Every Car Had a Personality

When Automobiles Had Style, Character, and a Soul.

Part of The American Time Capsule — preserving the people, places, products, traditions, and everyday moments that shaped growing up in America before the digital age. This article explores the cars, highways, road trips, and adventures that made the open road part of the American dream.

Before there were smart cars… there were cars with personality.

Long before touchscreens, GPS, lane assist, and software updates, automobiles had their own identities. You could recognize one from half a block away by its shape, its chrome, the rumble of its engine, or even the way it sounded when the door closed.

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Every September Was Christmas for Car Lovers

There was a time when you could identify almost every American car from half a block away.

A ’57 Chevy looked nothing like a ’58.

A Ford looked nothing like a Plymouth.

A Pontiac looked nothing like an Oldsmobile.

And every September, America waited to see what Detroit would dream up next.

Cars didn’t just get new paint colors.

They got entirely new personalities.

Dealers draped the new models with giant covers.

Television commercials teased the “all-new” cars.

Newspapers filled their automotive sections with photographs of longer bodies, bigger engines, more chrome, and whatever styling trick Detroit had invented that year.

Families visited dealerships just to look.

You didn’t even have to be buying a car.

It was a time before high pressure sales tactics took over when car salesmen were punished for not selling a car to everyone who came in.

Kids wandered the showroom.

Fathers compared horsepower.

Mothers inspected interiors and color combinations.

Everybody had an opinion about which manufacturer had gotten it right.

The unveiling itself was entertainment.

Cars weren’t just something I admired from the sidewalk or through dealership windows. For a while, they practically rotated through our driveway.

My dad’s brother owned a used-car dealership in Ferguson, and Dad worked there as a salesman for less than a year.

It seemed as though every week he came home driving something different.

One week it might be a Studebaker Hawk.

The next, a Ford Fairlane.

Then something completely different.

For a car-crazy kid like me, having Dad work at a used-car dealership was almost like having the world’s inventory delivered to the house one car at a time.

I loved it.

Dad eventually didn’t.

His brother apparently believed in giving the sales staff every possible advantage when negotiating with customers. The rooms where prospective buyers discussed a deal were bugged, allowing the salesmen to hear what the customers were saying privately and know which way the wind was blowing before returning to the negotiation.

Dad didn’t appreciate that way of doing business.

He quit before he’d been there a year.

My disappointment had nothing to do with dealership ethics.

I was a kid.

I was disappointed that the parade of different cars coming home with Dad was over.

Every Brand Had Its Own Personality

To a car-crazy kid watching America’s highways, the brands seemed to have personalities of their own.

Chevrolet felt like the everyman’s car.

Ford seemed confident.

Pontiac wanted to be exciting.

Oldsmobile felt a little more sophisticated.

Buick suggested you’d done pretty well for yourself.

And Cadillac?

Cadillac meant you’d arrived.

Every manufacturer seemed to be selling more than an automobile.

It was selling an identity.

Every manufacturer appealed to a different kind of driver.

Then Came the Little Imports

Detroit iron still ruled the American road when I was growing up.

Cars were big.

Engines were big.

Chrome was everywhere.

But gradually, something very different began appearing alongside them.

The imports.

The little Volkswagen Beetle proudly ignored almost every styling trend Detroit embraced.

The VW Bus looked like nothing else on the road and eventually became a symbol of adventure and the counterculture.

Then came the Japanese.

I remember cruising the dealerships along Florissant Road, the main drag through Ferguson, when those small Japanese cars began appearing…

One of the girls in my class had a father who owned the local Pontiac dealership. When he decided to take on Honda, people laughed.

Honda?

Those little things?

They’ll never sell.

Compared with the American cars surrounding them, those early imports looked tiny and underpowered.

Detroit was producing enormous automobiles with powerful engines, acres of sheet metal, and enough chrome to signal passing aircraft.

Who was going to give that up for one of those little cars?

At least, that’s how a lot of Americans seemed to see it.

We had no idea what was coming.

Looking back, I realize I was standing along Florissant Road watching the earliest signs of a change that would eventually transform the American automobile business.

But at the time?

I wasn’t thinking about the future of Detroit.

I just loved cars.

Big ones.

Small ones.

Fast ones.

Strange ones.

All shapes and sizes.

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Everybody Had a Favorite

Mustang.

GTO.

Charger.

Corvette.

Thunderbird.

Impala.

Maybe a Studebaker Hawk or the futuristic Avanti if your tastes ran a little differently.

There were station wagons with simulated wood paneling that hauled generations of American families on vacation.

Convertibles that made every sunny Saturday feel special.

And no matter what you drove…

Somebody always insisted his brand was better.

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I Knew Every Car on the Road

My fascination with automobiles started long before I was old enough to drive.

Whenever my dad and I were out together, he’d point at a passing car and ask,

“Son, what is that one?”

Without hesitation I’d answer,

“That’s a ’59 Thunderbird.”

Or a ’63 Galaxie.

Or a ’57 Chevy.

Or whatever happened to be rolling past us.

He was always amazed that I could identify almost every make and model just by its shape, grille, tail lights, or chrome trim.

That fascination followed me home.

Of course, I had something of an unfair advantage.

With Dad temporarily selling used cars for his brother, different automobiles were constantly showing up at our house.

I studied them.

The grilles.

The chrome.

The taillights.

The body lines.

To me, cars had faces.

And once you learned their faces, identifying them wasn’t much different from recognizing somebody you knew walking down the street.

I Built the Cars I Couldn’t Drive Yet

Like millions of boys growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, I spent countless hours building 1/25-scale plastic model cars, mostly from Revell kits, although I built my share of AMT models too.

I rarely left them stock.

I’d customize them with body putty, sandpaper, and plenty of imagination before giving them fresh coats of spray paint in colors like Candy Apple Red or metallic blue.

I didn’t have one favorite.

I loved cars.

All shapes and sizes.

And since I wasn’t old enough to drive them yet, I did the next best thing.

I built them.

I was always looking for the latest Revell model kit…

By the time I was finished, I had an entire collection proudly displayed in my room.

I can still remember the unmistakable smell of those little tubes of airplane glue.

Back then, it was simply part of building model airplanes and cars. It never once occurred to me that some kids actually sniffed it to get high.

To me, it was just the smell of another Saturday afternoon spent creating the car I wished I could someday drive.

Building model cars was part of a childhood when hobbies required patience, imagination, and plenty of time at the kitchen or bedroom table, something I remember in When Childhood Was a Hobby.

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Dad Taught Me to Drive Before I Was Old Enough

I don’t remember ever having what you’d call formal driving instruction—unless you count Driver’s Ed in high school.

By then, I had already been driving for years.

My real driving instructor was Dad.

Starting when I was very young—maybe eight years old—Dad would sometimes sit me on his lap behind the steering wheel.

I steered.

He worked the pedals.

But he wasn’t simply letting a little kid pretend to drive.

He was teaching me how to drive.

Dad taught me not to concentrate only on the car directly in front of me.

“Look several cars ahead,” he’d tell me.

That way I could see trouble developing before it reached us.

He taught me how much distance to leave between our car and the one ahead.

Check the rearview mirror constantly.

Use your turn signals.

Dim your bright lights when another car approaches.

Don’t use the horn unless you really need it.

And pay attention to the dashboard.

Dad taught me to watch the gauges—and what he called the “idiot lights”—for low oil pressure, engine temperature, fuel level, or anything else the car was trying to tell me.

Long before anyone used the term defensive driving, Dad was teaching me that driving wasn’t simply pointing the car in the right direction.

You had to know what was happening around you.

Then Dad Handed Me the Keys

By fifteen, I had become a pretty accomplished driver.

I certainly thought so.

Apparently Dad did too.

On one of our trips from St. Louis to California along Route 66, Dad became exhausted.

That legendary highway was already part of my childhood long before I understood what it would eventually represent to America, something I remember in Route 66: The Mother Road

We were apparently in a hurry to get to California, although I no longer remember why.

Dad wanted to pull over and get some sleep.

I had another idea.

“Why don’t you let me drive while you sleep?”

That way we wouldn’t lose any time.

There was only one small problem with this otherwise brilliant plan.

I was fifteen years old.

Dad thought about it…

And handed me the responsibility.

I ended up driving much of the trip while he slept.

Every once in a while he’d wake up, look around, check on how things were going, and compliment me on my driving.

Then he’d apparently decide his fifteen-year-old son had everything under control and go back to sleep.

Looking back today, sending a fifteen-year-old down Route 66 while Dad slept beside him probably wouldn’t make many modern parenting manuals.

But Dad knew how much he’d taught me.

And more importantly…

He trusted me.

I loved every minute behind that wheel.

I didn’t simply want to get to California.

I loved driving cars.

Then I Finally Flew Solo

I was sixteen when I finally got my driver’s license.

By then, driving itself wasn’t particularly new to me.

Driving alone was.

My first opportunity came courtesy of my eighteen-year-old cousin, who had just bought a 1965 Ford Mustang.

She let me take it by myself to a friend’s house.

I remember getting behind the wheel and realizing there was nobody sitting beside me.

No Dad working the pedals.

No Dad reminding me to check the mirror.

No Driver’s Ed instructor watching what I was doing.

Just me and the Mustang.

I was a little disappointed when I discovered it only had the six-cylinder engine and an automatic transmission.

After all, by sixteen I already had certain standards.

But who was I kidding?

It was still a Mustang.

I pulled away completely on my own for the first time, and I can still remember the thrill.

For years, Dad had been teaching me how to drive.

Now I had a driver’s license in my wallet, a Mustang underneath me, and an empty passenger seat beside me.

I had finally flown solo.

And I loved it.

That first taste of driving freedom eventually led to another American rite of passage—having a set of keys that actually belonged to you—a memory I revisit in Everybody Remembers Their First Car

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And Cars Really Were Different

Bench seats stretched from door to door.

Three-on-the-tree manual transmissions.

Four-on-the-floor muscle cars.

Hand-crank windows.

Little vent windows.

AM radios.

Ashtrays in every door.

Then came the miracle of the 8-track player.

Cup holders?

Nobody expected them.

Seat belts?

We had them eventually.

Getting us to use them was another matter.

Many of us ignored them.

Cars demanded more from the driver because they did considerably less for you.

There was no lane-departure warning.

No blind-spot monitor.

No backup camera.

No dashboard screen telling you what to do next.

Dad’s version of driver assistance was sitting beside me saying, “Look farther down the road.”

Cars weren’t designed to protect us from ourselves.

They were designed to make us want to drive.

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Every Car Had Its Own Sound—and Smell

You could recognize your father’s car before you ever saw it.

The starter grinding for a second before the engine came alive.

The deep rumble of a V8.

The click…click…click of the turn signal.

The solid “thunk” of a heavy steel door closing.

Fresh motor oil.

The smell of gasoline while topping off the tank.

A newly waxed finish.

Hot vinyl seats on a summer afternoon.

That unmistakable aroma of a brand-new car.

Modern cars may be quieter.

Safer.

More efficient.

But many of them have lost the personalities that made us fall in love with driving.

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Gas Stations Had Personality Too

Every gas station seemed different.

Full-service attendants.

“Fill ‘er up?”

Checking your oil.

Cleaning your windshield.

Giving away drinking glasses, steak knives, road maps, or Green Stamps.

Accurate directions.

Back then, buying gasoline felt like customer service instead of self-checkout.

Cruising Was America’s Friday Night Tradition

Long before social media…

Teenagers met on Main Street.

They cruised.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Sometimes we’d spend more on gas cruising around town than we did on whatever we were planning to do.

Nobody had anywhere special to go.

The drive was the destination.

And when we actually did have somewhere to go, there was no GPS telling us how to get there—just road maps, directions, wrong turns, and the occasional adventure I remember in The Last Generation That Got Lost.

Drive-in restaurants like A&W, Steak ‘n Shake, Dog n Suds, Dairy Queen and countless local hamburger stands became part of the cruising tradition.

Drive-in restaurants.

Root beer floats.

Rock ‘n’ roll on the radio.

Windows down.

One arm resting on the door.

Life felt wonderfully simple.

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More Than Just Cars

Looking back, those automobiles represented something much bigger than transportation.

They represented freedom.

Independence.

Growing up.

Family vacations.

First dates.

Friday nights.

The open road.

America’s confidence in its future.

We thought we were simply driving to Grandma’s house…

Cruising Main Street…

Or admiring the new models arriving every September.

Looking back, we were witnessing one of the greatest eras in American automotive history.

Every car had a personality.

And somehow…

So did America.

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Bunker Rule

Dad taught me to look several cars ahead, check the mirrors, use my turn signals, and keep an eye on the gauges.

But the most important rule was simple:

Pay attention to the road. The car isn’t supposed to do the thinking for you.

Bunker Notice

This is a personal remembrance of the cars, roads, dealerships, gas stations, and driving culture I grew up with. Modern automobiles are unquestionably safer, cleaner, more efficient, and technologically superior in countless ways.

But better technology and better memories aren’t always the same thing.

Sometimes you can improve almost everything about a car…

and still miss the personality.