1953 Pontiac Chieftain. Cape Cod, Massachusetts. October 1954.

 

Summer Jeep

This was in Blue Hill, Maine. Jeeps used to seem...nimble.

 

1970 Mercury Cougar XR-7

Maybe "cougar" suggests something a little less appealing, these days, but @1976-72 the Cougar was the sleek cat in FoMoCo's pony car parade. This unit dens in Cambridge.

 

US 67, West Texas

 

Hamilton Fish photograph.

Northwest Passage

 

Autoliterate's "Highway Home" playlist is now available on Spotify, thanks to Jessica Marsh in Halifax...

One track from the original "Highway Home" list didn't make it onto Spotify: a snowy version of Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage by Eleanor Elektra & Hawthorn (Heather Scott, Talor Holland). So you will have to listen to it here--a song and a singing you won't want to miss.

1978-80 Jeep CJ5

 

David Branch caught the ranch Jeep in Fort Davis, Texas.

1967 Maserati Ghibli

An Iowa mechanic has to pay $7.2 Million after allegedly scamming repairs on classic cars...see Lawrence Hodges' story in Jalopnik: 

" Looks like you can’t trust all mechanics. Especially when you’re the millionaire owner of a rare car collection. The Des Moines Register reports that an Iowa mechanic has been ordered to pay over $7 million after he scammed the former CEO of Angie’s List on both repairs and classic car purchases...
          "The scamming began way back in 2010. Craig Hillinger was the owner of Healey Werks Corp. in Lawton, Iowa. Former Angie’s List CEO Bill Oesterle took his 1967 Maserati Ghibli to the shop for restoration... (AL: don't know what a Ghibli is but it sounds more expensive than, say, Ford's Aspire.)

].   "According to the suit, Hillinger quoted Oesterle a timetable of one to two years to complete the work for a price tag of “no more than $200,000.” Except that’s not what happened. Four years later, Hillinger hit Oesterle with a $1 million invoice....In another instance, Hillinger convinced Oesterle to go in on a purchase with him of an Austin-Healey 100M sports car. Hillinger told Oesterle, who gave $50,000 for the car, that it was a coveted factory model but needed some assembly, according to the complaint. It stayed with Hillinger until 2021... 

      "When Oesterle finally received the vehicle, he “discovered that the 100M was not a factory 100M as Hillinger had promised,” the lawsuit states.Now Hillinger has to pay up. Iowa 3rd district superior court Judge James Daane ordered Hillinger to pay Oesterle $2.4 million in damages. But the damages, which were then tripled because of Iowa motor vehicle laws due to the “willful and wanton disregard” for Oesterle’s rights. Hillinger also has to cover Oesterle’s legal fees..."

Here at AL we're not really focusing on Maserati (that's a plural noun, right?) but we did post this c.1966 Maserati Sebring in Maine last summah. And a recent Grantourismo, right  here in Cambridge.

Autoliterate's Songs for the Highway Home

Mary Behrens photograph 

The Autoliterate "Songs for the Highway Home" playlist is now available on Spotify, thanks to Jessica Marsh. 

Red Molly, "Vincent Black Lightning"

The Cedars, "Used Cars"

 Lyle Lovett, "The Family Reserve"

Donovan Woods, "Portland Maine"

Bob Dylan, "Blind Willie McTell"

The Pogues, "I'm A Man You Don't Meet Every Day"

Margo Cilker, "Tehachapi"

Van Morrison, "Raglan Road"

The Waterboys, "That Was The River, This Is The Sea" 

Bob Dylan, "Series of Dreams"

 Billy Bragg, "Way Over Yonder In A Minor Key"

Emmylou Harris, "Waltz Across Texas Tonight"

Van Morrison, "Cyprus Avenue"

Seldom Scene.  "White Line"

Eleanor Elektra & Hawthorn, "Northwest Passage"

Dire Straits, "Skate Away"

Jolie Holland "South Louisiana"

Neil Young, Four Strong Winds

Sinead O'Connor. The Foggy Dew

Townes VanZandt "Snowin' on Raton"

Shawn Colvin, "This Must Be The Place"

Steve Earle, "Pilgrim"

                                      --thanks to MLB for the photo ("Park Bar, Boquillas, Coah.") and to Alex Emond, who keeps his ear close to the ground and turned up at least 2 of these that I had not heard before. And to Colin, for White Line. The Banff sister- and brotherhood, in other words.

Alfa Romeo Spider. Newton, Mass.

 

From Reid Cunningham: An unexpected find on a late mid-December afternoon in New England. The car was in Newton, Massachusetts. The regular registration and EZPass, along the season make it likely a daily driver for parts of the year. The paint was worn through in places, and the car was worn, with some bruising, but given the age, a nice driver. Hopefully the owner will keep it away from the winter road salt.

AL: my old friend Dave Inglis out in Brandon, Manitoba has a Spider Veloce. And Jonathan Welsh caught a mid-80s Alfa in N.J. How about this Alfa Romeo Giulia at Bonneville in 1966? And, since we're speaking Italian, here's a gorgeous 1972 Lancia Fulvia.

Philip Levine, "What Work Is"

WHAT WORK IS

We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision

until you think you see your own brother

ahead of you, maybe ten places.

You rub your glasses with your fingers,

and of course it’s someone else’s brother,

narrower across the shoulders than

yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin

that does not hide the stubbornness,

the sad refusal to give in to

rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead

a man is waiting who will say, “No,

we’re not hiring today,” for any

reason he wants. You love your brother,

now suddenly you can hardly stand

the love flooding you for your brother,

who’s not beside you or behind or

ahead because he’s home trying to   

sleep off a miserable night shift

at Cadillac so he can get up

before noon to study his German.

Works eight hours a night so he can sing

Wagner, the opera you hate most,

the worst music ever invented.

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you’re too young or too dumb,

not because you’re jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,   

just because you don’t know what work is.

                                  

                                                Philip Levine, “What Work Is” from What Work Is (Poems) Knopf, 1991. Copyright © 1992 by Philip Levine. 

1973 GMC Sierra Grande 2500, Nevada

 

From Michael Moore, in Nevada: "Our caretaker for Wall Spring and Parker Ranch, a diesel mechanic in one of his other [concurrent] lives, showed up with this GMC last week;
1973, first year for the squarebodies he was pleased to point out [built late ’72 so really an early one], and top of the line in its time…"

Jeepster Commando

From Markus Anstadt: "I don't know the exact year but these were produced from 1966-1971. Thisparticular vehicle is parked in a residential Denver neighborhood."

AL: we posted an earlier edition (1948) of the  Jeepster a couple months ago. And a 1968 Jeepster Commando in Las Vegas, NM.

                      

1958 Chevrolet Del Ray sleeper

 

You've seen this car before. We love Sleepers. Like this 1964 Impala wagon. And this 1964 Chevrolet Biscayne. The '58s always appealed to me more than any tri-Five Chevy. Other '58s from GM were monstrous, however, notably the chrome-encrusted  '58 Buick, aka  Belchfire. Check out Hometown Buick for all you ever wanted to know about 1950s Buicks. Del Rays were the Chev stripper, I think. Salesman car. Except this unit has a 4-barrel Edelbrock carburetor and 4-on-the-floor; don't know if they ever came that way from the factory; likely not. We caught a 1958 Chevrolet Del Ray sedan in Colorado Springs a while back. A '58 Chevrolet Yeoman wagon, up in Maine, and 1958 Chevrolet Brookwood wagon in Cimarron, NM.

The Law of Dreams/ La Legge Dei Sogni

 

Have you read my first novel, The Law of Dreams? Cover I like best: the Italian edition, published by Einaudi. 

Mitsubishi 2.7 litre Jeep

These from my Banff compadre, Toby Clark. He introduced me to a lot of back country Banff and we paddled a bunch of Rocky Mtn rivers...the Bow, Kootenay, Athabaska. Also West Texas and the Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande. For the past 25 years Toby has been spending most of the winter at a fishing camp/resort he and his family founded and own at Port Barton, on Palawan I., in the Philippines.  He has alway owned extraordinary vehicles,,,the Chevy sedan Suite 50....the '52 truck we drove from Banff to Texas one winter, hauling 6 canoes over Raton Pass.

This is the jeep Toby keeps on Palawan. His notes:

"1993 Mitsubishi military jeep 2.7 litre turbo charged diesel engine, high low range 4x4. Roof rack was built here in Puerto Princesa. It has allowed me to partake in some amazing adventures...considered by many to be one of the best 4x4's ever built. Not fast, but in all the yrs I have only ever been stuck once--and with the help of about 40 villagers– men women children– a few rocks and some huge hardwood planks, I was on my way again.  My youngest daughter and I once drove it onto a homemade bamboo raft and floated it across a major jungle river that had flooded then washed out the highway bridge. The raft was hauled back and forth by a huge diesel donkey winch similar to those used to haul out  logs in the early days of logging in British Columbia. The jeep was built from the 80's until 1998 for the Chinese agricultural market, so the steering wheel was on the left hand side same as USA. A Chinese farmer could plow his fields haul livestock to market then clean it up and bring the family to town all with the one vehicle

 

Ford F-150 Lightning: hits and misses

 

...from George Pearkes' piece in Business Insider on the pleasures (and displeasures) of the Ford F-150 Lightning ownership experience. We posted on the Lightning earlier this year. 

And Bloomberg has a piece on Ford offering "flexible financing" to persuade municipalities to buy the Lightning as a police cruiser.  The last police car we posted was a '59–of course-Pontiac.

     Kinda ugly. More than. A monster. In a bad way. 

Is AL alone in finding Ford--no, all- trucks kinda ugly these days? The bigger, the uglier. They need to lighten up on the beefcake. Or maybe keep it as an option. So that, if you want, you can order the Faux-Masculinity Package. We prefer European trucks; they look like trucks.  American trucks--a lot of American culture-- seem to reflect a WWE aesthetic or set of values, if you can call them that. Monstrous... misogynist... money..are a fair summary, I reckon. 

Too big. Too get-outta-my-way. Too expensive.

              

Kate Daniels, "Crowns"

Crowns  

  for Philip Levine

Around the time I first read the poetry of Philip Levine,

my teeth were fixed. Two or three hundred bucks

(I’ve forgotten now) purchased a brand new me,

two porcelain crowns. In the dentist’s chair, my midget

canines were filed down to sharp, bright points

hardly larger than the bronzed end of a Bic

pen, then crammed in the black-backed caps

of two hardened, china fakes. No more

covering my mouth to obscure the evidence

of faulty genes. No more tears at images

embezzled from graduation picnics

when Darrell Dodson picked me up and slung me

in the pool, and someone took a picture

of my lips slacking back to reveal my gums

in what appeared to be a scream. No more breezes

winding through the gappy pickets of my ill-grown

teeth and down my throat. No more worrying

some boy would snag his tongue in the zigzagged bulkhead

of my upper row, and bring us both to blood.

I’ll love Levine forever for confessing his own struggles

with orthodontia, his rot-plagued “Depression mouth,”

a dentist called it, his cavities and root canals, his occipital pain,

for his photograph in Antaeus, the summer of ’78,

the stained and crooked slabs parked compellingly

behind his grin. Our teeth connected us before the poetry,

he, from the immigrant onion-eaters and temperate tipplers

of Manischiewtz. I, from a long line of tannin-stained

Irish Catholics who smoked themselves to fragile

states of calcium depletion, and a recent run of Carolina

gritballs, too poor to brush, too ignorant to care their teeth

retired in early middle age. I can see them now, perplexed

before an apple’s crispy rind, frustrated by a succulent, stringy rack

of pork ribs barbequed in the side lot of Earlene Worsham’s

gas station south of town. Levine would have understood my uncles,

enthroned on plastic-covered kitchen chairs patched with tape,

their work boots kicking up mucky clouds of chiggery dirt,

their pick ups parked nearby, shotguns in the rack,

sucking on cheap beers and harsh cigarettes,

their nails starved by nicotine to yellow curls, the car grease

embedded permanently in the creases of their hands.

When I met him, he was such a mensch, massive

in my mind, but in the flesh, something touching

about his shoulders in the worn tweed jacket, something

vulnerable in his feet in an ordinary pair of soiled, white sneakers.

He opened his mouth to laugh, one side rising up

like it does, in that derisive gesture that seems, at first, a sneer,

and I remembered my mother flexing back her lips to remove

delicately, with two stained fingers, just so, a fleck of tobacco

lodged between her teeth, and saw again my father flossing at the table

with the torn off cover of a paper book of matches,

then stubbing out his butt in the yellowed, oily pod of broken yolk

that was hemorrhaging across his breakfast plate.

I can face those images now without the shame

I carried in the days before the poetry of Phil Levine

liberated me. I can look at anything now, because I keep

his picture in my mind and his poems in my pocket.

I can stand my life because I wear the crown he constructed

for people like me — grocery checkers, lube jobbers, truck drivers,

waitresses — all of us crowned with the junkyard diadems

of shattered windshields and rusty chains, old pots

with spit tobacco congealing inside, torn screen doors

and gravestones in the front yard, just five short steps from life to death…

So there is my family with their broken beer bottles

and patched shoes, their mutts chained in a back yard

carved from a stingy pine woods, on cheap land

out near the county dump where the air swells with the perfume

of trash, a circle of them playing poker in a trailer somewhere

in the woods, or razoring the state decal from the windowshield

of a ransacked wreck to transfer to my brother’s car.

Or cleaning fish on the back porch and throwing the guts

to the tick-clogged dogs, or frying venison in a cast-iron pan

and stinking up the house with that heavy smell, showing

the buck’s big balls in a plastic cannister that once held salt.

Or burning tires in a field some autumn, scumming

the sky with a smoky, cursive black they can’t even read

but inhale poisonously again and again.

And there I am, walking along tolerantly now, with Phil Levine,

his poems in my pocket, his good rage gathered in my heart

and I can love them again, the way I did in the years before

I saw what they were and how the world would use them

and accepted the fact they were incapable of change.

We’re in a field I used to love, a redbone coonhound running ahead

her ears dragging the edges of the goldenrod till they are tipped

in pollen, like twin paintbrushes dipped in gilt. And the world

is hunting dogs and country music and unschooled voices

bending vowels and modest kitchen gardens where late tomatoes

are tied up with brownish streamers of old nylon hose.

The vast way your chest expands when the sun gradually sets

in mid-fall in central Virginia. The tobacco barns glimmering

in last light, the chinks darkening now, the slats solidifying at the close of day

and your mind opening up like the pine forest swishing fragrantly overhead

way up in the dark that is coming, but remains, for the moment, beautifully at bay.

                

                                                                                                 -Kate Daniels

Thanks to Eva H.D. for introducing me to Kate Daniels' poetry. "Crowns" is in her collection A Walk in Victoria's Secret. Here's a link to Daniels' conversation with the poet Philip Levine. and another to Daniels talking with Tony Hoagland. (We've posted several Hoagland poems on AL, including one of my favorites, America.) Will be posting some Philip Levine soon.  

1970 Chevrolet C-50

 

Yeah, I know. But I want this truck. It's up at Hemmings. Always had a thing for old western farm trucks. Drove a 1968 International Loadstar 1700 for a couple of seasons on the wheat harvest in Alberta, offloading combines on the run and hustling the grain to the Alberta Pool elevator in town or to granaries on the farm. More on that episode posted here. They started threshing when the dew was off the crop and went at it until 1 or 2am. We were always watching the weather--like sailors. This blue truck was outfitted for hauling beets (side dump) but I sure like that blue. More grainers, and grain elevators, are posted here.