Out golfing the other day, we ran across a gentleman who had curb feelers on his golf cart. I haven’t seen curb feelers since the old days when they had them on automobiles – and we thought it was a splendid idea then. Of course, that was when you did a lot more parallel parking than one does these days. Today, if you are in a parking lot and need curb feelers to keep away from the car next to you, you are in big trouble – or the lot owner is trying to get more cars on a site than he should. Still they might be handy in one of the downtown’s.
Still it make us think of items that used to be on cars. You will recall that way back they had running boards. It was great for heroes in the movies to hop on and tell the driver to “follow that car”. Such an appendage today on a car would ruin the air flow and waste gas – unless you have a big pick-up or SUV and the lady needs it to get in the thing. Heck, I even travelled (not too far) in cars with rumble seats. Admittedly those cars were old even when I was young.
I recall being impressed when my Dad bought a car on which you could push a button and the radio antenna would go up and down. (For you younger people, antennas were not in the window then). That same car had a foot button where if you pressed it the radio would flip to the next station. I also found out that if you pushed it half way down, it would cut off the sound. This came in handy with the young lady I was dating at the time as we did not have the same music tastes. She would put on what she liked, and I would bear with it for a while, and then I would push the floor button and the station would go off. I would mutter consolingly that we must have lost the station and I would select one. She never did figure out what I was doing. (Good thing. She had a temper!)
You can still find a stick shift car, but in the old days you had no choice. People do not know what they are missing. It was great being on an icy hill in Pittsburgh waiting for a light to change. Then you had to play the clutch and gas pedal without slipping into the car behind you. There was a great deal of shifting in a trip through town. When I went into the army The Blonde in the house had never driven a car. I left my old 1951 Ford with her and while I went through basic training, she took lessons. We had stick shift cars after that until one time we determined we could afford a car with automatic shift. We bought one and The Blonde decided that she hated it. She wanted a stick shift car again.
Being a dutiful husband, the next car was a stick shift. The only problem was that once she started using the shift again, she decided that perhaps, an automatic shift was not so bad after all.
Not certain what will happen when they have self-driving cars!
Barry Evans writes about Life in The Villages for Villages-News.com