Christmas 2013

It is Christmas Day, 2013. The time is 12:30 AM. It has been Christmas for half an hour in my house. I just finished watching an old Perry Mason episode on TV. I enjoy the old Perry Mason shows … the TV series that was filmed from 1957 through 1966. It’s like having a time machine to view late ‘50s American culture. The women “ladies” of the era wore hats, sometimes veils, and always white cotton gloves. At least, they did when they “dressed up.” Of course, fashions come and go, and while hats and veils and gloves are now quaint, there was nothing wrong with wearing them back in the day. But watching how women were generally portrayed on the show demonstrates how much our culture has changed since that time. I shake my head and think, “No wonder there was a feminist movement.”

I like the old cars on the show, too. Okay, old is a relative term. I think that somewhere around the mid- to late-50s, American-made automobiles began losing their personalities. By 1960 they were long and wide and heavy and on their way to becoming indistinctive.

I owned a ‘55 Chevy. It had a Blue Flame inline 6 that burned a ridiculous amount of motor oil. I always carried a couple of 2 gallon cans of oil in the trunk. It had a solid steel dashboard – none of your fancy cushioned stuff, thank you. It also lacked seat belts. It was a manly car. In an accident, your soft body would hit the steel dashboard and you’d be dead. Or you’d be skewered by the solid, non-telescoping steering shaft. And we liked it! Apparently, because we sure bought a lot of them. But what it lacked in safety it made up for by being distinctive. When you saw a ‘55 Chevy you knew what it was. You wouldn’t mistake another car for a ‘55 Chevy. Well, you might mistake a ‘56 Chevy for a ‘55, but not if you had owned either one. I don’t remember the model, whether it was a One-Fifty, a Two-Ten, or a Bel Air. But more Two-Tens were produced than the other models, so that’s probably what it was. If you want a ‘55 Chevy today, you can still get one. A collector will sell you one for around $40,000.

I traded the ‘55 Chevy for a ‘60 Plymouth. The Plymouth had giant tail fins and a pushbutton transmission – the buttons selected vacuum lines to the transmission. The transmission on my Plymouth had no Park position – you used the parking brake and hoped it held. The steering wheel wasn’t round; it was shaped like an ellipse. When you were driving straight down the road, the steering wheel was wider than it was tall. My particular Plymouth had manual steering; no power steering, except for muscle power.

I traded the ‘60 Plymouth for a ‘68 Dodge Charger. You may remember a TV show called “The Dukes of Hazzard.” The car the boys called “The General Lee” was a ‘69 Charger, one year newer than my Charger. I always liked the ‘68 better. I thought it was prettier. The power steering had almost no feedback. It felt almost like the steering wheel was connected to nothing. You could steer around a corner using one pinky finger. I don’t remember much about that car except that I wrecked it, and some yoyos who shouldn’t have been allowed within a mile of an automobile did the repair work, which they screwed up every way possible, plus several ways I had thought not possible. Live and learn.

So yeah, watching the old Perry Mason shows does take me back to that time, in certain ways. Early episodes captured a time before the turmoil started, before drugs, before the summer of love, before Haight-Ashbury, before the Beatles, before Vietnam, before civil rights, before the women’s movement, before race riots and police riots. It evokes an era when all was right with the world, or so it appeared if you didn’t look too closely, and we were sitting on top of that world. Tons of shit was about to hit the fan, but on the old Perry Mason shows women wear white cotton gloves and defer to men, cars are huge with big V8 engines, and the phrases “gas guzzler” and “Arab oil” are yet to come into our consciousness. Looking back, it seems a simpler time, a more innocent time. It was a different world.

The world is faster now, with smart phones, tablet computers, social networking, instant communication, and with our own government spying on us (because how do they know who is good and who is bad unless they spy – excuse me, I meant to say “collect metadata” – on all of us?). I wouldn’t necessarily want to live in Perry Mason’s world again – after all, I’ve been there and done that – but it’s nice to visit for an hour.

Merry Christmas.