenue. The truth came out when I blew the entire exhaust system off
his pride and joy, his 1958 Edsel. It was a financial disaster; the lemon of
the century had two mufflers and two resonators. All four had to be replaced. I
was cool! And, then I was a pedestrian.
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