1948 Dodge
Walt sent me a picture of a car like the 1948 Dodge sedan our parents bought new in May 1948.
This stirred happy memories. The Dodge was mama’s present for her 36th birthday. We waited eagerly for weeks, and one day a phone call came from W&W Motors saying two new Dodge sedans had arrived and were on the boxcar down at the train station.
The pic Walt sent is a black 1946 Dodge sedan. Linda’s grandmother Lucile Noble Mustin had that exact car when we were dating in the middle 1950s. The 1946 was identical to our 1948 Dodge except the ’46 dashboard and steering wheel were cedar red.
In the 1947 and ’48 Dodge the steering wheel was a soft beige color and the dashboard was woodgrain. Very pretty.
In those days cars were shipped from the factory in boxcars, not transport trucks, and in Panama City they came down the back side of the depot, where there was a short unloading ramp. When the phone call came, Mama and I went down to look. The sliding door was open on the boxcar, we walked up on the ramp and saw a bright blue one and a dark green one. Mama said, “I’m tired of blue cars, let’s take the green one.” This story has been told once or twice here before and I will never get tired of it, so it may well appear again sometime.
The green 1948 Dodge Custom sedan was mama’s car until summer 1950, when our father bought the 1949 Plymouth woody wagon that was a W&W demo. The years we had both of them we called the Dodge "the car" and the Plymouth "the station wagon." The Dodge became our father’s car until summer 1956, when it was given to me to take back to college for summer school (I took typing and another course and helped Linda with her math course). We had the Dodge my senior year at Florida, Linda and I sharing it in Gainesville and as our first married life car. In December 1957 we traded it in for a new blue and white 1958 Ford Custom 300 tudor.
Why did we trade it? It wasn’t just my insanity about automobiles. The Dodge had developed reliability issues. For one thing, an electrical problem caused it to stop in rush hour traffic on the George Washington Bridge in New York City late summer of 1957, and Linda steered it while Walt and his friend Mike pushed it to the other end of the bridge and out of angry NY Yankee traffic. They were driving Linda from Panama City to Newport, Rhode Island, where I was in U. S. Navy Officer Candidate School, and I have absolutely no idea how they got the car running again.
But they did, and continued to Kingston, Rhode Island, where Linda lived upstairs in Father David Damon’s childhood home down the street from the University of Rhode Island, where David’s father had been a professor years earlier.
Linda and I kept the Dodge running for several happy months touring Rhode Island on weekends when I had liberty call. Saturday mornings during those months, it had any number of stops at shadetree garages in little Rhode Island towns. After I was commissioned Ensign, USNR in December 1957, we drove it home to Panama City and traded it in for the Ford. My new ensign salary was $222.30 monthly base pay, plus $150.00 housing allowance, plus $47.88 basic allowance for subsistence, which meant we could easily afford a car payment.
The first Dodge was twenty years before I was born, a 1915 Dodge Bros. touring car, the "Model 30," offered by brothers John and Horace Dodge, being chauffeured:
Dodge Bros. had been in business since 1900, furnishing engines to Henry Ford. Couple of old Dodge pictures. Of the Dodge pickups at the bottom, the first one is a 1941 through 1947 model. The last one is the new 1948 model. Both of my pickups were green Fords, an F100 and later an F150. But Bubba likes red pickup trucks.
TomBubba