Reminds me of how, following the death of an
in-law, we wound up with a 1954 Buick Roadmaster. That was some buggy and all those
things like factory air, power windows. power
everything. An elegance to that car and it had raw power to spare, to boot.

It was a nice complement to our 1953 Chrysler Windsor with the 6 cylinder enigne and semi-auromatice transmission (you shifted gears by lifting your foot off the accelerator, then pressing it down again once you felt the “thump” of the next gear. Had ARA-installed air conditioning with the tubes up the back window. Freeze you out of there, but the engine would heat if you caught a tailwind.

Did not have TV where I lived until 57. BUT, there was the radio. Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Johnny Dollar, Gunsmoke, Big John and Sparky, Game of the Day, just to name a few.

I could skip lunch at school a couple of days,
use the proceeds for a box of 22s, sneak the Old Man’s Remington pump with the octangonal barrel into the neqrby cow pasture and decimate the jackrabbit population of the Permian Basin.

Yeah, we had our shortcomings, but it was not a bad time and place to start coming of age.

PS: For Marie Claude: I also remember the
fall of Dien Bien Phu and wondering if I would ever see any action in “French Indochina”. Remember regretting the loss of that garrison and wishing I could have done something for them.

And that is the way it was. Sort of, anyway.