Destination
In some future age the human mind will be as transferable as computer memory. This stuff floating around in my head will be saved into a new body, and I’m starting over at 15 years of age.
NYT had an article about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, that helps me better understand the man. One of our difficulties in dealing with others is our unconscious assumption that everybody else who is normal thinks as we do in our self-assumed normality. Bergdahl is an unusual human being, not to say abormal, whose unusualness explains a great deal about him. He is like an ADHD kid beyond even his own control, who should have been left to roam without an army uniform: drum him out and send him home where he never should have left in the first place. His awarenesses are different from the awarenesses of other people.
The NYT article had an interesting statement about Bowe that ties with what I have noticed elsewhere. “Sergeant Bergdahl was baptized in the church as an adolescent, a decision that even one of the family’s pastors thought might have been a misstep, coming at a time when his ideas about religion seemed to be evolving. ‘It may not have been wise to do that,’ the pastor, Glenn Ferrell, said. He added that the teenager ‘displayed some of the weaknesses of home-schooled children: They are unrealistic about the world.’” I see it even in the adorable TV family with 19 children: they are their own little nation, quaint and fully as isolated in their way as the Pennsylvania Dutch are in theirs. Send Bowe Bergdahl home where he belongs.
SCOTUS, Hobby Lobby, and the contraceptives? My blog is a safe haven from the screaming, shouting, fingerpointing and name-calling, which has valid points on both sides.
More to my interest, returning to mind after Tuesday’s NYT article about the movie on Roger Ebert’s life, I think about the Studebaker Golden Hawk that Roger bought, had restored to showroom condition, and enjoyed driving as a return to his teenage dreams.
I have dreams too, dreams and memories. And I think about other things including my own tangential love for Studebakers when I was a boy. In the late 1940s a man working for my father bought himself a new pickup truck that I greatly lusted after. His name was Curenton, his pickup was the new postwar Studebaker, which I rode in but never drove.
I have dreams too, dreams and memories. And I think about other things including my own tangential love for Studebakers when I was a boy. In the late 1940s a man working for my father bought himself a new pickup truck that I greatly lusted after. His name was Curenton, his pickup was the new postwar Studebaker, which I rode in but never drove.
In the same era, my father had an employee who ran our retail fish market for a while. In his early 60s, divorced and likely escaping from alimony in some other state, his name was Pinkerton, and he said he was of the Pinkerton Detective Agency family. I worked with him in the fish market. He used to make iced coffee, the first I ever tasted. It was delicious. Coffee brewed in the back room, black, hot, strong, put in the reefer to cool, then poured into a large jar with ice, milk or cream added, sweetened with honey, the lid screwed on the jar, and shake the heliotrope out of it. Oh man, on a hot Florida summer day before anyone ever heard of air-conditioning, it don’t git no better’nis. On a cold winter day Pinkerton made coffee the same way, but he drank it hot and with the first sip always said, “I like my coffee like I like my women: hot, sweet, and blond.” Eleven or twelve at the time, I didn’t drink hot coffee and it was three or four years before I began to appreciate Mr. Pinkerton.
My next Studebaker connect was when the new 1950 model appeared in the showroom at the point where Oak Avenue meets 4th Street. Partly boarded up, the old showroom windows display used appliances stacked up waiting for God only knows what, a desecration of a once-holy place. The building needs pulled down, but then what? My car trunk that’s in Joe’s room has any number of Studebaker brochures that I picked up in that holy of holies as a teenager.
Studebaker stuck with the now so-called “suicide doors” design for the rear doors right through and into the fifties long after other manufacturers had left them. They were good: present day rear door openings are a pain in the beeyouteetee to get in the back seat, but with the old suicide-doors you just opened the back door, leaned over, walked into the rear passenger area and sat down.
I’ve had three cars with suicide doors, the 1948 Dodge, a 1967 Ford Thunderbird that we bought our last Navy tour in Newport, RI, and a 1968 Lincoln Continental Town Sedan, a large lithe, comfortable car with an enormous V8 engine that I lusted after on the Lincoln-Mercury dealer’s used car lot in Harrisburg. Low mileage, like new, it was ten years old when I bought it for $1,400.
I’ve had three cars with suicide doors, the 1948 Dodge, a 1967 Ford Thunderbird that we bought our last Navy tour in Newport, RI, and a 1968 Lincoln Continental Town Sedan, a large lithe, comfortable car with an enormous V8 engine that I lusted after on the Lincoln-Mercury dealer’s used car lot in Harrisburg. Low mileage, like new, it was ten years old when I bought it for $1,400.
My last Studebaker reminiscence is the cream colored Studebaker sedan owned by Mrs. Benton.
Mother of Dr. John Benton of Panama City, she was Linda’s landlady at Gainesville schoolyear 1956-57. She was a dear, sweet, generous lady who, perhaps because of the Panama City connection of friendship and trust, let me drive her Studebaker when my Dodge was out of commission. She called it “my little Champion.” It was a four door sedan with 3-on-the-tree, the first car I ever drove with Overdrive. Overdrive gave you freewheeling and an extra, fourth gear. After you got moving you could do all your shifting without using the clutch by simply lifting the accelerator if you wanted to. I lost sight of the little Champion when I graduated from UFlorida in May 1957, but recently during a Benton family event I remembered the Champion and was told that one of the Benton children had the car later.
Mother of Dr. John Benton of Panama City, she was Linda’s landlady at Gainesville schoolyear 1956-57. She was a dear, sweet, generous lady who, perhaps because of the Panama City connection of friendship and trust, let me drive her Studebaker when my Dodge was out of commission. She called it “my little Champion.” It was a four door sedan with 3-on-the-tree, the first car I ever drove with Overdrive. Overdrive gave you freewheeling and an extra, fourth gear. After you got moving you could do all your shifting without using the clutch by simply lifting the accelerator if you wanted to. I lost sight of the little Champion when I graduated from UFlorida in May 1957, but recently during a Benton family event I remembered the Champion and was told that one of the Benton children had the car later.
What brings all this together. Nothing brings Bowe Bergdahl or Hobby Lobby into it, but Studebaker came together in a piece I read yesterday, a fascinating and personal history by W.A. DeWitt, who begins with the Studebaker family and brothers in the early 1700s and brings the history to conclusion in the middle of the 20th century. America had some memorable cars, and Studebaker was one of them. Maybe I’ll have a Golden Hawk instead of that red Duesenberg touring car. Or maybe I'll just have a little Champion. Or a Commander Starlight Coupe
It will be an age when men do not kidnap and murder other men's children as their means of waging war. I can't wait.
