1967 Dodge D 200 Camper Special

Reid Cunningham:  I came across the truck in Lunenburg, MA.  It has the old version of the 318 V8, and the automatic trans that shifts on the dash.

AL: this era Dodge trucks were marketed in Canada as Fargos, and here's a Fargo 100 from south Saskatchewan.  And here's a 1964 Dodge D100 from Marfa, Texas. And a 1968 Dodge D 200 from Salida, Colorado.

Joseph Fratesi: Yes/No Traffic Signals

YES / NO. Traffic signals

Joseph Fratesi

Years ago, I had a friend with the words “yes” and “no” tattooed on the backs of his left and right arms, just above the elbows. He was pretty heavily inked, and despite a crisp, bold font, the words were absorbed by the broader tapestry, becoming more pattern than text. Later, when I began driving in New York City, I saw the same presentation on the backs of trucks and realized that YES / NO is shorthand for the common tailgate warning: “This truck makes wide turns, do not pass on right.” As I saw more of these messages, I also began to notice variations on the warning, always in the same binary format...

The origin of the warning is thoroughly practical in nature, its primary iteration (“This truck makes wide turns”) intended to clearly communicate to drivers the dangers of passing a truck on the right side. The extrapolations, on the other hand, have lost almost all didactic value, becoming a kind of private language in plain English. There could be no other context in which SURF / TURF or SEND FLOWERS / RECEIVE FLOWERS mean pass / don’t pass. They acquire that meaning both by virtue of their location (on the back of a truck) and through their proxy relationship to the original warning. But given that they are legible only by virtue of that relationship, they are meaninful only to insiders, to those who “speak the language.” Even in cases where the reference is unfamiliar or insensible—YEE HA / HOG TIED—the meaning is understood.. 

Besides being meaningful only to an insider audience, YES / NOs are visibleonly to them. As we move through the world, we selectively process visual information, filtering on the basis of a wide range of criteria, noticing much less than we see. In much the same way that my friend’s tattoos, by failing to attach symbolically to anything recognizable, more or less disappeared, YES / NOs remain largely “unseen” components of the graphic chaos that surrounds us. Not one person to whom I’ve described this phenomenon had seen an example of it prior to my description. Many subsequently did.

At the risk of sounding like someone who needs to get out a bit more frequently, I can say that the thrill of spotting a marked truck, chasing it down, and getting the photo rates very highly. As does the thrill in being reminded that the world sometimes hides its riches in plain view, and that, in general, life is interesting in direct proportion to what we choose to notice. Note: As time goes by, I see fewer and fewer of these, and I’ve never seen one outside of New York. The extinction of this practice seems like a real possibility. I hope that after reading this, a few of you will feel called to the hunt.     

                                                                    --Joseph Fratesi                                                                     

(Fratesi is a designer, and founder of Atlas Industries in Brooklyn.

                        This piece was originally posted in Cabinet Magazine)

Dodge 150 Power Wagon, Northern Virginia

 

From Matthew Sheehey: "I came across this great old Dodge Power Wagon today in North Arlington, VA. Looks to be from 1978 or so. I miss New York registration stickers, which include the model year..."

We have posted Power Wagon of the same era in Cambridge MA of all places: The Power Wagon That Went to Harvard.

RadWgn

Heading out of Cambridge for Montreal, & caught the 240 wagon somewhere in Somerville while  on a  baroque backstreet Waze routing to I-93. Made it to Burlington Vt in 4hrs 15. Overnight here. Mo'ray'al demain. On y va. You know we love Volvos, especially old ones, especially wagons.
 

1975 Pontiac Grand Am

 

The color says 70s, doesn't it? Kinda cool machine. We spotted it between Augusta and Belfast, Maine.

1972 Oldsmobile Delta 88

Nice summer car caught just west of Belfast, Maine. We posted a 1971 Olds Delta 88 Custom in NJ a few weeks back. And a 1974 Cutlass Supreme in Maine. And this 1970 Vista Cruiser in Cambridge, Mass.

Standard Vanguard

 Do you recall the Unidentified Driving Object that we posted a couple of years ago, in one of Aidan O'Neill's station wagon photos from Québec in the 1950s?

After considerable  trawling, and some advice from experts ("British, 1948-52?" we've decided it's 1948 or '49 Standard Vanguard. These were produced by the Standard Motor Company in Coventry from 1948 to 1963 and exported across the Commonwealth-- e.g. Canada- and into other markets as well.

From motor-car.net: "The car was announced in July 1947. It was completely new with no resemblance to the previous models, and was Standard's first post-Second World War car. It was also the first model to carry the new Standard badge, which was a heavily stylised representation of the wings of a Griffin.

"In the wake of the Second World War many potential customers in the UK and in English-speaking export markets had recently experienced several years of military or naval service, therefore a car name related to the British Navy carried a greater resonance than it would for later generations. The name of the Standard Vanguard recalled HMS Vanguard, the last of the British Navy's battleships, launched in 1944 amid much media attention: permission to use the name involved Standard in extensive negotiations with senior Royal Navy personnel.

"The styling of the car resembled the pre-war Plymouth with a sloping 'beetle-back.' Russian media claimed that styling of this car had been in part influenced by Russian GAZ-M20 Pobeda, which had been in development from 1943 and went into production in 1946. In 1952 The Motor magazine stated that the Soviet Pobeda 'shows a certain exterior resemblance to the Standard Vanguard', disregarding the fact that the Pobeda had been  launched a year before the Vanguard. In Scandinavia, Standard marketed the Standard Ten saloon as the 'Vanguard Junior'."

When Mercedes-Benz Had Fins

A Spy Who Came In From the Cold kinda car; you could see it cruising quietly through the grey fogs of West Berlin, kind of Cold War-compromised by those wanna-be fins. Sold out to the Yanks, from a Jaguar point-of-view; but much more reliable than the contemporary British intelligence product.

Stanford umbrella. Don't knoww here that came from. Not mine. Clearly Cali car though. Black plates rule. We caught the car in a gas station parking lot somewhere between Lexington, Waltham and Belmont, Massachusetts.

1927 Studebaker

Driving by a gas station in Belmont, Mass. and...it kinda stood out. Faded glory, certainly; but not bad after 96 years. Looked like a barn find, except not in a barn. Might have been repainted a long time ago, but those wooden spokes do look original. Some inanimate objects--even semi-mass produced mechanical contraptions--do acquire, with age, something more than just patina. Is it soul? Something of the dead generations that must have known, driven, been driven in this car...must have rubbed off on the machine. Soul? Maybe. The living and the dead. Anyway, there she was, on a bright early-fall Saturday in New England, confronting my 16-year-old son and me, on our way home from the driving range, with history, mortality, and decay; and doing so with a certain kind of steadfast integrity. A lot to ask of a machine. Built and owned and maintained and, maybe, loved by humans, though.