Revving up (or gearing down)

When I bought my first car nearly 60 years ago, the choice was simple and straightforward. A friend in my Army Reserve unit tipped me off that one – only one – 1965 Plymouth Barracuda remained in the showroom of his father’s dealership — and I could have it for a song.

So I took the bait and immediately became hooked on the Barracuda, or vice versa. The song my friend crooned came to the tune of $1,800 for a lovely machine featuring a boss V8 engine, heavy-duty shifter, bucket seats, and fastback wrap-around window. The metallic gold paint job screamed tackiness and the sport tires just itched to give full traction to a tachometer nearing redline. That car simply strutted standing still.

It took me only two years to run it into the ground. The engine gasped, the exterior became pocked with scratches, dents, and dings, and the interior’s new leather smell yielded to an embedded nicotine aroma. (No, I didn’t drape red velvet dice over the rearview mirror.)

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Only one solution leaped to mind: Buy another Barracuda, which I promptly did for $2,100. It was a 1967 beauty with a more refined design than its predecessor, burnished in metallic gray and sporting dual black racing stripes from stem to stern.

I managed to flog that vehicle for about five years until it too went the way of many American muscle cars of the era whose built-in obsolescence was hastened by drivers with too much adolescence.

In what next proved to be the ineptest purchase of my life, I foolishly decided to step up the luxury ladder and shelled out for my first and only used car, a Chrysler, from an esteemed colleague at the Star-Ledger.  After all, his son owned a luxury import restoration shop and presumably kept his dad’s vehicle in tiptop shape. Besides, editors never try to get over on one another.

Right? Wrong!

Jon Lazarus with his mother and father, Stuart and Minnie Lazarus, and his sister, Janeen. The family rests on the trunk of their new 1950 Buick in Newark’s Weequahic Park.

Six months of constant malfunctions and breakdowns followed, prompting me to christen the yellow-and-leather-topped sports coupe “Rossiter’s Lament” in honor of its erstwhile owner. Actually, the color was more lemon than yellow, a hue that seemed to neatly sum up the car’s reliability.

And the timing of my purchase couldn’t have been worse. Just as the papers were signed and the ink dried, the first oil crisis of the 1970s struck. My Detroit-made monster devoured petrol with a vengeance, and I seemed to spend as many hours on gas lines as I did as an editor in the newsroom (while also acquiring some siphoning skills on the side — strictly from friends, of course).

Through it all, Mr. Rossiter and I managed to maintain a collegial relationship, but he did reject my offer to sell back the lemon at a much-reduced price. Buyer’s remorse couldn’t begin to describe my feelings; caveat emptor proved an empty phrase.

Since old habits die hard, I returned to familiar territory and next purchased a 1974 Mustang which, while downsized from its predecessors, still had plenty of giddyap (it belonged to the pony-car genre) and sportiness. But when I married in 1981 and Gail and my two stepsons, Steve and Mike, entered the equation, I had to rethink my approach to automobiles.

While I tried to hold on to the Mustang as long as I could, even having it repainted from cinnamon brown to battleship gray, the need for more spacious and sedate family cars became obvious. And so began a succession of 1980s and mid-’90s cookie-cutter models entering our lives and garage. And just before the turn of the new century, through the aughts and into the present, Gail and I, by now empty-nesters, switched to Explorer SUVs for roominess and perceived safety.

Why am I writing about this decades later and why the need for speed in the first place? Was I the driver or the one being driven? Even as I pondered the metaphysics of the situation, I knew it was a very un-Jewish characteristic. I could think of only one racing driver of note from the tribe, Mauri Rose, who became the first three-time winner of the Indy 500. (Of course, that’s not counting Paul Newman’s exploits on the Formula 1 circuit.)

Perhaps it all started during tricycle races with my childhood chum from across the street in Queens, Georgie Fox. Or maybe it developed while I idled away youthful summer hours in an abandoned rust bucket of a Model A on Long Beach Island, pretending I was king of the road. Or possibly it was the mindset of being a teen in the Fabulous Fifties, life really not beginning until the day you pocketed your learner’s permit.

Jon Lazarus, right, may have developed the need for speed in 1946, during tricycle races with his childhood chum from Queens, Georgie Fox.

I never felt mechanically inclined, nor did I tinker with cars to soup them up. I could fix a flat, change the oil and sparkplugs, simonize the surface, and clean (usually streak) the windows – beyond that lay unchartered territory. If you called me a gearhead, I would probably stare blankly back at you.

In high school, I, like most of the Jewish kids (that would be 90-plus percent of the student body at Weequahic, about 30 percent at West Orange), took the college prep curriculum and bought into the culture that looked down on those enrolled in power mechanics, industrial arts, or vocational trades. These outliers would wind up repairing cars while I helped repair the world as a crusading journalist. (I didn’t refer to it back then as tikkun olam, nor did I realize that plumbers would outearn editors.)

I also managed to avoid driver education by telling my parents that I wanted to take a different elective. The real reason was that I learned to drive with my older, licensed friends, even making several illegal forays on my own. The only time Dad and I ventured out together for a lesson proved unforgettable, or completely forgettable, depending on who occupied which front seat.

Fast forward to my junior year at Rutgers, when Dad completely floored me with the gift of a candy-apple red 1963 Chevrolet Corvair, the rear-engine model Ralph Nader later called out as unsafe. I say floored because Dad witnessed my all-too exuberant driving during high school, resulting in family cars regularly being towed to the autobody shop. And he decreed that I would have to buy my first vehicle completely on my own. Nice to have had a father willing to change his mind, especially after I was accepted as a Henry Rutgers scholar.

Alas, there a no more Plymouth Barracudas, and, mercifully, no more Corvairs, except in the garages, showrooms, and back lots of afficionados. Before Nader’s safety broadsides, my Corvair safely transported me on a cross-country camping trip with only one breakdown, in Georgia, undoubtedly my own fault for being too frisky with double-clutching and downshifting.

During my freshman and sophomore college summers, I coaxed cranky Good Humor trucks along routes in Bergen and Hudson counties. And later in the Army Reserves, I was assigned a new model Jeep, which had a short production run because of its tendency to tip over in turns. (I drove it as if on eggshells.) But I’ve never realized my Walter Mitty-like ambitions to take the controls an 18-wheeler, a frustrating experience I described to Jewish Standard/NJJN readers a few years back.

While the Big Three and global manufacturers are phasing out their remaining muscle cars and transitioning to EVs and hybrids as market makers of the future, I’m trying to keep my two gasoline-powered Ford Explorers running as long as possible. The 11-year-old is approaching 100,000 miles and the six-year-old model, 45,000. Quite a different value system from my early buccaneering days.

Gail and I are both strictly hands-on motorists, never using cruise control and always chuckling when commercials show self-parking cars or news clips feature driverless contraptions. We consider synching our cell phones as a major achievement.

Since we’re both octogenarians, the dreaded prospect of one day being physically unable to drive does intrude on our thoughts, especially as suburbanites with few public transit options. I recall being younger and thinking older drivers should be retested periodically for cognitive acuity and physical reactions. Now, not so much. And although my need for speed has diminished over the years, it’s not gone entirely. Even though I move to the right when someone appears close in my rear-view mirror, I do it grudgingly.