In 1973, four years before he disappeared down the Star Wars rabbit hole, George Lucas directed the film American Graffiti, eulogising his days as a teenage car fanatic in Modesto, California; parking at drive-ins, hot-rodding and cruising for dates. This vanished world was only a decade away —‘Where were you in 62?’ said thepublicity — the equivalent of someone today getting dewy-eyed about 2007. Yet the clashes and strife of the late 1960s in mainland America and the deepening quagmire of the Vietnam War had already made those days look like an age of lost innocence. The film was an international hit, but in October that year Opec’s oil embargo quadrupled the price per barrel, putting any number of nails in the coffin of cheap motoring and jacked-up jalopies.
Gary S. Cross, a University of Chicago professor, came of age around the same time as Lucas, and cites American Graffiti several times in this book. His time frame stretches from the earliest days of motoring in the US up to the present, although the scene and the circumstances which supported it moved into serious decline after the 1970s, once computer-designed identikit boxes took the place of the Detroit dream machines of earlier decades. Those were the days when, according to one of the many veterans he quotes, ‘the cars were the coolest, the chicks the bitchingest; the guys were bad-ass SOBs’.
As Cross points out, in the first half of the 20th century, ‘Americans were curiously tolerant of very young people driving’; indeed, California used to issue licences to 14-year-olds. What could possibly go wrong?
Among the most informative and enjoyable parts of this book are the very large number of reminiscences Cross has gathered from veteran car enthusiasts, generally identified by their home town and date of birth.
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