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  1. tonyb

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    There’s some good reporting and good writing online, but sometimes a person has to sift through a lot of crap to find it. The bigger problem is how easy the Internet allows a totalitarian government to choke off the free exchange of information. Is there something in the digital world...
  2. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    I’ve never lived in a place where cars were safety inspected as a condition of licensure. Emissions, yes, but not anything else. I’ve owned and driven cars that really weren’t fit for use on the public roadways. That’s been a long time ago, and I’m certainly not proud of it. But I’d bet that...
  3. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    ^^^^ My brother (RIP) and his wife (RIP) inherited from her mother (RIP) a water-cooled VW Vanagon (RIP). I drove it a few times. It was, well, okay. More comfortable than the old microbuses, certainly more powerful, and not bad looking. Still, the front wheels under one's rump never did make...
  4. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    Among my cars I remember fondly was a ’62(?) Ford Falcon two-door wagon — green, small six-banger, three on the tree. Quite serviceable, it was. Cheap to operate. I had to put a rear axle in it, which I acquired for next to nothing from a schoolmate’s dad’s wrecking yard. Those days are gone...
  5. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    A friend owned a purple Ford Escort wagon as his knock-around car. He’s a drummer, and had little use for a car that wouldn’t accommodate his drum kit. EDIT: Perhaps my memory is failing me. Perhaps that drummer friend’s Escort wagon wasn’t purple. It was an odd color, though, maybe a...
  7. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    I had a similar exchange recently on another online platform, wherein I predicted that over here in the States cars with internal combustion engines will become fewer and fewer but will still be street legal, much in the way that Model T Fords and other cars of that vintage are street legal now...
  8. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    Good for you, Bob. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but my strong suspicion is that prices on these old VW’s have peaked, or will before long, as the people harboring fond memories of the things are getting long in the tooth and, well, dying off. At some point a collectible car ceases being a car...
  9. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    I had a ’66 window bus; a ’62 panel bus (double doors on both sides; Boeing Co. surplus); that ’58 Karmann Ghia I alluded to above; and a ’56 Beetle (oval window, sunroof, semaphores, etc.). What would they be worth today? I hate to think it. But whenever I get to regretting selling them (you...
  10. tonyb

    Forgotten Celebrities of the Era

    Can’t say that I always found Mencken’s political positions agreeable, but he was a brilliant literary stylist.
  11. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    I had a couple of old “split window” VW microbuses. Ill-suited as those things were for the limited-access American freeways, they were completely out of their element when those limited-access highways covered mountain passes in the West. On more than one occasion I found myself crawling along...
  13. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    ^^^^^ Was it a 510? I had a ’71 (I think) 510 wagon in the early ’80s. In some ways it was the best car I ever owned. Easy to park, easy to see out of, good for hauling stuff, and real sweet handling. They’re fetching good money these days.
  14. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    ^^^^^ 2CVs were a particular kind of cool over this way back a half century and more ago, much in the way Vespas were, and are -- just the thing for an anti-macho, anti-posing sort of posing. Curt, the character played by Richard Dreyfuss in "American Graffiti," drove one. In the end, he was...
  15. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    Even in adjusted dollars cars were much less expensive in my early driving days. A month’s wages at a low-paying job could get you a perfectly serviceable and presentable set of wheels. A week’s pay would get you a car that might last a few months or maybe a year. It beat walking.
  16. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    Slant 6?
  17. tonyb

    Your First Car....

    I owned a bunch of cars in my teens and 20s, bought cheap and for the most part driven until something major broke, at which point I called the gnarly old guy with the roll truck who took ‘em to the crusher. But the first was a ‘58 Karmann Ghia, bought, if memory serves, for $65, which is...
  19. tonyb

    My Vintage Radio Collection

    Just acquired this not-working c.1946 Emerson 578A. Paid 80 bucks plus shipping and tax, which seems an outrageous amount until you see what other examples of this model fetch. They’re pricy because of the Charles and Ray Eames connection. The Eameses had been experimenting with molded plywood...
  20. tonyb

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    ^^^^ I’d think that the chamber of commerce or downtown business association or even the municipality itself would tend to that. Clearing the walks is pretty much necessary to the functioning of the district. Around here is many a freelance snow removal guy or gal, ranging from kids going...
  21. tonyb

    Tourist cabins, auto and motor courts

    So long as it isn’t disturbed ... A friend’s large house, dating from Nineteen-Oh-Something, was sided in asbestos tiles some decades after it was built. The original siding, having been protected by that covering all these years, is probably in pretty good shape. But my friend has no intention...
  22. tonyb

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    “Fussbudget,” meaning a person who gets fussy over trivial matters. My dear old ma used it fairly frequently when I was a kid, but I can’t recall when I had last heard even her use it.
  23. tonyb

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    One of my cardiologists strongly advises her patients to either buy a self-propelled snowblower or hire out the work. “Every winter we have patients fall over dead while shoveling snow,” she said.

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