Cadillacs & the Sins of My Youth
Every week Sheila Leto Scott has a column in the News-Herald that stirs memories and touches the heart. Most recently she wrote about shopping downtown, which when we were growing up there was nowhere else to shop, no malls, no shopping centers, nobody ever heard of 23rd Street, and my earliest memory of 15th Street is a dirt road with two sets of ruts, one set going east and one set going west, and from St. Andrews Grammar School to the Tally Ho was as far as it went. Same with 11th Street, a dirt road that you could get stuck on.
My best or worst but certainly sharpest memory of 11th Street is from high school days, or maybe I was just starting college by then, driving from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church where our mother was church secretary for a while, on 11th Street headed for Bay High taking my sister and brother to band practice. It must have been his summertime band practice. Mr. Whitley was not soft on being tardy for band practice, and we were hurrying. The speed limit was 35 and I was doing 50 in our 1949 Plymouth station wagon.
As we crossed Balboa Avenue raising a cloud of dust I glanced to the right and sure enough there was a constable’s car a few yards down, watching and waiting. His flashing red light went on and he came after me. I stopped, he asked, “How fast were you going?” I admitted, “Fifty.” He asked, “What’s your hurry?” I said, “I was trying to get them to band practice on time.” He said, “Well, watch your speed,” and let me go without even a written warning. In those days, if you were driving from St. Andrews to Panama, the best route was Beach Drive, and it was the only paved one.
As we crossed Balboa Avenue raising a cloud of dust I glanced to the right and sure enough there was a constable’s car a few yards down, watching and waiting. His flashing red light went on and he came after me. I stopped, he asked, “How fast were you going?” I admitted, “Fifty.” He asked, “What’s your hurry?” I said, “I was trying to get them to band practice on time.” He said, “Well, watch your speed,” and let me go without even a written warning. In those days, if you were driving from St. Andrews to Panama, the best route was Beach Drive, and it was the only paved one.
I worked in my father’s fish business from age nine or ten. At first he paid me two dollars a week for clerking in the retail market, which included waiting on customers, cleaning fish of all kinds, and making change. There was no cash register, just a cash drawer. After a couple of years he raised me to six dollars a week, which was a handsome salary (though I did supplement my salary by surreptiously eating all the raw oysters I wanted out of the gallon bucket that was sunk in the crushed ice in the display case, a venial sin), and I opened my first checking account at Commercial Bank, corner of Harrison and Beach Drive. Shortly he raised it to seven dollars a week and said that from now on I had to buy my own clothes. I must have been eleven, maybe twelve.
Mama always went with me when I needed clothes -- she made my shirts and I bought my pants, khakis, at J. C. Penney. Sheila remembered the vacuum tubes shooting between the clerk station and the cashier office on the mezzanine floor, but I’m four years older than Sheila (who was in my brother Walt's class at Bay High) and I remember before the vacuum tubes, when they had the cable system. There was a cable going from each clerk station to the cashier’s office. And a little tube like the tube you put your deposit in at the bank. The tube with your money and receipt fastened to a base with rollers that sat on the cable, the clerk jerked on a handle, and your money and receipt shot up to the cashier’s office with a buzzing hum. In a few seconds, the tube, hanging to the cable, came shooting back with your change. I don’t think J. C. Penney was air conditioned then, but if not it was air conditioned before too long, maybe by the early fifties. The Ritz Theater was air conditioned though.
Mama always went with me when I needed clothes -- she made my shirts and I bought my pants, khakis, at J. C. Penney. Sheila remembered the vacuum tubes shooting between the clerk station and the cashier office on the mezzanine floor, but I’m four years older than Sheila (who was in my brother Walt's class at Bay High) and I remember before the vacuum tubes, when they had the cable system. There was a cable going from each clerk station to the cashier’s office. And a little tube like the tube you put your deposit in at the bank. The tube with your money and receipt fastened to a base with rollers that sat on the cable, the clerk jerked on a handle, and your money and receipt shot up to the cashier’s office with a buzzing hum. In a few seconds, the tube, hanging to the cable, came shooting back with your change. I don’t think J. C. Penney was air conditioned then, but if not it was air conditioned before too long, maybe by the early fifties. The Ritz Theater was air conditioned though.
Sheila mentioned the five and dimes, we called them ten cent stores. Two, McCrory’s and Christo’s. Each of them had the store name in gold paint on a huge red sign across the front of the store. McCrory’s was a nicer store, Christo’s had a rough and worn wooden floor and was a little bit run-down. At one or the other I bought my first little toy car, a red Packard convertible about three inches long, for fifteen cents. It was such an extravagance that I hid it and didn't let my parents know I'd bought it, another sin. Before that, I'd carved my toy model cars out of blocks of wood and painted them.
In our family we, at least the males, ordered our shoes from a salesman who came in the fishhouse every few months. As he came in the door with his suitcase of samples and catalog he would say, “My name’s Pelham, I sell those good Knapp shoes.” And I usually ordered a pair from him. They arrived in the mail a week or two later, fit well and were reasonably priced, about two dollars a pair, maybe two-fifty. That was all the way rhrough my school years. The Knapp shoes were fine, but the sin of my youth is that I coveted the cordovan wing-tips with metal taps that Charlie Lahan wore one year we were at Cove School the same time. You could hear Charlie walking wherever he was in the hall. Click click click click. Damn, I coveted those shoes, which because Charlie was an only child and a bit -- indulged -- obviously came from Cogburn's and not out of some door-to-door salesman's Knapp shoe catalog, and let the reader pardon my filthy language.
As I mentioned another time, we only went to the Ritz Theatre for movies. Saturday there was the kiddie matinee with Bud Davis on the stage down front as emcee, leading all the children raising the roof singing "Hail, hail, the gang's all here." My neighbors and friends went most every Saturday morning. I didn’t get to go often, because Saturday was our busy day at the fishhouse, and also because it was eleven cents, a quarter when you turned twelve. You could tell when Bud Davis was there because his Cadillac would be parked out front. He had two in my memory, first a 1948 then a 1949. They were both sedanettes (sleek fastback two door sedans), either Series 61 or Series 62. And on the front fender on each side was a huge long horn. One year his Cadillac was tan, I don’t remember what color the other one was, but I do remember the tan one with a horn on each side.
Above is a 1949 Cadillac Series 62 (the Series 61 did not have the little vertical chromepiece on the fender just behind the front tire). These were the cars that started the fin craze that everyone else copied in subsequent years and that resulted in some of the most godawful cars imaginable before it was over, viz the 1959 Cadillac below:
The 1948 and 1949 Cadillacs were identical in appearance except that the '48 grill was delicate and the '49 grill was massive. A 1948 Series 62 sedan:
The chrome trim at the parking lights under the headlamps was different, the '48 did not have that wraparound chrome treatment.
Also, the rear fins, which were the taillights, on the ’48 were plain (that's a 1948 Series 61 Sedanette:
but on the ’49 the taillights had built in backup lights under the red taillights (red convertible below). On both of them the left taillight had a button that one pushed, and the taillight popped up to reveal the gasoline tank filler cap.
And, oh WTH, the 1948 Cadillac had the last flat-head V8. For 1949, Cadillac introduced their new OHV V8 engine. These things are important to know and may be on the entrance exam at the Pearly Gates.
When we lived in Japan and "needed" a second car, I bought a 1952 Cadillac Series 62 sedan from an Air Force officer who was PCSing back to CONUS, for $100, my first Cadillac. It still had the fins and the hidden gas cap:
Better to remember details like this, and the difference in the 1946 and 1947 Ford, and the difference in the 1947 and 1948 Buick, and the difference in the 1946 and 1947 Dodge and which Chevrolet sported the bold V-for-Victory emblem on the front (the 1946 Chevrolet that graced showrooms and highways starting right after V-J day late autumn 1945)
than to get one question wrong, anger St. Peter (who also knows all this important stuff), and cause him to pull that red lever and be dropped through the clouds into the unquenchable fire far below where the worm never dies and so forth.
The 1948 and 1949 Cadillacs were identical in appearance except that the '48 grill was delicate and the '49 grill was massive. A 1948 Series 62 sedan:
The chrome trim at the parking lights under the headlamps was different, the '48 did not have that wraparound chrome treatment.
Also, the rear fins, which were the taillights, on the ’48 were plain (that's a 1948 Series 61 Sedanette:
but on the ’49 the taillights had built in backup lights under the red taillights (red convertible below). On both of them the left taillight had a button that one pushed, and the taillight popped up to reveal the gasoline tank filler cap.
And, oh WTH, the 1948 Cadillac had the last flat-head V8. For 1949, Cadillac introduced their new OHV V8 engine. These things are important to know and may be on the entrance exam at the Pearly Gates.
When we lived in Japan and "needed" a second car, I bought a 1952 Cadillac Series 62 sedan from an Air Force officer who was PCSing back to CONUS, for $100, my first Cadillac. It still had the fins and the hidden gas cap:
Better to remember details like this, and the difference in the 1946 and 1947 Ford, and the difference in the 1947 and 1948 Buick, and the difference in the 1946 and 1947 Dodge and which Chevrolet sported the bold V-for-Victory emblem on the front (the 1946 Chevrolet that graced showrooms and highways starting right after V-J day late autumn 1945)
than to get one question wrong, anger St. Peter (who also knows all this important stuff), and cause him to pull that red lever and be dropped through the clouds into the unquenchable fire far below where the worm never dies and so forth.
The other movie theater was in the next block or so south on Harrison, the Panama Theater. We were never allowed to go there, because my mother said the place was frequented by nasty men, whatever that meant.
T in +Time