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| My wife and our 1973 Pinto? |
The 1970s: Never Forgotten, Never
Celebrated
“Nobody is apt to look on the 1970s as the
good old days.” – Time Magazine.
“It seemed like nothing happened.” – Peter
N. Carroll title of his monograph on the 1970s.
Personally, the
1970s was a lost decade. And my memories of that time are for the most part
filed in the deepest recesses of my mind, perhaps to preserve my present
equillibrium. My cars from those days
reflect a similar mentality. Nostalgia of
those days is largely absent, and amnesia is the general rule. In looking back,
how can a decade can be seen as positive
“auto” biographically, when the best
car that I owned during the decade was a 1973 Pinto?
That Pinto was a trooper of a car, powered by
a 1.6 liter Kent engine that never quit. And contrary to my student’s
perceptions, that car did not explode and kill its occupants! In contrast, my
1974 Capri V-6 was my first (and last) new car, a vehicle plagued with issues
that included a clutch cable that kinked time after time after replacement,
often at the most inconvenient times as I was crossing the Mississippi River
Bridge in New Orleans. The Capri was
equipped with a water pump that for a year or so would last would last less
than a 1000 miles. Those were the good ones, as several pumps could not be bolted
on properly because flanges were not machined flat and thus uneven pumps fractured
when bolted down! And to add insult to
injury, at the end of the decade my family purchased a 1979 Chevy Malibu that I
subsequently inherited, featuring the infamous THM-200 transmission that blew
pan gaskets and overheated repetitively. That problem was only solved after I
tore that transmission out and replaced it with one proper for a V-8 engine. And
it seems that everyone from my generation has similar car story disasters to
tell.
On
a far broader scope than that of personal or auto history, Andreas Killen has
argued that the seventies continue as "the foundling of recent American
history, claimed by no one." It was a decade of dwindling birth rates, the
lowest in American history. Given what
happened to the U.S. in Vietnam, it was a time in which the limits of the
nation’s global power was once and for all exposed. And our national identity
was transformed, as homogenized culture derived from traditional class and
economic structures gave way to new sensibilities that were linked to
ethnicity, race, and gender. Gays,
feminists, African –Americans, and the elderly all wanted a place at the table,
and to a lesser degree perhaps, their own distinctive rides.
One
significant question centers on the extent that a complacent American
automobile industry recognize the emergence of a rapidly evolving new social
matrix, one contained within an economy characterized by both inflation and
recession?[1]
Secondly, how pervasive was the notion that the automobile had become a social
problem, as argued by James Flink in his The
Automobile Age and reflected in the contemporary writings of Ralph Nader,
Emma Rothschild, John Jerome, Lester Brown, and others?
For
the American automobile industry, the seventies have never ended. Intense
foreign competition, high fuel prices, federal government regulation concerning
safety and the environment, quality and reliability, potential power train
transitions, and disaffected consumers all surfaced during the early 1970s and
really never went away. Yet, scholars focusing on automobile history have
utterly neglected the decade. Perhaps the oversight is because these
years followed the glorious 1950s and 60s. Perhaps, the disregard is a
consequence of enthusiasts' distain of what is regarded as the post-1972
"Malaise Era."
Nevertheless, in terms of both automobile history and global history this
period contains all the ingredients of revolutionary and enduring change.
It was an era characterized by the loss of product quality and Detroit
Three market shares due to the emergence of a rapidly changing global economy.
On the street, Americans experienced the appearance of cars equipped with
ugly bumpers and poor running engines, annoying buzzers, and quick-to-rust body
parts.
[1]
Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing
Happened (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2nd ed.,
2000), Preface.
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