TheFlight ofHi You can’t go home again, said Tom Wolfe, but that doesn’t keep us from trying. We return to familiar ground to see the old shake shop, the tavern where we drank the first beer, the gas station where we hung out on Saturday evenings, the local theater, the house in which we grew up—even a road, a tree, a bit of sidewalk, something from the past to which we can return and thus confirm that the past is not an illusion. Which is why I found myself walking across the parking lot of the Memorial Coliseum, on my way, along with thousands of other people, to see a car show called The World of Wheels. The advertising had promised that this year’s show would feature hotrods and customized cars from the past. I wanted to see those old cars, the leaded, lowered, scalloped and chromed cars I had grown up with. They had represented mechanical perfection, ideal examples of automotive artistry, which, like the tableau on Keat’s urn, the rest of us were forced to pursue. With the persistence of memory, they had become more beautiful, more dazzling, more important, not only for themselves, but for the time, the world, the way of life they represented. It’s almost impossible to explain to others why one would undertake such a quest for the past, or how the past could possibly come alive at a car show, so I went alone. A simple explanation can be chalked up to nostalgia, a dopey affection for times gone; it’s not unlike listening to The Golden Age of Radio or viewing old films or collecting Little Orphan ■thadbptm a fiiniftlvr world in many ways* a world whoro a rar soomod not only intorostiny importanro. Annie Ovaltine Mugs. To explain an obsession is more difficult. Twenty-five years ago, half the cars in Portland were modified—nosed and decked, body seams filled, fender skirts, dual pipes, lowered to within inches of the ground—or so it seemed to me, growing up here, a wild-eyed kid always on the alert for an interesting set of wheels. On a Saturday night, if you stood outside the old Penny Arcade, you’d see a traffic jam of the finest cars found anywhere; they rolled up Broadway, dual exhausts rumbling, turned at the Arcade, then down Sixth to Ankeny ko and up Broadway again. They cruised the drive-ins—from The Speck to Flannagan’s to Merhar’s to Jim Dandy to the Tik-Tok, an endless circle which symbolized the decade. On a Sunday afternoon you might see one or two of the cars parked at a neighborhood gas station, their owners moving around them, touching up the chrome with a cloth, attending to some minor repair while you stood respectfully by, waiting for just the right moment to make a comment or ask an informed question, to be a part of what was happening. Later that night, when you were supposed to be asleep, you might lie in bed listening to the radio, the music of Little Richard, Lavern Baker, or a young Elvis Presley, thinking about those cars and the one you would own someday. The longing for adulthood and mobility, the juices of puberty, not to mention the girls down the street—mix these elements together and you’ve got a heady mixture, a memory of mind and body that’s not easily exorcised even after 25 years. left the parking lot, filled with German, Japanese and American Uni-cars, each a clone of the other, and entered the Coliseum, yearning for the days when cars had an identity. Inside the building, the display area was filled with flashy show versions of the cars in the parking lot: Volkswagens with flared fenders, muscle cars with scoops and big rubber, vans with elaborate murals. There were molded fiberglass Model T hotrod replicas, all alike, one distinguished only by the roses painted on its starter! Impatiently I made my way to the section set aside for cars from the past. There I saw a sharp ’32 Ford five window with a hot flathead, and a lowered 1950 Mercury from California. They were classics alright, but I soon discovered that they had both been built the year before, to capitalize on the nostalgia kick, an off-shoot of the cars in “Happy Photograph by Pete Sukalac Clinton St. Quarterly 27
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