Farewell, My Lovely!
May 9, 1936
I see by the new Sears Roebuck
catalogue that it is still possible to buy an axle for a 1909 Model T Ford, but
I am not deceived. The great days have faded, the end is in sight. Only one
page in the current catalogue is devoted to parts and accessories for the Model
T; yet everyone remembers spring times when the Ford gadget section was larger
than men’s clothing, almost as large as household furnishings. The last Model T
was built in 1927, and the car is fading from what scholars call the American
scene—which is an understatement, because to a few million people who grew up
with it, the old Ford practically was the American scene.
It was the miracle God had wrought.
And it was patently the sort of thing that could only happen once. Mechanically
uncanny, it was like nothing that had ever come to the world before.
Flourishing industries rose and fell with it. As a vehicle, it was
hard-working, commonplace, heroic; and it often seemed to transmit those
qualities to the persons who rode in it. My own generation identifies it with
Youth, with its gaudy, irretrievable excitements; before it fades into the
mist, I would like to pay it the tribute of the sigh that is not a sob, and set
down random entries in a shape somewhat less cumbersome than a Sears Roebuck
catalogue.
The Model T was distinguished from
all other makes of cars by the fact that its transmission was of a type known
as planetary—which was half metaphysics, half sheer friction. Engineers
accepted the word “planetary” in its epicyclic sense, but I was always
conscious that it also meant “wandering,” “erratic.” Because of the peculiar
nature of this planetary element, there was always, in Model T, a certain dull
rapport between engine and wheels, and even when the car was in a state known
as neutral, it trembled with a deep imperative and tended to inch forward.
There was never a moment when the bands were not faintly egging the machine on.
In this respect it was like a horse, rolling the bit on its tongue, and country
people brought to it the same technique they used with draft animals.
Its most remarkable quality was its
rate of acceleration. In its palmy days the Model T could take off faster than
anything on the road. The reason was simple. To get under way, you simply
hooked the third finger of the right hand around a lever on the steering
column, pulled down hard, and shoved your left foot forcibly against the
low-speed pedal. These were simple, positive motions; the car responded by
lunging forward with a roar. After a few seconds of this turmoil, you took your
toe off the pedal, eased up a mite on the throttle, and the car, possessed of
only two forward speeds, catapulted directly into high with a series of ugly
jerks and was off on its glorious errand. The abruptness of this departure was
never equalled in other cars of the period. The human leg was (and still is)
incapable of letting in a clutch with anything like the forthright abandon that
used to send Model T on its way. Letting in a clutch is a negative, hesitant
motion, depending on delicate nervous control; pushing down the Ford pedal was
a simple, country motion—an expansive act, which came as natural as kicking an
old door to make it budge.
The driver of the old Model T was a
man enthroned. The car, with top up, stood seven feet high. The driver sat on
top of the gas tank, brooding it with his own body. When he wanted gasoline, he
alighted, along with everything else in the front seat; the seat was pulled
off, the metal cap unscrewed, and a wooden stick thrust down to sound the
liquid in the well. There were always a couple of these sounding sticks kicking
around in the ratty sub-cushion regions of a flivver. Refuelling was more of a
social function then, because the driver had to unbend, whether he wanted to or
not. Directly in front of the driver was the windshield—high, uncompromisingly
erect. Nobody talked about air resistance, and the four cylinders pushed the
car through the atmosphere with a simple disregard of physical law.
There was this about a Model T: the
purchaser never regarded his purchase as a complete, finished product. When you
bought a Ford, you figured you had a start—a vibrant, spirited framework to
which could be screwed an almost limitless assortment of decorative and
functional hardware. Driving away from the agency, hugging the new wheel
between your knees, you were already full of creative worry. A Ford was born
naked as a baby, and a flourishing industry grew up out of correcting its rare
deficiencies and combatting its fascinating diseases. Those were the great days
of lily-painting. I have been looking at some old Sears Roebuck catalogues, and
they bring everything back so clear.
First you bought a Ruby Safety
Reflector for the rear, so that your posterior would glow in another car’s
brilliance. Then you invested thirty-nine cents in some radiator Moto Wings, a
popular ornament which gave the Pegasus touch to the machine and did something
godlike to the owner. For nine cents you bought a fan-belt guide to keep the
belt from slipping off the pulley.
You bought a radiator compound to
stop leaks. This was as much a part of everybody’s equipment as aspirin tablets
are of a medicine cabinet. You bought special oil to prevent chattering, a
clamp-on dash light, a patching outfit, a tool box which you bolted to the
running board, a sun visor, a steering-column brace to keep the column rigid,
and a set of emergency containers for gas, oil, and water—three thin, disc-like
cans which reposed in a case on the running board during long, important
journeys—red for gas, gray for water, green for oil. It was only a beginning.
After the car was about a year old, steps were taken to check the alarming
disintegration. (Model T was full of tumors, but they were benign.) A set of
anti-rattlers (98c) was a popular panacea. You hooked them on to the gas and
spark rods, to the brake pull rod, and to the steering-rod connections. Hood
silencers, of black rubber, were applied to the fluttering hood.
Shock-absorbers and snubbers gave “complete relaxation.” Some people bought
rubber pedal pads, to fit over the standard metal pedals. (I didn’t like these,
I remember.) Persons of a suspicious or pugnacious turn of mind bought a
rear-view mirror; but most Model T owners weren’t worried by what was coming
from behind because they would soon enough see it out in front. They rode in a
state of cheerful catalepsy. Quite a large mutinous clique among Ford owners went
over to a foot accelerator (you could buy one and screw it to the floor board),
but there was a certain madness in these people, because the Model T, just as
she stood, had a choice of three foot pedals to push, and there were plenty of
moments when both feet were occupied in the routine performance of duty and
when the only way to speed up the engine was with the hand throttle.
Gadget bred gadget. Owners not only
bought ready-made gadgets, they invented gadgets to meet special needs. I
myself drove my car directly from the agency to the blacksmith’s, and had the
smith affix two enormous iron brackets to the port running board to support an
army trunk.
People who owned closed models
builded along different lines: they bought ball grip handles for opening doors,
window anti-rattlers, and de-luxe flower vases of the cut-glass anti-splash
type. People with delicate sensibilities garnished their car with a device
called the Donna Lee Automobile Disseminator—a porous vase guaranteed,
according to Sears, to fill the car with a “faint clean odor of lavender.” The
gap between open cars and closed cars was not as great then as it is now: for
$11.95, Sears Roebuck converted your touring car into a sedan and you went
forth renewed. One agreeable quality of the old Fords was that they had no
bumpers, and their fenders softened and wilted with the years and permitted
driver to squeeze in and out of tight places.
Tires were 30 x 3 1/2, cost about
twelve dollars, and punctured readily. Everybody carried a Jiffy patching set,
with a nutmeg grater to roughen the tube before the goo was spread on.
Everybody was capable of putting on a patch, expected to have to, and did have
to.
During my association with Model
T’s, self-starters were not a prevalent accessory. They were expensive and
under suspicion. Your car came equipped with a serviceable crank, and the first
thing you learned was how to Get Results. It was a special trick, and until you
learned it (usually from another Ford owner, but sometimes by a period of
appalling experimentation) you might as well have been winding up an awning.
The trick was to leave the ignition switch off, proceed to the animal’s head,
pull the choke (which was a little wire protruding through the radiator), and
give the crank two or three nonchalant upward lifts. Then, whistling as though
thinking about something else, you would saunter back to the driver’s cabin,
turn the ignition on, return to the crank, and this time, catching it on the
down stroke, give it a quick spin with plenty of That. If this procedure was
followed, the engine almost always responded—first with a few scattered
explosions, then with a tumultuous gunfire, which you checked by racing around
to the driver’s seat and retarding the throttle. Often, if the emergency brake
hadn’t been pulled all the way back, the car advanced on you the instant the
first explosion occurred and you would hold it back by leaning your weight
against it. I can still feel my old Ford nuzzling me at the curb, as though
looking for an apple in my pocket.
In zero weather, ordinary cranking
became an impossibility, except for giants. The oil thickened, and it became
necessary to jack up the rear wheels, which, for some planetary reason, eased
the throw.
The lore and legend that governed
the Ford were boundless. Owners had their own theories about everything; they
discussed mutual problems in that wise, infinitely resourceful way old women
discuss rheumatism. Exact knowledge was pretty scarce, and often proved less
effective than superstition. Dropping a camphor ball into the gas tank was a
popular expedient; it seemed to have a tonic effect on both man and machine.
There wasn’t much to base exact knowledge on. The Ford driver flew blind. He
didn’t know the temperature of his engine, the speed of his car, the amount of
his fuel or the pressure of his oil (the old Ford lubricated itself by what was
amiably described as the “splash system”). A speedometer cost money and was an
extra, like a windshield-wiper. The dashboard of the early models was bare save
for an ignition key; later models, grown effete, boasted an ammeter which
pulsated alarmingly with the throbbing of the car. Under the dash was a box of
coils, with vibrators which you adjusted, or thought you adjusted. Whatever the
driver learned of his motor, he learned not through instruments but through
sudden developments. I remember that the timer was one of the vital organs
about which there was ample doctrine. When everything else had been checked,
you “had a look” at the timer. It was an extravagantly odd little device,
simple in construction, mysterious in function. It contained a roller, held by
a spring, and there were four contact points on the inside of the case against
which, many people believed, the roller rolled. I have had a timer apart on a
sick Ford many times, but I never really knew what I was up to—I was just
showing off before God. There were almost as many schools of thought as there
were timers. Some people, when things went wrong, just clenched their teeth and
gave the timer a smart crack with a wrench. Other people opened it up and blew
on it. There was a school that held that the timer needed large amounts of oil;
they fixed it by frequent baptism. And there was a school that was positive it
was meant to run dry as a bone; these people were continually taking it off and
wiping it. I remember once spitting into a timer; not in anger, but in a spirit
of research. You see, the Model T driver moved in the realm of metaphysics. He
believed his car could be hexed.
One reason the Ford anatomy was
never reduced to an exact science was that, having “fixed” it, the owner
couldn’t honestly claim that the treatment had brought about the cure. There
were too many authenticated cases of Fords fixing themselves—restored naturally
to health after a short rest. Farmers soon discovered this, and it fitted
nicely with their draft-horse philosophy: “Let ‘er cool off and she’ll snap
into it again.”
A Ford owner had Number One Bearing
constantly in mind. This bearing, being at the front end of the motor, was the
one that always burned out, because the oil didn’t reach it when the car was
climbing hills. (That’s what I was always told, anyway.) The oil used to recede
and leave Number One dry as a clam flat; you had to watch that bearing like a
hawk. It was like a weak heart—you could hear it start knocking, and that was
when you stopped and let her cool off. Try as you would to keep the oil supply
right, in the end Number One always went out. “Number One Bearing burned out on
me and I had to have her replaced,” you would say, wisely; and your companions
always had a lot to tell about how to protect and pamper Number One to keep her
alive.
Sprinkled not too liberally among
the millions of amateur witch doctors who drove Fords and applied their own
abominable cures were the heaven-sent mechanics who could really make the car
talk. These professionals turned up in undreamed-of spots. One time, on the
banks of the Columbia River in Washington, I heard the rear end go out of my
Model T when I was trying to whip it up a steep incline onto the deck of a
ferry. Something snapped; the car slid backward into the mud. It seemed to me
like the end of the trail. But the captain of the ferry, observing the withered
remnant, spoke up.
“What’s got her?” he asked
“I guess it’s the rear end,” I
replied, listlessly. The captain leaned over the rail and stared. Then I saw
that there was a hunger in his eyes that set him off from other men.
“Tell you what,” he said,
carelessly, trying to cover up his eagerness, “let’s pull the son of a bitch up
onto the boat, and I’ll help you fix her while we’re going back and forth on
the river.”
We did just this. All that day I
plied between the towns of Pasco and Kennewick, while the skipper (who had once
worked in a Ford garage) directed the amazing work of resetting the bones of my
car.
Springtime in the heyday of the
Model T was a delirious season. Owning a car was still a major excitement,
roads were still wonderful and bad. The Fords were obviously conceived in
madness: any car which was capable of going from forward into reverse without
any perceptible mechanical hiatus was bound to be a mighty challenging thing to
the human imagination. Boys used to veer them off the highway into a level
pasture and run wild with them, as though they were cutting up with a girl.
Most everybody used the reverse pedal quite as much as the regular foot
brake—it distributed the wear over the bands and wore them all down evenly.
That was the big trick, to wear all the bands down evenly, so that the final
chattering would be total and the whole unit scream for renewal.
The days were golden, the nights
were dim and strange. I still recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal
crises when you drew up to a signpost and raced the engine so the lights would
be bright enough to read destinations by. I have never been really planetary
since. I suppose it’s time to say goodbye. Farewell, my lovely! ♦
