Curbside Musings: Bringing Color Back – There’s Actually A Lot Out There, Curbside and Otherwise

Doesn’t that lovely line of Volvo 140 butts make you want to say “Man, I remember when cars came in so many different colors!”? That’s been my comment on that scene ever since I took the photo earlier this fall. I mean, look at that! Two kinds of blue, two kinds of yellow (is Butterscotch yellow?), and a deep green. Those were the days, eh?

For a variety of reasons which I probably don’t need to go into, I’ve been feeling kind of blah and monochromatic lately. Kind of gray. This current mindset has likewise done no favors to a case of writer’s block that I’ve been experiencing. I’ve taken a lot of photos, and even traveled some, but nothing has really jelled so far as inspiring me to pull together a full article here on CC. That situation of course contributes to a downward spiral since creating articles here is a source of joy for me (otherwise, I wouldn’t do it); and who doesn’t need another hit of joy? Holy cow. I do.

So here’s what I’m going to do. Rather than simply sitting on a bunch of half-baked ideas for CC articles, I’m going to toss them out here – each with a few photos – and see where they go. Stick with me. I hope that there’s enough here that there’s something for everyone. If any of these catch your fancy, you can either write about them yourself (Yes!), or talk about them in the comments and that might inform me as to whether there’s more to say and share. Meanwhile we’ll hop around the rabbit holes, maybe fall into a couple of shallow ones, and who knows, perhaps discover that there’s a theme to this whole mess somewhere.

This is not my photo, but I wish it were.

Gray?  Really?

It has become trite to talk about the lack of colors offered to today’s car buyer. There’s truth to that trope. I particularly resonated with RICHP’s rather nuanced article here on CC about describing car color choices via how one takes cream in their coffee. Still, looking at certain color lineups such as that of the current generation of Bronco (above) or those offered recently by Dodge in its Charger/Challenger lines (links to recent colorful additions to CC authors’ driveways), I have to admit that arguably there are even more colors available now than was the case with those Volvos in the opening photo.

Granted, it’s easy to find stunning examples of colors from days gone by, such as this 1927 Stutz Safety that I found in Indianapolis at a museum housed in the original Stutz factory. How cool is that? Apparently not cool enough for me to figure out an article to wrap around the handful of cars I found and photographed at that museum.

But back to the car and its color, I have no proof, but it’s likely that this car has been repainted at some point in the past century. Even if it is its original color, a high end vehicle such as this was likely offered in a unique color selected by the intended owner. The swells motoring in their Stutz Safety probably were surrounded by mostly black cars.

This raises the fact that even when colors are available, buyers may eschew more vibrant choices and stick with safer shades of gray (ranging from white to black) and other neutral colors.

How About Those Broncos?

I recently attended an event that featured a whole garage full of new Broncos, and of the dozen plus vehicles present, all except a handful were black or a shade of gray. It did not look like the rainbow spectrum pictured above.

Wait, a garage full of Broncos? What’s that? Yeah, I actually did that for paid work. One of my educational projects — this one at a community college with a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for which I am the evaluator — is an automotive technology program. This program has received federal funding to expand its curriculum to incorporate more hybrid and EV technician training.

Work on this project requires me to observe a number of the project’s activities that encompass all manner of automotive tech programming.  The Broncos were part of a Ford-sponsored high school activity/program that guides students into what is essentially an apprenticeship where they can become Ford-certified technicians.

The Ford program is just one of many things this two-year college is involved with. It’s the sort of random activity that I encounter throughout my broader work with this NSF project. For the most part, I observe, interview, and hang out with high school and two-year college students in the various courses offered by the college. The NSF-funded project has a particular focus on encouraging more women to enter the automotive technology field and train in EV technologies. To this end, I’m proud to admit that my project is making good headway. There’s a lot to say here, and eventually I’ll figure out more to write about this on CC.

You are likely more interested in this automotive technology project versus those about antibody engineering, solar energy installation design, or the integration of infrared photography into lab technician training. You’ve already heard lots about STEM in agriculture, and I promise you will again.

Big Car and Little Car

One of the advantages of working closely with a local(ish) two year college’s auto tech program is that it provides ample opportunity for me to talk to trained professionals (e.g., certified Toyota technicians) about my own cars. If I get really stuck on some technical issue, I could bring my car to the college to be worked on by students.  I haven’t done that yet because they have plenty of cars to work on (so many that they don’t really publicize this “service” to the community) and I haven’t been in desperate enough need to do that.  But as you can tell from the above picture – that’s my 18 year old Highlander Hybrid on the right – it may not be that long before desperation strikes.

That photo is from another someday article where I talk about the changing size of cars, illustrated mostly with photos of my cars parked next to other cars. I know, kind of boring. It does make for some interesting photos when I get to park next to some found curbside classic. This 2CV (found at the start of a hiking trail down the road from me) actually looks pretty big for what is nearly a microcar. Maybe the Highlander isn’t as large as I often feel that it is.

On the other hand, my E91 328i looks like a Matchbox toy next to this GMC pickup that parked beside me at long-term airport parking a few weeks ago. Anyway, I have other shots of big cars (vehicles) next to little cars. It’s just something that constantly catches my eye.

One more 2CV shot. That’s an amazing shade of blue, no? I’ve seen others this color, so I’m guessing that some came from the factory that way.

I’m Finally Getting Old Enough to Start Noticing Corvettes

That Citroen blue compares favorably to what I stumbled upon on this 2023 (?) Corvette Stingray.

A little online investigation of the 14 exterior colors Chevrolet offers on the new Stingray shows that this one was rendered in something called “Riptide Blue Metallic”.  Their second blue (yeah, they offer two types of blue) is “Rapid Blue”, and that actually seems closer to the 2CV that I found.

Neither of these blues could possibly be mistaken for gray.

Rapid Blue. I didn’t take this photo either. Although for the first time in 40 years I’ve found a Corvette to be desirable. Is this because I’m finally, undeniably, old?

Speaking of Blues

So yeah, I was at the airport recently as I went on my annual “trip to somewhere” with my friends who I’ve known since the days when nearly all of the photos were black and white.

1979 or 1980. Broadway and 116th Street on the Upper West Side.

 

Well, that’s obviously not true…the part about all of the photos being black and white. It’s just that all of the photos that I took (or were taken with my camera on those rare occasions where I relinquished the instrument) were black and white. That’s because I was a teen-aged iconoclast who saw the world in black and white terms – literally as well as figuratively. I was there to tell you that black and white photography was just better. Period. Plus, it cost a lot more to process color in your own darkroom, and back in those days if I didn’t process it myself, it wasn’t getting processed.

I did play with processing color transparencies (Ektachrome) for a while but found that pretty unsatisfying since viewing your output required a slide show or expensive Cibachrome printing (which I also played with and quickly lost interest). Also remember that this was before Kodak sold off most of their patents and lost control of the color film processing market – ultimately paving the way for gutting the company and laying waste to the city of Rochester, NY (there’s many an article, if not a whole book to be written about that). So while it was possible to process and print some color negative film (C-21 or C-41) in the home darkroom, doing so was fussy and expensive. I stuck with black and white because it I was cheap and I made up reasons to win arguments with “regular people” who would ask “How come you never take pictures in color?”.

I moved on from those youthful arguments, but fortunately managed to keep the same friends. Here are two of the guys who are in that NYC photo above; the third is in many other 50 year old monochrome photos that I treasure. This is from a few weeks ago where we found ourselves on a trip to Memphis, Tennessee. The highlight of that trip was a day spent driving down-river along the Mississippi Blues Trail and eventually to so-called “Ground Zero” for the Delta blues, Clarksdale, Mississippi.

What we were looking at, standing there in the parking lot, is the alleged cross road made famous by the legend of blues musician Robert Johnson.

Nearly 50 years ago, when that NYC black and white photo of the 4 dudes at 116th and Broadway was taken, I was the guy who would have told you that there was simply no music worth listening to that didn’t come pretty much from within a 100 mile radius of that cross road in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Have I mentioned that I was pretty opinionated back then and saw the world as a consistent set of polar dichotomies?

So, wanting to do this for practically forever, I finally went to the cross road. Itself a powerful metaphor for choosing between one direction or another.

The cross road was probably more impressive when poor Bob was there talking to the Devil. In 2024 it’s an island in the middle of a rotary which strangely has no crosswalks or signal lights allowing pedestrians to actually go stand right there without getting killed in the process…hence our position in the auto shop parking lot starring at it. That’s right, nowadays, the actual cross road of Cross Road Blues is a traffic circle. Yeah, that’s probably a metaphor too.

Which is not to say that one should pass up a visit to Clarksdale if you can make it there. The small city has worked hard to make the most out of its largely accidental heritage. Accidental if you assume that Johnson didn’t actually encounter the Devil in Clarksdale, and that he didn’t sell his soul but rather was simply a talented albeit troubled musician/human being. Nevertheless it all makes for a good story and one can visit the Delta Blues Museum and the many other blues-related locations in the area to learn more about Johnson and his contemporaries.

There is no doubt but that the Delta region birthed an amazing number of legendary blues musicians who are on a direct lineage to pretty much everything that we now call “popular music”. Clarksdale hosts a 3-day blues festival each April, and that’s something I fully intend to do. Someday. So maybe there will be yet another article to write about Clarksdale and the Mississippi Delta (I’ve written one already I believe. Yup.)

But before moving on, can I just say that one of the things I love the most about the Delta is actually the color of the sky and the ground. The tones are muted, sort of like cream in coffee, but the vistas are so vast and flat that splotches of color stand out.

Often as not, those splotches come from residents working with what they have and adding paint. I admire that. It’s a welcome contrast to my home turf of staid New England where one is advised to paint their house white, gray or beige specifically so that it won’t stand out (and thereby become un-sellable someday in the future, according to real estate advisors).

My house is bright blue, somewhere between Rapid and Riptide; because that’s the way I like it.

Oh, and the food of the Delta is great too.  Providing that you don’t eat it every day. We stopped at this place in West Helena, Arkansas to pick up a bunch of locally raised (Tunica, Mississippi across the river) catfish to cook up at the rental house. Eating in would have been fine too (albeit with less chance of encountering a green salad).

Ironically, all of this travel was facilitated through use of what has to be one of the dullest vehicles available at the airport rental counter (well, maybe not, there’s a lot of competition for that designation).

This is actually the van rented for LAST year’s trip to Houston…but the one I got this year in Memphis was identical. At least by now I have mastered the dashboard dial to switch gears.

 

That criticism of the Pacifica/Voyager is another shot across the bow of dullness and lack of color. The Voyager is currently available in white, black, two shades of gray, a third shade of gray that is called “blue”, and red.  Red seems to hang on as one of the most frequently offered non-gray colors on vehicles.


There is a touch of color – kind of a tan-bronze shade – on the dashboard.

Of course, if you want serious color on a Chrysler dashboard, you need to go back a ways. And yeah, I’ll admit that probably a lot of my ideas about cars come from spending the first 10 years of my life starring at that 1961 dash on the family wagon.

If This Had Been an Actual Emergency

That photo, by the way (it’s one of the 3 for this article that I didn’t take myself) is part of a long simmering, yet to-date lifeless, article on CONELRAD radios. If you look carefully, you can see the little Civil Defense symbols at 640 and 1240 kHz on the dial.

These also came in colors. There’s a lovely teal out there which I would gladly have had my parents own versus the plain white version that we had.

 

You can see it better on this Motorola tabletop radio. The twin of this radio sat on the kitchen table (a boomerang-patterned Formica dinette, of course) of my youth. I loved everything about that radio. The alarm switches on the clock face. The little red frequency indicator. How the radio volume slowly increased as the tubes warmed up. How it smelled once the tubes got hot. Yes children, back in the old days our entertainment technology came with unique smells…AND THAT’S THE WAY WE LIKED IT!

Most of all, I was fascinated by the little symbols between 60 and 70, and 100 and 140 that were also on the car radio out in the Plymouth.

I would ask my mom over and over (this was probably when I was about 5) what those symbols were, and she clearly didn’t want to talk about it. She eventually came out with the explanation that they were something that would only be used if “something terrible” happened.  I again asked what that was and…silence.

From my adult perspective, I believe that the Cuban Missile Crisis (October, 1963) would have been pretty upsetting if you were just over 21 years old and had a 15-month old child (me) and were 5 months pregnant with another.  So I don’t begrudge Mom more than a little trauma and not wanting to talk about nuclear war.

Nevertheless, as a child I used to wish that whatever it was that might happen would happen just so I could hear the radio in action.  It wasn’t until I entered elementary school, and learned that “air raid” wasn’t just the siren going off once a week at noon, that I understood that it was just as well that we had never actually been instructed where to tune to stand by for a message from the President of the U.S.. Furthermore, it wasn’t until recently that I learned that CONELRAD was discontinued in 1963 when I was just 2, and so there was actually virtually no chance that we would ever have had to use those symbols to tune to special frequencies. My mom probably didn’t know that. And this is all typical for my parents and their use of outdated technology…a tradition I continue to this day.

Spending time starring at the details of dashboards and the things like radios that comprise dashboards is something I’ve spent more time doing than maybe most people. I love arrays of knobs, switches, and the like. That’s why I loved that 1961 Plymouth dash pictured above. And that’s why a lack of stuff on modern dashes that you can grab onto bothers me.

I do like the addition of color on some of these displays, like on this Kia something (I can’t remember) I rented once, but a digital tachometer that just displays the rpm?

No. I need to see where the current value is in relation to where it was and where it might be. Simply showing where you are is much less useful (when you’re trying to get somewhere) than allowing you to see where you are in relation to where you were and where you’re going. Hence the number of people who get lost and confused using GPS apps on their phones.

The Mighty Wurlitzer

Speaking of dashboards with things to touch, that reminds me (sure, why not?) of keyboards, and the most resplendent keyboard I have encountered recently.

Behold the Mighty Wurlitzer.

Over the past year, I’ve discovered that my town is home to the (relocated) largest theater organ in New England, and the owners have concerts. As part of my expanding tolerance in music (see above…I’ll wait), I’ve come over the years to love the music from these gigantic pieces of entertainment technology. I call the Mighty Wurlitzer technology and not a “musical instrument” because it is part of an entertainment system that existed solely to support another technology (the motion picture). The theater organ is a technical response to technical needs.

I’ve been to two events thus far that feature famous theater organists – yes, that’s a thing – accompanying 100 year old silent movies on this organ. If you’re into such things – and you just might become into such things if you go to one of these concerts – this is truly an amazing and magical event. It’s often said, but you won’t believe it until you’re there, that a silent film played with an authentic soundtrack (i.e. by one of these theater organs played professionally) completely removes the need for dialog and makes the accompaniment fade into the background such that you forget the organist is playing. I can 100% attest to the truth of that statement. It’s like time travel to be able to experience and appreciate films exactly the way viewers did a century ago.

If you happen to live near one of these – there are maybe 400 machines – not all Wurlitzers – left of the over 4000 that once existed – go to a concert that includes a “silent “movie.  You’ll be glad you did.

Or if you’re just into mechanical stuff, I’ll note that not many other musical instruments would be attached to a giant turbine with posted specifications.

I have a bunch more photos of various parts of the installation. But I’ve not managed to pull together a full article. Plus, it turns out that the guy who owns this thing (It’s really more of a building than a “thing”.) is also an avid car collector.  I’ve met him once – he’s a really personable and down-to-earth guy who often shows an old car or two next to his organ (sorry…) – and I would love to write about the cars and the organ together.  Someday…

Maybe that someday will coincide with when I finally write the article about kiddie rides.

A bright yellow horse! A horse of a different color indeed.

Mom!!! Can You Give Me One Of Those Round Flat Things??? I Want to Ride!

If you’re of a certain age, or frequent some of the places where I wind up, you’ll know kiddie rides. These are the things that one drops a coin into a box and then gets jiggled by sitting on something like this horse (above) or perhaps some kind of nondescript motor vehicle.

The regional chain of grocery stores that I pledge my enduring fidelity to (ok, it’s Market Basket…which you don’t get if you’re living outside of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Maine. Sorry, your loss.) still places these devices outside of their stores. And as the above photo shows they still get a lot of use.

Yet I must believe that these devices are in the sunset of their time on Earth. If for no other reason than who carries change that can be fed into their coin-operated activation boxes? Maybe this is the ONLY thing that children (those who frequent Market Baskets) will associate with those round metal objects that get dropped into boxes, producing inexplicably thrilling, jiggling, results.

Yes, these rides are the toddler equivalent to Magic Fingers. Yet another lost “technology”, and one that through its association with motels should receive its own CC article.

The kiddie rides article needs more photos of vehicle-based kiddie rides. There used to be “sports cars” and fire engines frequently featured close to the front doors of Woolworths, Kmarts, and other now-defunct enterprises. I need to go find some of those in order to complete that article.

Road trip.

So yeah. Still lots of places to go, and lots of things to see and photograph. And you know, all things considered, while a good black and white photo will always appeal to me, I am also appreciative of the broader pallet provided by the colors I find everywhere.

Same day, different perspective.