I drew this cartoon for my uncle a few years back, when he bought my dad’s 1969 Porsche 912. For those of you who missed it, my very first CC was on this car, and can be found here.
Remember when Porsche made just sports cars? No crossovers, no sedans, and you didn’t need to be an electrical engineer to work on them. Those were the days…
I remember when almost ALL cars were fixable with pliars, feeler-gauge and Crescent wrench. The reasons it changed are better fodder for social-political commentary than automotive remembrance.
That said…this is one of the reasons I’d never consider owning a Porsche. In my salad days (very green) it was Maserati and Jaguar ownership which tended to stretch the vocabulary beyond socially-acceptable norms. Then, as now, those with money to spend on status…sought exclusivity. And sometimes, the reasons a product was exclusive, and not sought by the masses, had less to do with price than with actual value and satisfaction.
I like this; the best humor is based upon absolute truths.
The foul language my wife was exposed to was always while her father and his brothers were working on a car. It got to the point the mothers would pull the kids into the house to protect their ears.
Cussing and car repair go hand-in-hand. I don’t care if you do it; if you have a friend or family member do it; if you pay to have it done and then just get “jobbed”…the air’s gonna have a blue tint.
One of my earliest partial memories, is of my old man trying to fix his new Rambler, taking a nasty crack on the shinbone and launching into all sorts of funny new words…and four-year-old me just laughed and laughed. And of course repeated them; and then of course discovered that my mother didn’t think the words as funny as I did.
Oddly, I don’t have any memory of my ex with regards to foul language, of the sort I’d use when fixing her VW Fox. I used it, I know that; her brothers would join me in cussing-orgies when trying to fathom the Germanic mind on some problem. Her father sometimes let loose; but she…just ignored it all. When she’d use bad words it was matter-of-fact.
Great cartoon!
We called the cussing “barn language” because we heard it from the old toothless farmers at our family gatherings.
When working on my ’60 Plymouth in my uncle’s tire shop, especially on the exhaust system, the air would turn blue as I skinned my knuckles and worked on other major contusions. Uncle Bud just laughed. He had been there, done that, and had heard the words before.
Uncle Blaine, my mother’s brother, was more creative from my perspective. Not my mother’s. One of his favorite sayings, regarding people that ran their yaps too much, was to describe them as being “windier than a sack full of assholes”. Yeah, he didn’t have any teeth, but his perspicacity was mind bending.
I can only imagine what Jack Baruth would say about this…
I would imagine it would involve him apparently being the only person in the world who has ever had to pay tax. Bitchiness aside, about the only time I can remember my father swearing was when he was working under our Chrysler and the spanner slipped and fell. It hit him right above the eye and I nearly passed out from the shock of him dropping the F-bomb!
this made me think of Car Toons magazine, actually miss thoses