After re-reading yesterday's rant last night, I kept thinking there were a number of cars I had left off of my wish list. I alluded to British sports cars --- boy, do I think they're neat. A classic MG or Sunbeam would be pretty cool, especially in "Arrest Me Red."
In fact, since I still have some money left in my fantasy bank account, I think I'll buy a:
5.) 1967 Triumph TR4A --- I'd like one in British racing green, please, with a tan leather interior. This little gem would probably fit in the back of the '74 Oldsmobile Delta 88, which is a good thing, because I'm going to need to go pick it up and drag it home on a regular basis. If you have any question why the last major British car maker --- MG Rover --- just went toes up, then you've never seen a '60s or '70s British car.
The cars being turned out by British auto industry of the '60s and '70s made the ones that Detroit was making look like the pinnacles of Quality Assurance. You've heard the old joke about British headlight switches having three positions, "dim," "flicker" and "off"? Combine that with starters that wouldn't crank on damp days, carburetors that required constant fiddling, valves that wouldn't stay in adjustment, and body panels installed apparently by nearsighted drunks on the third day of a week-long bender, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
But on those 30 or so days a year when they're in perfect running order, classic British sports cars are the epitome of cool. So purchase number 5 will be a Triumph TR4A, or better yet, two --- one to drive when the other one is out for repairs, which will be often. I'll also buy a wicker laundry basket to pick up the parts that fall off, and I'll take them to the auto parts store in the back of my:
6.) 1965 Rambler convertible --- I'm hung up on convertibles, aren't I? And yet convertibles are utterly impractical. They're hot in the summer, cold in the winter, noisy when the top's down and noisy when the top's up. They rattle and twist and they require lots of expensive maintenance. But almost any car looks better as a convertible (exceptions include the AMC Eagle and the Yugo GVX, but the latter didn't really look good in any guise).
The mid-'60s Ramblers were just about the best economy cars that had ever been produced up to that point. They were dirt-simple to repair, reliable and tough little machines, and more important for my purposes, they looked good --- trim and almost European in their looks. They could even be relatively peppy when equipped with AMC's bulletproof 290 V8 and a Borg-Warner stickshift transmission, but I'll gladly take one with the inline six-cylinder. No one wants to drag race your Rambler, anyway.
If you're going to drive around those gas hogs from yesterday's Almanac, you're going to need to balance them out with some fuel economy, I think, and if you're going to have a British sports car, you're going to need something that starts every time you turn the key.
Still, you're not going to want a convertible Rambler in a Pittsburgh winter, so you'd better get a closed car --- something that can haul a lot of salt and cinders home. Something like a:
7.) 1964 Studebaker Wagonaire --- Another damned Studebaker? Sure! I've already confessed my affection for the Duquesne Dukes basketball team, so why not a couple of loser cars, too?
Like the Studebaker GT Hawk, the Wagonaire was a product of Brooks Stevens' skilled pen. In 1959, Studebaker had taken the same 1953 body underneath the Hawk and turned it into the surprisingly successful compact Lark. Naturally, the Big 3, seeing Studebaker's success, rushed to market with Falcons, Corvairs and Valiants, putting the final nails into the coffins of the boys from South Bend.
But Studebaker made a "valiant" effort to carry on, and Stevens was able to reskin the Lark once again to make it look surprisingly modern. The Wagonaire had a very neat sliding rear roof panel that enabled to you take tall cargo aboard without resorting to a pickup truck. It would take another 40 years for the Big 3 to catch up with that idea, but GMC finally copied it with the new Envoy SUV.
And naturally, the Wagonaire went onto be a great success for Studebaker. Right --- how many Studebakers have you seen lately? The company struggled on for another two years and then bailed on the car business altogether.
When the snow gets too deep, though, the low ground clearance of the Wagonaire is going to be a pain, I suppose. So, why not finish my collection with a vehicle with a very similar-sounding name, the:
8.) 1967 Jeep Wagoneer --- Jeeps were the first real "SUVs," after all, and this was one of the last few years that Jeeps were made by the Kaiser Jeep Corporation --- successor to Willys-Overland, which made the Jeep concept such a success. (Yes, Butler's American Bantam company invented the first Jeep, but American Bantam was just barely in the car business by that time, and was in no shape to take the project over.)
I'm no big fan of SUVs, but I do like these old-timers. They remind me of a big, friendly dog --- they're sloppy, clunky, bulky, but a great pal to have when you need them, and they even look "cute" from certain angles, unlike today's SUVs, which look like Mack trucks. (If I wanted to drive a Mack truck, I'd go to the Pittsburgh Diesel Institute and get paid to drive one.)
So, that's my (mostly) environmentally unfriendly "wish list," inspired by "Jalopnik." Next week, we'll return you to your regularly scheduled Mon-Yough minutia and assorted other nonsense. Your comments are still welcome for your automotive guilty pleasures --- we've already gotten votes for '57 Chevys and "something large and pink with fins to annoy the neighbors," which is exactly in the spirit of yesterday's Almanac.
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Lest you think I'm exaggerating the problem with these old beasties, by the way, take a goggle at this 1967 road test over at Oldsmobility.com of several of what are now considered highly desirable, classic "muscle cars," like Pontiac GTOs, Chevy Chevelles and Oldsmobile 4-4-2s. The reviewers from Road Test magazine blast every single car --- their handling is almost uniformly bad, the brakes are worse, and the ergonomics are virtually non-existent. And the "quality" is laughable --- the Olds blows a radiator hose during testing.
The "good old days"? Haw haw haw.
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To Do This Weekend: McKeesport Little Theater, corner of Coursin and Bailey streets, presents Neil Simon's "Jake's Women," tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m. A special Mother's Day brunch performance is set for 12 noon on Sunday, but reservations are necessary. Call (412) 673-1100.
"Jalopnik" has been running a contest where readers are sending in the names of cars that they'd buy if they had a million dollars. There's no prize --- though a million dollars would be appropriate, now, wouldn't it?
I know what I'd do if I had a million dollars. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, I'd put it on the end of a forked stick and run around town showing it to everyone. Of course, he was writing about Lake Wobegon, Minn.; if I did that in most of the towns around here, someone would clonk me on the head and take the money.
But, I digress.
I wouldn't need a million dollars, I don't think. I have fairly pedestrian tastes in automobiles (although that seems like a contradiction in terms) and don't have a big desire for a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, or a Duesenberg. In fact, if you gave me a million dollars to spend on cars, my very first purchase would be:
1.) 1958 Plymouth Fury --- Preferably fuel-injected, please. I first saw one of these cars in a advertisement in an old copy of Life magazine when I was about 8 years old, and my eyes popped out of their sockets. (Which may explain why I still wear glasses to this day.) For a kid growing up in a world of cruddy looking GM X-cars like the Chevy Citation, Chrysler K-cars and over-upholstered Fords with dual opera windows and padded vinyl tops, this beige-and-gold hardtop screamer out of Virgil Exner's "Forward Look" was like something from another planet.
When I eventually read about the impact that the late '50s Chryslers had on the auto buying public, I could instantly understand what that impact must have felt like --- the rest of the overchromed, fat, wallowing, chunky '50s cars looked like the boxes that the new Chryslers, Plymouths, Dodges and DeSotos came in.
The '58 Plymouth Fury single-handedly made me fall in love with '50s cars. I was only slightly disappointed to learn later that the '57 and '58 Chrysler Corporation lineup was among the worst manufactured cars that the company ever produced --- they rusted and shook themselves apart within months --- and considering some of the krep that the Mopar boys would build over the next 30 years, that's really saying something. I was more disappointed when they made a (wretched) movie of Stephen King's "Christine" that required the destruction of dozens of '58 Plymouths. Why didn't he write a horror novel about the Renault Le Car? We could have benefited from the destruction of a few dozen of those.
Anyway, if I had a million dollars and had to spend it on cars, the '58 Plymouth Fury would be my first choice. Given the fact that the Fury was a limited-edition car then --- it was only later that Plymouth applied to name to a line of boring sedans and station wagons --- I might have to settle for a hardtop Belvedere, I suppose. I'd probably set myself back about $40,000, I suspect for a Fury, and maybe $15,000 for the Belvedere. Either way, I'd have lots of money left for my next purchase:
2.) 1958 Chrysler 300 D --- Take the '58 Fury and multiply it by two, and you get a '58 300. Better-looking (less chrome, for one thing), faster, bigger, more powerful, more luxurious. If you saw the movie "Quiz Show," it was a Chrysler 300 that Rob Morrow's character is drooling over at the beginning. The 300 was built just as lousy as the Fury, of course, but you can't eat your cake and have it, too, I suppose.
Besides the massive 300-horsepower Hemi engine that would propel one of these land-sharks up to 156 miles per hour, the Chrysler 300 D also handled exceptionally well for a car of its size, and was dragged to a stop by massive power brakes. If I had one of these --- preferably in red --- I'd take it out on the Trans-Canada Highway somewhere in the prairies, find a radio station playing Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley (hey, it's my fantasy) and mash the accelerator to the floor boards, and I wouldn't stop until the Mounties shot out my tires. Once I got out of jail, I'd go find myself a:
3.) 1964 Studebaker GT Hawk --- By now, the neighbors would be so up in arms by the smells of burning rubber and unburned gasoline on my street that they'd be organizing a petition drive to have my house rezoned for a methadone clinic or a strip bar or a rendering plant --- anything that would be an improvement over me rocketing out of the driveway every morning in a giant V-8 powered fire-breathing Chrysler monster.
So I'd have to get something that looked more sedate. I'd go before the zoning board, looking humble, and tell them that I'd bought a '64 Studebaker. In a nice, somber black color.
"A Studebaker?" they'd say, thinking of the ridiculous bullet-nosed monstrosities from the early '50s that always show up in TV commercials and movies. "How bad could that be?" The zoning board would rule in my favor, and I'd go home that night, back the Stude out of the garage, drive out to the street, wind up the McCullough supercharger and pop the clutch. Every night the good burghers of North Bittyburg would hear the squeal of tires and say, "Who was that masked Stude?"
Studebaker in the early '60s was going down for the third and final time. They were saddled with a basic body that dated back to 1953 and had a budget of about $11 to facelift it. In came industrial designer Brooks Stevens, who turned the old '53 Stude coupe into what looked like a cut-down Thunderbird with a heavy Mercedes influence. Under the hood went the reliable Studebaker 289 V-8, with an optional supercharger to beef it up.
There were only 15,000 made in the entire three years of production, so you wouldn't have to see yourself going down the street constantly. They still look pretty good --- which is an amazing testament to Stevens' work --- and in fact, most people would peg it for a '70s car, not one from 1964. The Studebaker 289 was an oil-burner, but otherwise bulletproof. And even the best, primo-condition '64 Hawk you could find would only set me back $15,000 or so.
After a few weeks, the North Bittyburg police would figure out that the narrow black stripes of burnt rubber all over the streets in our borough could have only been made by a Studebaker, and I'd be back in hot water again. They'd haul me up before the district magistrate, and I'd get my license suspended. I might also be handed some community service as a penalty, so for my last car purchase, I'd buy a:
4.) 1974 Oldsmobile Delta 88 convertible --- When I was growing up, someone in our neighborhood had a red Olds Delta 88 convertible with a white top. What a car! It wasn't fast --- 1970s smog-control regulations had taken care of that --- nor was it agile --- the car's size and weight made it tend to wallow. But it had those great early '70s GM lines that made it look graceful from virtually any angle, and it was a convertible.
The great philosopher Charlie Brown, after all, once said that the secret to happiness was to own both a lake and a convertible. That way, if it was a nice sunny day, you could drive to your lake in your convertible, but if it was raining, you could say, "Oh, well, at least the rain will fill up my lake."
I don't know about the lake, but with a Delta 88 convertible, I'd volunteer to do my community service driving in all of the town parades. There I'd go, trolling down Main Street at 5 mph behind the high school band and in front of the Port Vue Legionettes, with some cute TV news chick or beauty pageant winner sitting on top of the back seat, waving at the crowd.
Gee, a couple of months of that kind of community service, and I'd be thinking about what other vehicles I could buy to break the law with. A big old Dodge or Plymouth police interceptor from the '60s? An MG or Sunbeam sports car (I can just see myself in a tweed jacket and a racing cap, zipping around Renzie Park)? A Jaguar XJ12 drop-top?
So what cars would you buy with a million bucks?
Like most Americans, I've always had a thing for underdogs. That's what makes "Rocky" so endearing, after all. That, combined with my latent Catholicism, has always made me a fan of the Duquesne University basketball team.
And you won't find more of an underdog anywhere than the Dukes, who are licking their wounds after going 8 and 22 (their 11th consecutive losing season) in what Phil Axelrod of the P-G called a "clunker" of a year and the second-worst in Duquesne's history. The worst was just six years ago, when the Dukes went 7 and 23.
I have a feeling that on the Duquesne campus, the "Duquesne Duke" is starting to look about as popular as Archduke Franz Ferdnand, circa 1914. (I understand he's turned down several opportunities to ride in a motorcade around the Bluff.)
One needs only to have read the obituary last week of the great John "Red" Manning to realize what Duquesne has lost. Under Manning, the Dukes were 247 and 138 in 16 seasons. Even after Manning retired, "college basketball" in Pittsburgh for a long time meant "Duquesne University."
Over the last 20 years, the excitement has shifted east to Oakland, and the Dukes are also-rans.
I don't know very much about sports --- but then again, I don't know very much about a lot of things, and that's never stopped me from writing about them --- so it's difficult for me to diagnose what might be wrong with the Dukes. I suspect that it's extremely difficult for a small, Catholic university to recruit basketball players to a relatively parochial city like Pittsburgh, especially when it's in the shadow of a successful team at a larger Big East school.
On the other hand, you don't get much more parochial than Cincinnati, Ohio. And there you have a large university --- the University of Cincinnati --- whose men's team is coming off of a 25-win season and its 14th straight appearance in the NCAA tournament. Across town, there's Xavier, which like Duquesne is a small, Catholic university in the A-10, and their men's team went 26 and 11, and threatened in the conference tournament. I've been to Xavier, and their campus isn't any more attractive than Duquesne's, so I can't imagine there's a great recruiting advantage to working in Cincinnati.
Thus I'm at a loss to understand what Duquesne's major malfunction has been. I'm almost left to wonder if they should get out of big-time college basketball altogether and drop down to Division III, like Carnegie Mellon, but I have to imagine that their alumni would go into apoplexy (much like Carnegie's alumni did in the 1950s when it got out of big-time college athletics).
Is it the coach? Duquesne doesn't seem to think so --- the university extended Danny Nee's contract for two years, but that was before the Dukes' stinkbomb of a 2004-05 season. I do know that when former Dukes and Lakers star Norm Nixon visited the Mon Valley last week to give a talk at Woodland Hills High School, Mike White of the P-G floated the possibility that Nixon would come back to coach at Duquesne.
Nixon's name among Duquesne alumni holds the same magic that Tony Dorsett's name has for Pitt alumni, so if I'm Danny Nee, I'm looking over my shoulder nervously.
Americans like underdogs, but the thing we like about underdogs is when they occasionally triumph over adversity and emerge victorious. (It's worth noting that Duquesne has had some very successful athletic teams --- in baseball and football, for instance --- but the heart of small-college sports is basketball.)
If you never win, however, you get a reputation not as an "underdog," but merely as a "loser." And Americans don't particularly care for "losers."
Now: Don't get me started on the Pirates. There are teams that are "underdogs," and then there are others that are just "frustratingly mediocre."
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By the way, not only do I like underdogs, I also like "Underdog," so I was delighted to see his cameo appearance in a TV commercial for some product the other day. (Of course, you can also buy a boxed set of "Underdog" DVDs I should have suspected as much.)
You can download the "Underdog" theme song here:
When criminals in this world appear
And break the laws that they should fear
And frighten all who see or hear
The cry goes up both far and near
For Underdog! (Underdog!) Underdog! (Underdog!)
Speed of lightning, roar of thunder
Fighting all who rob or plunder
Underdog ... Underdog!
Now that I think of it, perhaps it's Simon Bar Sinister who's behind the slide of Duquesne basketball --- someone get Sweet Polly Purebred on that story! Better yet, look around the mouth of the Armstrong Tunnels for a mild-mannered dog shining shoes. Maybe he can help.
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P.S. Naturally, opinions expressed in the Almanac about college basketball or any other topic are not those of the University of Pittsburgh, or anyone else for that matter. I'm not even sure they're mine!
A picture is worth a thousand words, eh? Well, then, here's 3,000 words for you. There is a chance that the Almanac is going to drop down to two or three times per week, because the book is sucking up a lot of my evenings right now, and is going to continue to do so for the forseeable future. I'm moving out of the "research" phase (although there's still a lot of research to do) and into the "transcribing" and "writing" phases.
One of the things I've had to do is scan some old pictures and clean them up, both for the book and the G.C. Murphy Co. historical website. So, in lieu of an Almanac, I'll share them for your entertainment. (Once again, by the way, any opinions expressed at the Almanac are not those of the G.C. Murphy Co. Foundation or any other organization.)
Here's G.C. Murphy Co. store No. 25 on Electric Avenue in East Pittsburgh, circa 1920:
Here's G.C. Murphy store No. 12 in Downtown Pittsburgh --- I think this is the Forbes Avenue side --- circa 1979-80. Mayor Murphy (no relation to G.C.) wishes Downtown was this crowded now:
Finally, here's an unidentifed Murphy's Mart, also circa 1979-80. This looks vaguely like the location on Route 51 in Pleasant Hills, between what's now Century III Mall and Southland Shopping Center, but I'm not sure:
An intro, a correction, and some material form the basis of today's Almanac. (What, you were expecting maybe Proust?)
I recently got a new (to me) computer, and moving the old peripherals and files over has been a trip. My old computer was pushing 10 years old, and I'm surprised that anything works with the new one. All praise the Mac gods for making so many things "backward compatible." The one case where it looks like I'm going to be, to use the technical term, "S.O.L." is the printer.
Switching the scanner (an image scanner, not this kind) over has, however, been a "P.I.T.A." (that's another technical term). I'll call the scanner a Kreptronic X11 --- it wasn't a cheap one, and it's still in production --- but nevertheless, it has basically the worst user interfaces I've ever seen.
As it turns out, the software that Kreptronic supplied to run the scanner on the old computer won't run on the new computer, which is OK, because it was crummy software anyway --- It would perpetually crash the computer any time you tried to do two scans in a row, which meant you had to reboot every time you wanted to do a new scan. Needless to say, this slowed the process down to a crawl, and it explains why there are relatively few images at Tube City Online.
(Sidenote: The Kreptronic replaced a 1989-vintage black-and-white scanner which wasn't very high-resolution, but was at least reliable. So was the software, which would fit on a single floppy.)
I went to the Kreptronic website to download the most recent version of the scanner software. It was 70 MB, but the estimated download time (even over a high-speed connection) was more than an hour. That has to be a mistake, I thought. I was wrong. The Kreptronic server must be powered by constipated gerbils. Then, it took three attempts to get the software to install. And when it finally did, it didn't crash the computer if you tried to scan two things in a row --- it crashed the computer as soon as you started it.
Thanks a lot, Kreptronic.
Luckily, I found some third-party software that will run the Kreptronic. The bad news is that it set me back $49.95, but the good news it's very quick, and has a lot of features.
So that's the introduction, as a way of explaining that I was a scan, scan, scan, scan, scannin' machine (watch me get down, watch me get down) on Sunday night.
Now, the correction --- two weeks ago I mentioned that I had purchased a bag containing three 1938 copies of the Homestead Daily Messenger. It turns out I was off by two weeks, and also misquoted the headline slightly. Mea culpa.
Finally, here's the material --- this is the front page of the Messenger from Sept. 19, 1938. (Click to enlarge.)
Here's the "masthead" of the Messenger:
Dig the school board "credo" --- I'm not sure if they printed that every day, or if this related to some crusade that the Messenger was on at the time for school district reform.
I say that because the Messenger was also on a street-lighting crusade at the time --- the "ear" at the top left of the front page says "WANTED: More and better street lighting for Eighth avenue."
You know, Eighth Avenue finally got new street lights a few years back. Who says the news media doesn't get results?
And finally, for those of you who read "Nancy" every day and think, "Gee, this has really gone downhill," here's proof positive that "Nancy" (then called "Fritzi Ritz") was, in fact, never funny:
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