Watch out! No seat belts!

Were you surprised that my Mother just held me in the front seat of the car on our way to the doctor? She didn't put me in the back seat or buckle me in.

She couldn't put a seat belt on me in the back seat because there weren't any seat belts. Joe B. and I never "buckled up" when I was nine.

Our car (we only had one) was called a Nash.

Dad had bought the car in July of 1956. It was six years old (remember that we usually didn’t buy new things). It only cost $750.
It was a 1950 Nash two-door “Statesman”. The Nash looked like this:


It was distinctive. From the back it looked like a big beetle. People called it the “Bathtub” car because they thought looked like an upside-down bathtub.

It was made that way so that air flowed over it smoothly – it was advertised as going as fast as 75 miles an hour! That seemed awfully fast to us. It was big – our Dad liked a big car because he was so tall. He needed “headroom” and room for his long legs. He liked to keep track of his gas mileage and the Nash was supposed to get over 25 miles a gallon. That was important because gas cost 29 cents a gallon.

When we pulled into a filling station to get gas, the attendant in his uniform would come out and fill the tank for us. Most of the time my Dad would say, “5 gallons please” instead of “Fill ‘er up”. While the gas was going into the tank, the attendant would clean all the windows. The gas station man would always ask “Check the oil?” If Dad said “yes” he would reach under the hood to spring a little latch and open the hood to pull out the dipstick and see how much oil we had. He would check the tires and if they were low we would get air pumped into them from a little red hose.
Dad carried cards for certain stations – I remember Esso and Amoco. Credit cards were sort of a new thing and you couldn’t use the cards anywhere else but those stations, so sometimes on a trip we would have to drive around looking for the stations that took Dad’s cards.
Sometimes there were premiums that came with your gas, different free gifts from different gas stations – sometimes you would get a glass bowl or a plate or a toy. You could always get free maps. At Christmas the gas stations had records from the tire companies – we always got the Firestone Christmas album.
I often rolled down the window while the gas was going in the tank. I would put my head out to sniff the gas fumes, because I liked the way it smelled.

Do you ever sit in the driver's seat and pretend you are driving? Suppose you did that with the Nash - this is how you would look:

You can lean your head waaay back, because there is no head rest on the back of the seat. Your feet are busy: your right foot dances between the gas pedal and the brake while your left foot pumps the clutch and clicks the button on the floor that turns the head lights up and down.
You can adjust the rear view mirror, but you don't have to bother to adjust a side mirror - there aren't any.

You honk the horn with that little half-circle at the bottom of the skinny steering wheel. You have a little triangular window up front to let some air in. You need that to clear the windshied on foggy days, or to let in some air when it's hot. See the handle with the white knob on the door? That's how you roll down the window.

We always rolled down all the windows when it was hot - there wasn't any air conditioning. Even though we weren't supposed to, we put our hands and elbows out the windows. Dad stuck his elbow out and drove with just his fingertips. Joe B and I loved to fly our hands along in the air rushing past the car, tilting them this way and that. Once we were driving and I had my arm out the window and a bee flew up my sleeve. It stung me right in my armpit! My mother couldn’t understand why I was yelling and crying. It was an awful experience, and after that I wasn’t so eager to hang my arm or elbow out the window.

There were no back doors so Joe B. and I had to climb in to the back with the front seat pushed forward. The Nash had a big broad backseat. Joe B. sat on one side and I sat on the other, unless we were going on a trip at night. Then we stretched out to sleep, with one of us on the inside and one on the outside of the seat, head to foot and foot to head. Sometimes one of us slept on the floor. There was a lot of floor between the backseat and the front seat.

The whole car could turn into a bed. (When it was parked!)The back of the front seat would fold right down flat against the back seat. It was as big as a full sized bed. This was useful when we went camping!

I’ll tell you about our camping trips another time.