The Station Wagon: Death of a Leviathan

Please enjoy this mobid for the station Wagon, which I recorded for the audiobook version of the Mobituaries book, and please enjoy the bonus on the back end of this bonus, Death of a Leviathan the station Wagon to two thousand eleven. My family had a station Wagon for a couple of years in the early nineteen seventies, but I was only three or four at the time, so I can barely remember it. It was yellow, I think, or maybe it

was cream colored. Was it a Chevy? What I do know is that one afternoon my mother put my brother in the back seat after a doctor's appointment, and the car started rolling backward in the parking lot allah Angie Dickinson and policewoman my mother had to jump into the

front seat and pull the emergency brake. This was reason enough for my father to trade in the station wagon for an Impoli sdan soon after, and just like that, the one thing that made us like TV's Brady Family, and who were more all American than the Bradies, was gone. For a few decades. From the mid fifties to the mid eighties, station wagons like the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, the Chrysler Town and Country, and the Ford Country Squire were as central to the American dream as the white picket

fence and the basketball hoop in the driveway. These were the quintessential family cars. If y I the Bradies had at least two different station wagons, both of them Plymouth Satellites, and the bigger the wagon, the cooler the family. By the nineteen seventies, the Ford Country Squire was a nearly nineteen ft long behemoth and got a whopping eight to ten miles to the gallon. You could cram four or

five kids into the back seat. But that's not where I wanted to be anytime I was lucky enough to ride in one, and I'm sure I befriended some kids because their families had station wagons. I headed straight for the way back with the seats folded down. The freedom, the danger. I loved being thrown against the side when the car turned, all the better when other kids were back there, all of us ricocheting off each other after

a pizza party at Shakey's. Riding in the way back gave me the same out of control thrill I got from roller coasters. Related thought, I used to fantasize about climbing into the dryer so I could just spin and spin. It's probably a good thing I didn't figure out how to turn the dryer on from the inside. What gave these cars an extra flare was the vinyl applicate wood grain paneling. It made it feel like a house on wheels. The paneling was a throwback to the earliest station wagons,

which were made mostly of wood. These wagons were d i y affairs. The customer would buy the chassis of say a Model T, then ordered the wood body from a coach builder or hire a carpenter to make it and bolt it on. It was just much lighter and easier to build the body out of wood, says my friend Matt Anderson, curator of Transportation at the Henry Ford Museum. The technology just didn't exist at that time to build

a large body out of steel. By the nineteen thirties, these vehicles and any where beauties were known as woodies. The earliest station wagons were used on farms or as delivery vehicles and to transport passengers between railroad stations and hotels. That's how the vehicle got the name station wagon. This is the kind of factoid I love. By the time the baby boom hit, the station wagon had caught on with families. The first real modern station wagon is Plymouth Suburban,

says Matt. It's got an all steel body. The name itself tells you how that vehicle was marketed. The rise of the suburbs was a big factor in the adoption of the station wagon. Now, it's true that station wagons were an absolute nightmare for any teenager learning to parallel park. They were larger than the standard parking space, the site lines were miserable, and I'm pretty sure that rear defrosters hadn't been invented yet. And of course they were dangerous.

The way back was a death chamber. Are the more safety conscious. There was a rear facing fold up seat, introduced by Chrystler in seven. It had seatbelts, not that you could ever find them. It also had the benefit that someone sitting back there could call out whenever luggage strapped to the roof rack came free and tumbled out onto the highway. By the early nineteen eighties, the family station Wagon was already beginning to acquire value as kitch. We know this for a fact because in nine Warner

Brothers released Harold Ramos's National Lampoon's Vacation. The true star of that movie is not the bumbling Chevy Chase but the wagon Queen Family Truckster, an enormous hearst like vehicle that is gradually gutted over the course of the film due to a combination of vandalism and incompetent driving. But as the movie Vacation was celebrating the station Wagon, its

demise was looming. There were warning signs. The oil crisis of nineteen seventy three made fuel efficiency a priority for consumers. The ingenuity of Japanese engineering was making it harder and harder to stay loyal to American cars that handled poorly and seemed in constant need of repair. Then came what car journalist Amos Kwan has called the testosterone robbing minivan, which Leaya Coca introduced to Chrysler in with better fuel economy, more headroom, and best of all, a sliding side door.

The minivan was a hit among practical minded car pooling soccer moms. Mandatory car seats rang the death knell of the way back. The station wagon belonged to the golden age of the highway, the new system of interstates built by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Up through the eighties, that highway system represented nothing less than freedom itself, flight from dreary routines of city and suburb, access to all our nation's

great beauty and natural attractions. But then, with traffic and suburban sprawl getting worse and worse, those endless highways were no longer our means of escape. They became another part of what we needed to escape from. And so after the minivan, we fell in love with the four wheel drive suv, the kind that, at least in the commercials, could drive right over a guardrail, plow through a rocky river bed and scale a craggy mountain at forty five degrees.

Maybe it was the renewed nuclear fears of the eighties, or just a vague sense of looming catastrophe, but suddenly we all needed military grade vehicles of our own, something that could get traction on a glacier and stand up to machine gun fire if needed when the next blizzard, hurricane, or wildfire hit. Local and state authorities weren't going to save us. In two thousand eleven, Volvo announced that it

would stop selling station wagons in the United States. Sales had dropped from forty to four hundred and eighty in two thousand ten. Auto buffs immediately began to mourn its path sing, But the truth is that by two thousand eleven, the station wagon was already long dead. The Volvo wagon of the nineties was no more a real station wagon

than a barn swallow was a real dinosaur. At best, it was a stunted descendant of the magnificent monsters that roamed American highways during the late Cretaceous period of American automotive history. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of

auto safety. A boy. If someone gave me the keys to a nineteen seventy nine Ford Country Squire, I'd be sorely tempted to take a week off and ride that beast to the Grand Canyon, and other things from the nineteen seventies that could have killed us McDonald's collectible drinking glasses. Ronald McDonald has been the mascot of McDonald's ever since nineteen sixty three, when he was first played in TV

ads by future Today weatherman Willard Scott. In nine seventy, a lonely Ronald was joined by the hamburglar officer Big Back and the milkshake loving Grimace in McDonald Land, a spectacularly imaginative concoction of ad agency Needum, Harper and Steers, which seemed awfully similar to the then popular kids TV show hr Puffin Stuff. Google the images of Mary mc cheese and hr Puffin Stuff himself and you'll see what I mean. The courts agreed and ordered McDonald's to pay

one million dollars to the show's producers, Small Fries. Given that the ad campaign had been so successful, the McDonald land characters became inescapable as a line of plastic action figures, a complete set of which goes for about six dollars on eBay and as collectible drinking glasses, each one brightly painted with a different character. It's a safe bet that a good half of the liquid I consumed growing up was via those glasses. But it turns out the glasses

themselves weren't so safe. In July, the paint used on the exterior was discovered to contain led content up to eighteen times the legal limit. Although the company that manufactured the glasses, Owen's Illinois of Toledo, Ohio, declared that the glasses in no way present a health hazard, regulatory agencies weren't loving it. By that point, McDonald's had given away as many as sixty million of these i Q killers in various promotions over five years. Under pressure from the

Food and Drug Administration, they agreed to cease distribution. Unfortunately, my family missed the memo, and the glasses remained and now were covered up until about three years ago, by which point the images had faded to not much more than outlines. My mother's response, but the painting was on the outside. PS. Let's all raise a non lead painted glass to Willard Scott in the hopes that he lives

to announce his own hundredth birthday Quayludes. The pilot episode of The Brady Bunch, just before they're married, Mike confesses to Carol that he has a case of nerves. Why don't you take a tranquilizer, asks Carol. I took one, says Mike. Well maybe you should take another one, says Carol. Nothing doing, says America's dad. I want to be calm

for the ceremony, but there's the honeymoon to consider. Look, I have no idea how much of the Brady Honeymoon was fueled by synthetic drugs, but the fact that the quintessential family show of the era was promoting double doses of tranquilizers makes you realize how mainstream these things were. Queludes, the brand name for methoon, began as an insomnia and anxiety treatment and soon became a recreational drug, easy to get from a doctor who didn't ask too many questions.

It fast became a popular club drug, sometimes called a disco biscuit, Highly addictive, even lethal when taken in large doses or mixed with alcohol. Coludes were finally banned in the United States in a law in Apple A day keeps the doctor away, right, not if it's sprayed with demeanor'side.

The plant growth regulator, manufactured from the sixties through the eighties by the Uni Royal Chemical Corporation and sold under the brand name A Laar A Laura was sprayed on apples and other fruits in order to keep them on the tree longer, aiding the ripening process and most important, cutting down on labor costs for big fruit producers. But evidence that a law causes cancer emerged during the nineteen seventies,

and the proof was overwhelming. A federal band finally passed Congress in A laar is still found all over crossword puzzles. Shag carpeting Okay, I can't prove that shag garpeting huge in the free love era of the nine sixties and seventies, ever killed someone. But according to a two thousand one piece in the British newspaper The Telegraph, carpets function as toxic sponges, soaking in all kinds of pollutants that we

track in from the outside. Now imagine the billions of hippie micro organisms teeming inside those deep plush piles of looped yarn that make up a shag carpet. Trillions of the shag carpeting was inside a van. I'm not a licensed to pediatrician, but I bet that encouraging a baby to roll around a shag carpet from the nineteen seventies

would build up all sorts of immunity. Jarts. Jarts, also called lawn darts or javelin darts, were weighted metal darts about a foot long that people used to toss around the backyard trying to get them to land inside a plastic ring. If you threw them high enough, they could

really gather speed as they plummeted to earth. Kids loved charts until the government, citing several injuries and at least one death, tried to banned them in After pushback from several dangerous toy lobbying groups, the Consumer Product Safety Commission agreed to a compromise charts would be allowed only in sporting goods stores. Then, seven year old Michelle Snow was

tragically killed by a misthrown chart. Her father, David campaigned tirelessly for an outright ban, and eventually the CPSC voted two to one to prohibit their sale. I got to wonder about that one no vote electric blankets. On a cold winter night. During the Carter administration, there was nothing like curling up under a soft, cozy blanket laced with thick electrical wiring. Before safety features like an automatic shutoff became mandatory in two thousand one. Exposed or damaged wiring

made electric blankets a serious fire hazard. We got rid of the two we owned when my father started worrying we could be electrocuted. Even today, the American Pregnancy Association warns that the heat from an electric blanket can decrease

a mail user's fertility. Fun fact. In the vintage sci fi invasion film The Thing from Another World, the monster is freed from the block of ice in which he is encased when an electric blanket is casually tossed aside, melting the creature's prison and loosening him upon the world. You Fee you fee spelled u f f I was a kind of expanding foam insulation sprayed into walls and crawl spaces. As a kid, I thought it looked kind

of pretty like ready whip topping. The problem was that one of the f's in u F stands for formaldehyde, which, when sprayed into the air, poses a cancer risk. When you fee's use became a cause of concern, manufacturers protested that symptoms of exposure were limited to watery eyes, nasally irritation, wheezing, coughing, fatigue, red or blotchy skin, severe allergic reactions, burning sensations in the eyes and throat, nausea, difficulty breathing, headache, malaise, insomnia,

and orexia. Loss of libido. I'm running out of room here.