Beached at Old Navy
Twice over the holiday shopping season I found myself in the Old Navy store up on Rockville pike. It happens and besides this same mall has a Barnes and Noble, a Hudson trail outfitter, plus the guitar store where I buy strings is right behind it. This Old Navy has a mid-store display which is an old pick-up truck they have jammed full of hoody pullovers and various oddly colored cloth merchandise. It was the truck that caught my eye, which must be thought to have some iconic use, some cachet, that translates into something useful for them. A pick-up truck doesn't strike me as seeming all that campy, perhaps old pick-ups are and I missed that happening. Possibly it simply exists in steel counter-point to all the flannel present. I found myself trying to explain all this to my niece the second time I was there, again walking around the truck. "So why is it here", she asked. I didn't really know. As a guess I figured it must be a significant model of truck rising to the ranks of Americana. The Chevy 3100 (the half ton truck) is from the Advanced Design Chevy truck series Jeff Nelson's Advance Design Chevy Truck Page. This line of trucks came out in 1947 when the Detroit factories retooled and put in production the first new lines in six years. The ADC's were bigger wider higher, had one-piece welded cabins
Deve's Antique Chevy Truck Restorations | History of Advance Design Trucks. This truck had a divided windscreen (two pieces of flat glass joined by a chromed strip in the center), and a multi-ribbed grill. The ADC 3100 changed to one-piece wraparound front windscreen in 1954. They were the top sellers in their category every year they were in production. At the outset of the ascendant half of the American century, this was the pick-up to have. My friend George's grandfather had a pickup much like this in the 1970's. We all admired it.
Maybe this isn't so different from the vague diffuse and arbitrary decorations that hang off the walls of your average theme restaurant, but it is certainly bigger and there was only one of them. So I carelessly decided it must have meaning. A meaning I attribute to the nostalgic uses of postwar optimism. Problem is my niece, now an actual teenager and reasonably close to the prime Old Navy demographic, has no concept of post war optimism. Isn't even absolutely sure she knows what war this 'optimism' might be associated with. I pointed out the choke on the dashboard. Then I had to explain what a choke was and what it did - partly close the air-valve in the carburetor so a cold engine would get a fuel rich mixture to the pistons to start up with. My father, her grandfather, was a firm believer in chokes. I tried to describe to her how temperamental cars used to be on cold days. How my dad in the winter would start the car up before breakfast, throw a blanket over the hood, go back in drink a cup of coffee, and then go back out and try to coax it down the road to work. Those were the tan and green Fords we had, they were not new cars. As with many things in life, a large part of it, when you come down to it, is knowing when to push the choke back in.
11:59:19 PM  ;;
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