Summer Nationals - Green Hill Park

They started the burnouts about a half hour early today in Green Hill Park.

I wasn't complaining, though, as I'd already been wandering around taking pictures of cars for nearly an hour. Since I'm not really a motor-head, I can get car show saturated fairly quick.

But I did shoot video of the burnouts for about forty-five minutes and collected over a dozen burnouts inside my trusty little Hi-Def camcorder before I started feeling like the burnt rubber smoke might kill me... I'll be editing all that stuff after I post this, and we'll see how long it takes to actually get it online...

The thing that appeals to me in these shows and cruise night events, actually, is seeing cars from the 50's and 60's that were the models I grew up with. They're the ones that I can identify with.

Take, for instance, this chorus line of four Chevys with their mouths open... I mean, these are cars that, aside from the customizing, were everywhere when I was a kid.

One of our family cars was a '55 Chevy sedan, and there were Chevy II's, '57 Chevys and Chevy Novas that wove in and out of my life for years.

I owned an old Chevy Nova when I first met Kathy. I always liked to be able to do minor work on my own cars, but after the Nova I haven't done any of my own work.

To see these vintage examples of original American heavy metal, all collected together in one place... well, it's a nostalgia thing for me.

Here's a 1956 Ford.

In 1969, I bought a black 1956 Ford from a guy named Joe Senosk. I remember stuffing the intermediate pipe with a bunch of steel wool (it had no muffler), bringing to an inspection station in South Grafton, and having the guy go through it for a few minutes, grumble something, take my two bucks, and slap a sticker on it.

Once I was far enough away from the station for the guy not to notice, I gunned the engine and blew out the steel wool.

I paid twenty-five dollars for that car.

It ran just fine for about a year, before I picked up a 1961 Oldsmobile 88 for a mere thirty-five bucks.

This is a 1966 Saab.

There were a few of these on the street where I grew up. When you revved up the engine hard, it sounded a little bit like a popcorn popper right afterwards as there would be a little string of backfirish noises when the engine revs came back down.

People bought these and Volkswagen bugs, along with a few other fuel efficient cars back in the mid-1960's. They were popular amongst people who could easily afford gas guzzlers and much more ostentatious vehicles, but who clearly wanted to do something a bit more sane for their regular transportation.

The fuel efficient fad came on the heels of the late 1950's when cars got so big that they were like living rooms on wheels...

Like this 1958 Chrysler Imperial, for instance.

The trend of very large cars never really went away, though. It has something to do with the whole "size matters" mentality, I think.

When a friend of mine on Long Island showed up with a Hummer a couple of years ago, another friend of mine asked if these things had any Freudian significance. I thought that perhaps they did.

But if you've never gotten behind the wheel of a really powerful car and experienced what it's like to have all that raw power transfered down to the slightest twitch of your right foot on the accelerator... well, there's no way anyone can tell me that this stuff isn't exciting!