Ah, the good ol’ days, right? Well…maybe not; the good ol’ days never existed—not the way we think we remember them, anyhow. Brother’s playing with guns. Sister’s not even pretending to be buckled in, and anyhow there are only lap belts that might do an OK job of keeping the bottom half of her in place if the car should stop suddenly* (like, say, on indirect account of its four-wheel nine-inch drum brakes and single-pot master cylinder). Not shown: lead aerosol and other corruption spewing from the tailpipe, five or six packs of cigarettes between mom and dad daily, and the zero percent nonwhite neighbors in that Leave-It-To-Beaver neighborhood of theirs. The past is a foreign country, as it is said; on objective balance it’s probably best we can’t get there from here.
But take a look at the ad itself. Not only is it in vibrant black and white, but it’s clearly from when marketing psychology scarcely even existed yet. It boils down to “Look, here’s our new model. You should buy it because it’s attractive and built well and has room for your family and it’s pleasant to drive.” Nothing more or less than that; they don’t make ’em like they used to.
*-with grateful apology to Shelley Berman
Love it! It is likely my age, but 1964 marked the beginning for me of what was a “modern” car. The first new car I remember my family getting was a 64 Cutlass hardtop, and its crisp squared-off lines were just the thing every suburban family needed.
No word here about the conveniences of Push-Button Drive – that was decidedly *not* modern by 1964.
I would have been drawn to this car as a kid because of its exotic nature. Chrysler-built cars were rare sights in my area then. GM owned the middle class universe where I lived.
It’s definitely relative, just the week before last Mr. Regular was calling the ’92-95 Civic the lightest, simplest (and it’s inferred, oldest) “modern” car. “…even though it’s OBDI and not OBDII…)
“Look, here’s our new model. You should buy it because it’s attractive and built well and has room for your family and it’s pleasant to drive.”
Man, I wish advertising were that direct. Is there actually any thing else that I should want from a normal family car? No. today even ordinary products are sold as “statements”
One of the finest cars ever made.
One of the most widely-loved and fondly-remembered cars, yes. I’m quite a fan, myself. One of the most durable, dependable cars built at that time, yes. But there’s a long, long list of cars-ever-made that completely whup the Dodge Dart (or any other 1964 model) by any objective measure: acceleration, stopping, handling, crashworthiness, efficiency, environmental compatibility, water sealing, wind sealing, oil sealing, exhaust sealing, NVH, durability, dependability, convenience, etc.
I agree with this 100%.
I had a brand-new, white 1962 Plymouth Valiant, Slant-Six “Super 225,” 145 hp, with three-on-the-tree manual transmission, and I drove this car for many years while in college and in the USAF, back and forth between El Paso, Texas and Los Angeles at nearly top speed on many weekend passes, flying through Arizona’s water-filled highway drainage ditches at speed — but never having a single mechanical failure during the many years of service!
In many respects, those *were* the good old days! I’ve owned many cars since then, but that old Plymouth Valiant stays in my mind as a wonderfully engineered, durable car that never let me down despite my abuse of it.
Agreed on wishing for more direct advertising. If I hear anything about “lifestyle” in the marketing, I try to avoid it like the plague. Nothing, save how you actually live your life, can create a lifestyle for you, or remake you in it’s image.
You have to love the simple method of presenting the item for what it is, and what it can do, rather than projecting it as a way of changing your life to something more glamorous and making you more attractive.
And finally, the past is a foreign country alright, but it is one we cannot visit, let alone live there.
Truth in advertising ! .
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I love it .
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I remember these cars new and at the time I wasn’t impressed but they’re wonderful and better drivers than any GM compact right out of the box .
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You’re right : those of us who actually grew up then don’t usually want to go back to that time .
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-Nate
I stood on the hump in the back floorboard looking over the front seat. Survived. Born before pollution controls. Survived. About half my family smoked. Survived that and smoking myself. Have cut down to vaping. Hate it. Give me a good ol’ Pall Mall Red and let me kill myself if I want. Wore seat belts on long trips, never mind most crashes are closer to home. Survived. I have done several things that would make the author cringe and survived. That America did exist and we survived. And we came to realize many of these things need change. So if we don’t need to go back to revisit this stuff, why not destroy the ads and crush all the old cars? that way, we have no reminders of the history that got us to CC today.
Commercial shows all I need to know – several shots of nice new car transporting happy people.
Not sure what the purpose of this entry is if it is all complaining about the commercial and the aspects of life in 1964. Today’s cars aren’t classics yet and most of the commercials aren’t any better. Most everyone of them show a vehicle being driven normally with tiny copy at bottom reading “Professional driver on closed course”. Some even say “do not attempt”. Seriously? It takes that much disclaimer to show someone driving an SUV down their own street?
Having a Pall Mall Red right now, LOL. I also “love ” those “Do not attempt” warnings on ads where the vehicle is being used normally. To me, it reads: “Do not attempt to DRIVE this vehicle…Ever!!” “Feel free to use the “Infotainment” system however.”..
I, too, stood on the hump and looked over the front seat as a child. About died when my face hit the dash when we got in a crash. I had asthma as a kid. Smoke from old cars used to make it hard for me to breathe. Those damned pollution control devices seemed to make the cars less smokey. I also used to smoke too, but seeing my Dad die from lung cancer made it seem like a stupid choice. Yeah, I survived too. But I don’t mind changing my habits to something safer for myself and the others around me. The point of letting you kill yourself is that in doing so, are you going to refuse any medical care that insurance pays for (we all share the general risk pool and pay into that pool to buy insurance, so we are paying for some of that care, after all)?That all of that stuff happened and we managed to survive is more testament to good luck than anything else. Rules are usually made by the people who survived stupid things and then decided to make sure others never made the same mistake. When only you pay for your mistake, it is yours to make. When we all pay for a mistake, then society must have some say in whether you can do it or not.
The point on the commercial is that this was a simple presentation of a simple car, without flouting any other guff in trying to get you to consider purchasing one. That does not happen in modern commercials.
Sure, but if smoking kills him early, he won’t draw social security. People that don’t smoke, live much longer, and bankrupt social security. 6 of 1, and a half dozen of the other.
Much current advertising crosses the line…it tries to tell you what you want, the kind of person you want to be, the kind of jokes to laugh at, the kind of life philosophy that is “politically correct,” which is a concept I detest since it professes the opposite of individualism…it demands that we all be sheeple adhering to certain already-determined principles).
That is probably because, like much of the media we are exposed to, it is written and produced by that same kind of sheeple.
The occasional exceptions are refreshing, as is this 1964 Dodge commercial.
Utterly agree. I like advertising done well, but I don’t need any “edgy” or other messages. A little humor, pleasant people and some info about the product please.
This ad is a little thin on product specifics, but it was probably perfect for the message Chrysler Corp. needed to send in the fall of 1963. After the quality wheels fell off of Chrysler products in 1957, and the stylists lost their marbles during the ’60-’62 era, Chrysler needed to get out the message that sanity had made its way back to Chrysler with the ascent of Lynn Townsend to the helm of the company.
By all accounts, this was a pretty good car for its era, and would make a perfect second car for many of the larger families of the 1960s.
As ads from the ’60s go, this one would still be quite acceptable today – a family spending time together, participating in skeet shooting, perhaps the parents were smart folks that took the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report seriously, and we have no idea who their neighbors were. But, I hope the neighbors were nice people.
Love this ad, and agree with Mr Stern that the simplicity is refreshing, although things weren’t always as simple as this.
I’ve heard some documentaries on twentieth century advertising, very interesting how the underlying message changed along the way:
– Buy our product, because it’s good
– Buy this product, because it will make your life better
– Buy this product, because your life is great and you deserve this
The absolute dumbest ads have to be for pickup trucks. They’ll show a guy in the middle of a 200 acre field. In the middle of that field is the stump of a 100 year old tree. That stump just has to go, and he has just the truck to pull it out. Yeah right. You can beat the piss out of your 70,000 dollar truck and still not move that stump, and you won’t, or pay the guy down the road with the bulldozer 200 dollars to actually get the job done. I guess showing the truck at Walmart picking up a new grill and a bag of dog food wouldn’t be too exciting.
Many years ago I helped my boss’s family remove a row of dead trees from the side of their property abutting a street. It was a big lot in a small town with wide open streets. Lots of room to work. Fortunately!
As some point a standard Chevy pick-up was chained to a tree to pull it one direction, the tree had different plans, and pulled that pick-up backwards like a Tonka toy, tires smoking on the concrete.
If ever an advertisement needed a “do not try this at home” disclaimer, it’s an ad showing trucks used for tree removal by amateur aborists!
Some attempts at guiding the direction of a falling tree with a truck are successful. Unfortunately in my dad’s case years ago, that “success” brought the tree down on top of his truck!
Fortunately he was okay, the truck was able to be repaired, and I learned a valuable lesson without having to damage any of my own equipment in the process.
Yes, I’m trying to recall what the hell we were doing with that truck. One would think pulling a tree in the direction of the vehicle might have some, er, consequences. In our case, the tree fell into the yard, instead of the street as hoped. But, at least the truck was just embarrassed instead of totaled.
“Auto Load” is a procedure that should be avoided as well.
As you’d guess from my screen name, I’ve always loved the look of these cars. And yes–there is one in our garage, a GT convertible, in about a million pieces right now. When it’s on the road again–oh blessed day in the foggy future–those dinky drum brakes will be long gone. In 1964 I couldn’t even drive yet–though I was old enough by a couple of years–but if I’d been car shopping back then, you can bet I’d have gone for one of these.
(We’re keeping the manual tranny, but it’ll be a new 5-speed.) Great to see the old-style ad.
You say “Leave It To Beaver” like it’s a bad thing. I remember those days and in many ways times were much better than now. Certainly there were very interesting automotive choices, though as you remind us, safety was an afterthought and tailpipe gases had yet to be dealt with. You could certainly do a lot worse than a slant six Dart though.
Are you sure those days were much better than now? Are you really sure? We forget and minimize lot of the bad stuff and we embellish and amplify the good stuff. Not consciously or deliberately; it’s a human sanity-preservation mechanism; without it we’d be crushed under the weight of overwhelming cumulative grief and sadness and annoyance.
If we’re going to pine and yearn for the “good ol’ days” of that time, let’s also remember the rest of that time. Let’s remember that we were busily poisoning ourselves and brain-damaging our kids by spraying lead into the air from the tailpipe of every car, truck, bus, motorcycle, and lawnmower. Let’s remember that the traffic fatality rate was numerous times what it is now, despite the fact that many more people drive many more cars many more miles now than back then. Let’s remember that in many cities, the air was unbreathable by 12 noon because there was no control over emissions from cars and factories.
Let’s remember that in a lot of places, you couldn’t get on the bus, go to the good library, run for office, play on a sports team, live in the neighborhood of your choice, or go to the public swimming pool if you weren’t white (and Christian). Let’s remember that even if you were white, you hesitated to go to the public swimming pool because that was a good way to catch polio. And let’s remember that if anyone ever found out you weren’t straight, you were likely to get beaten to death at random or thrown in a psychiatric “hospital” to be tortured.
Let’s remember that we were all profoundly more ignorant than we are today. Let’s remember that a whole slew of diseases and ailments we can treat or cure now, we couldn’t then. Let’s think about the difference in experience going to the dentist in 1957 or 1967 versus in 2017.
Let’s think about how much more capable and efficient a 2017 dishwasher, washing machine, and telephone are than their counterparts from 1957 or ’67. Let’s think about how much cheaper and easier it is to travel now than it was then.
Let’s think about how today’s little girls aren’t told their only options are teacher, nurse, stewardess, or barefoot and pregnant as their counterparts were back then.
Let’s take a moment to consider that we now have more computing power in our pocket than existed in the whole world in 1957. Let’s recall what a nuisance photography was back then: take a bunch of photos to try and make sure one works out, burn your fingers changing flashbulbs, take your film to the drugstore and wait a week, then wait another week if you want extra prints, then fetch an envelope and a stamp if you want to share them with your friends.
Let’s remember what a pain in the neck it was to get a question answered or do research for a report: go to the public library during its opening hours, spend time in the card catalogue and the Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature, put in a request for materials the library would have to procure from elsewhere, go home and wait a week. Now if we want to know what the population of Tuvalu was in 1998 we just toss a couple keyclicks at Google or ask Siri and we have our answer immediately.
Let’s have a reality check showing us that no, actually, in general things are getting better and not worse — do read the link and at least scroll down through the charts and graphs, it’s interesting stuff.
Let’s do all that before we start wanting to go back to the perfect ol’ wonderful ol’ flawless ol’ good ol’ days, eh! Please, thank you, and you’re welcome. (-:
Thank you.
All things considered I’m rather apolitical, outwardly speaking, but as a gay man partnered with a son of immigrants, who has many african-american, naturalized-american and jewish-american friends and relatives, Thank You.
It’s easy to see the Leave it to Beaver, Wonder Bread and Kool Aid days as All-American bliss, and indeed as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American I might be so foolish as to agree if it weren’t for certain realities.
We’re here as a result of a common love of things automotive, and not to chastise each other for political or sociological views, but the above rather well-written statement (one man’s statement may be anther man’s diatribe, but tom-ay-to, tom-tah-to) is less a political or sociological ‘opinion’ than it is pure and simple fact.
(Shit did I go off on a tangent there….but I’m gonna let it ride anyway;)
While your points are correct, Mr. Schulz does raise a point about some aspects of modern life………….
While I remember the old mowers without catchers, I was using an old hand mower in those days.
Great comment. It’s fun to look back at the “good old days” and see them thru rose-coloured glasses, but every time I do that I remind myself that in 1964 there was no way I could have lived an openly gay life with my long-term partner in small town Ontario. But thanks to changing laws and changing attitudes, I now can. We work a steady job and a small business, we own a home and pay all property taxes and are a net contributor to our neighbourhood and our country. So why shouldn’t we be able to live quietly with the person we love?
As for the car, it looks nice with pleasant styling, and was probably no better or worse than anything else on the road at the time. Safety? Pfffffttt!!!! Who needs that? And what does “large economy size” mean anyways? That’s total ad-speak.
I think “Large Economy Size” used there is tounge im cheek, It’s a play on an overused size desingnation of the time, and that Dart was marginally larger than Valiant, Falcon and Chev II competition.
Define better? Is it better that massive amounts of money/debt are needed to equal a job income a high school diploma got you 50 years ago? Is being “enlightened” the knowledge that individuality is futile in the big picture and that the only noble goal in life is to live as long as drugs and technology will keep you alive? Is it better that nobody possesses the skill to use a basic tool to fix an otherwise in-tact product when they can simply buy a super cheap replacement from overseas, built on the backs of exploited labor? Is it better that the computing power in our pockets is, in fact, NEVER in our pockets, and is isolating us from the nuance and joy of real human contact… that is until we cross the median and end up face to face with one… but luckily in our safety pods so lesson not learned… autonomy will fix this flaw!
It’s also possible that some look back at the past forget and minimize lot of the good stuff and embellish and amplify the bad stuff. The world has never been a utopia, and never will be. There are always a grab bag of positives and negatives from any one period of history and you can’t simply write it off someone’s yearning for a consumer product of an era as racist/sexist/ignorant/deadly, when in fact one just likes the aesthetics of signs, buildings and cars. Or maybe fantasize that they could have lived an equally fulfilling life without being on their lifeless career path chosen sometime in grade school by their helicopter parents. Or maybe are sick of getting lectured every time a benign comment is uttered on the internet, like…
Siri is a moron.
…I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.
Oops, there I am looking back at the recent past with my rose tinted glasses, completely not taking into account the crippling arthritis my fingers will be subjected to after physically typing in searches to google on an arcane keyboard, driving up health insurance costs with my reckless lifestyle!
+1!
Thank you as well. “Better” is always going to be a relative term between those who lived it and those that observe, but I have zero interest in humoring people who act like The Selma to Montgomery Marches didn’t happen in 1965. That’s not ancient history, folks. Good for you is not the same as good for us.
Of course not, but I’m not going to humor people who take an inanimate object and connect it to racial enequity and other unpleasant things of the time so they can get up on their soapbox. I’m sorry, but this as much of a stretch as bringing up Pearl Harbor when someone buys a Mitsubishi.
Besides, there wouldn’t noses thumbed at the past if it weren’t being used as a convenient scapegoat for current problems and inequalities, and those issues certainly didn’t start in 1963. The irony is the voices lecturing others to stop “living in the past” seem more immersed in the past than anyone who just likes old cars.
Matt, I disagree with some of your points but I think you make some very good points, too. I’m firmly in the “today isn’t amazing, but the past was so much worse for many of us” camp, but you have thoughtfully made some points about the past that show there were some good aspects as well. A good read.
I started to read this article halfway down the page and noted the quality of the writing…”is this stern?” So i scrolled back up and realized of course it was! Then his reply knocked it out of the park..so not only did he sell me a pair of cibie cesars 10 years ago..he entertains and informs to this day
Thanks kindly! »doffs cap«
I don’t think seat belts were required for the rear seat passengers in 1964. Some states may have required them for the front seat.
I believe there were some state laws in advance of Federal statute. Ford made a push for belts in the mid ’50s, but was met with market indifference. By the mid ’60s, belts were at least optional on most cars, and fairly commonly installed. My well optioned ’65 Buick Riviera had them – color keyed, no less.
The Feds made it official in ’68:
Title 49 of the United States Code, Chapter 301, Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, which took effect on January 1, 1968, that required all vehicles (except buses) to be fitted with seat belts in all designated seating positions
The belt laws go like this-
1965-2 front lap belts standard
1966-plus 2 rear lap belts
1967-laps for all pass positions,
plus shoulder belt anchor
1968-2 front shoulder belts (Jan 1 ’68)
1972-All outboard lap belts rectractable,
plus light and buzzer
1974-Intertial reel front shoulder belts
integrated with lap belt (coincided
with interlock, soon dropped)
1991? Rear outboard shoulder belts
1962–lap belt anchorages, front and rear.
As you pointed out, the girl in the rear seat is not belted in. Probably there are no rear seat belts for her to use was my point above. Front seat belts were standard for the 64 model year as enough states required them to make not making them standard pointless.
Our factory-ordered 64 Fairlane Sports Coupe was the first car we owned that came with standard seat belts (front only) – supporting your statement that they were industry wide in 64. I believe my aunt’s 66 LTD was the first car in our family with rear belts – I don’t recall our 65 Thunderbird having them. Of course, key was state mandatory usage laws which came much later.
I love the smell of hydrocarbons in the morning.
“A compact in the large economy size” Nothing like having you cake and eating it to.
I believe that’s a reference to the fact that the Dart was slightly larger than it’s primary compact competition, Falcon,Valiant & Chevy II.
In 1964 I was 12 years old. It WAS better. And I’m not apologizing because my neighbors were white. Screw revisionist history. The cars? Eh, they were fun but driving one now in its original configuration can be pretty scary.
FS, I still drive my 63 Valiant regularly. Different, but not scary. I drive accordingly.
I am also with you on revisionist history. And virtue signalling. It doesn’t belong on a site devoted to old cars.
No revisionist history here. That phrase doesn’t mean what it looks like you might think it means.
Agreed. It’s a nonsense term. History is constantly re-written and revised. That’s how we look at and try to understand the past, i.e. through our present. All history is revisionist.
I resent the fact that many try to label those from the past with today’s labels and definitions. They were who they were. They live in the time in which they lived. Did they need to know more and progress? Sure, but nuts to those who’d like to blast Mt Rushmore to smithereens.
The old days seem better because the problems we had back then appear to be more manageable to our current eyes than what we have today. A lot of today’s problems weren’t around because ‘those people’ couldn’t set foot in your neighborhood.
Childhood was seen as better because we got more freedom than kids do nowadays. Of course we did, we were among the first generation to enjoy childhood. In our parent’s day, you worked to help put food on the table. Nowadays, our generation as parents remember what we did as kids and are terrified their kids will try the same dumb stunts.
I will admit, the one thing that was better back then was the lack of all-pervasive media. A lot of what happened back then, we didn’t find out in the daily newspapers. And we were happier to not have all the stinking dirty details 24/7. Don’t believe me? Read up on what we now know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, then think back to what we actually knew what was going on day by day during that week. If you thought we were scared then, just think how terrified we’d be living every detail that we know now on a day by day basis.
Every time I get tempted to look back to my youth thru rose colored glasses, I think back to my first car, that 1937 Buick Special. Big, impressive, “they don’t build them like they used to.” Thank god, that thing drove like a damned delivery truck.
This is a very well thought out post, Syke.
Critiquing this ad using the lense of presentism is as wrong as claiming those were the “good ol’ days”. Like any period the times were good and bad. Same as today.
One can’t use modern mores and standards to analyze historical periods without distorting that period in the retelling. The 60s weren’t the 10s of the 21st Century. Nor are the 10s the 60s.
Agreed, but critiques of ads are a product of the present, thus affecting how we view them when making the critique. I don’t think we all view them as all good, or all bad times, but we can point out the good and the bad to try to make the present even better while avoiding the bad. It does not distort the era when you put it in context, and I believe most posters did just that.
+1!
Thank you for saying that. As a reenactor, nothing frustrates me more than putting up with someone insisting a viewing a historical event thru modern eyes and with modern mores.
They weren’t wrong back then. They were different.
Let’s rev up that idea of yours and see how it goes: Segregation wasn’t wrong, it was just different. Slavery wasn’t wrong, it was just different. Dumping mercury and lead and all kinds of other poison directly into the air, water, and land wasn’t wrong, it was just different. This (lower left corner of page) wasn’t wrong, it was just different. Mmmm…sorry, no sale. Just because something was (is) the way it was (is), doesn’t mean it was (is) right.
Granted, I was very small at the time, But I didn’t know we had slavery in 1964.
Yep. In South Africa, for example, where its formal name was “Apartheid”. We still have it today, in places like China. We’re not just talking about the United States, and we’re not just talking about 1964.
Since this post was about an American car commercal from 1964 and everyone was referring to things from 1964, I really thought the subject was 1964.
PS Since those horrible things STILL exist, why criticize the past at all?
Oh, I know why. People today are so much better today! After those idiots from the past couldn’t do ANYTHING, especially AMERICANS (or Westerners,in general). We’re, much more enlightened and progressive now! Man, I’m glad my generation fixed everything. Whew! back to bed for me!
In 1964 I was 23 years old and in the Air Force, at Elmendorf AFB outside of Anchorage, where my first sight of these cars was a shipment on a flatbed rail car. From that small distance and seen from slightly below, they were stunningly gorgeous, very European in their looks. Now they seem a bit oversized and gawky, but they and their Valiant siblings are still my favorite Americans from that time.
A garage owner who was part of our car-freaks gang bought one with the hot slant-six. He got a lot of static – a four-barrel on a SIX?? – until we all ran up the road to Palmer one day and he (and his wife and kids, all belted in by the way) blew off everyone but one or two.
Your garage-owner buddy didn’t buy a ’64 Dart with a 4bbl Slant-6. Carburetion options on the Slant-6 engine in ’64 were none: you got a 1bbl. There were aftermarket 4bbl manifolds from Offenhauser and Weiand. The factory “hot Slant-6” package was the ’60-’61 Hyper Pak, with a long(!)-ram 4bbl intake, front-3/rear-3 cast iron headers, a much hotter cam, stiffer valve springs, and other bits.
Though the theory (and practice) behind marketing psychology has pretty much reached a form of singularity with the almost one-to-one sample-to-population petri dish that is google and facebook, to say nothing of the wonders of fMRI, there was a superb book written in the late 1950s by Vance Packard – ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ with some content that still holds today.
CC continues to be somewhere near the vanguard of parsing the truth from the fetishism of the past, and its a post and comments like this and these that show why. And none of these moments of clarity will ever disabuse me personally of the absolute supremacy of the pre-1980 automotive shape.
Cheers Daniel.
Thanks for a fun-to-watch commercial and lot of thoughtful and also emotional (I mean both in a good way) comments. In the late ’70’s a friend of mine inherited his parents’ ’64 Dart after owning some fairly modern cars, including a Volvo 140 and a Golf. He loved the Dart; the few times I drove it was reminded just how much cars had improved in 15 years. And I felt the same way every time I drove my own parents’ ’64 Volvo (which frankly felt even more dated than the Dart in many ways). I can’t imagine driving either car now as more than a (brief) exercise in nostalgia. As a financially secure married straight white male I’m really glad the modern world, or at least the US, is a much safer place to drive, drink the water and breathe the air, and in general, live, not only for me and my family, but also for my disabled, gay, darker skinned, etc etc friends. And, if you really want to, you can still go out and buy a new Dart (though perhaps not for much longer, since not enough people did).
Ahh, the pleasures of rose tinted glasses. I for one think things were not really that good in the good old days. Even so, time has a way of messing with your memories so that you forget the bad and remember the good. Kind of a defense mechanism I guess.
Yes, I miss 1964 – I miss ducking under my desk for Atomic War Tests – I miss getting the strap every other day for not conforming – I miss visiting my best friend’s brother in his Iron Lung Machine in their house – I miss falling out of the car turning the corner with no seat belts – I miss both my Grandfathers dead under 65 from Lung Cancer – I miss our 1964 Dodge Dart, but mainly I miss playing in backyard with my bother.
While I can appreciate some people may disagree with Daniel’s article and further comments, I think it is worth pointing out that we generally try to present a balanced take around here on many topics. And so many other websites wallow in unrestrained idolatry of the past, and I think it’s worth showing a different take. Daniel’s arguments are arguments I for the most part agree with, and I can see there are others here who agree too. We can still like things from the past, appreciate memories and objects and traditions from the past, while acknowledging the past wasn’t all that great. Some get very defensive about the past and how great it was but, just like old cars have their flaws we can acknowledge, so too can we acknowledge that old times have their flaws too.
That’s it exactly. We don’t like old cars because they’re better—they’re not. We like them because we like them, and that’s fine.
Where I disagree with Mr. Stern is his need to come out swinging on social issues in a manner that is out of context.
There is not a single issue of bias or racism in this Dodge commercial he chose to write about. The comments about all-white neighbors when virtually nobody but the central family is even featured, or the comments about the boy shooting a gun when he is merely practicing a hobby seem simply written to irritate.
That, and a propensity to get some of the details wrong doesn’t help. When issues are sensitive, details count. Mr. Stern recently came out swinging on race in comments on a 1977 Chevrolet commercial BECAUSE it featured black cast members. He asserted this was something revolutionary. Apparently, he has not seen the 1972 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight commercial featuring Eddie Robbinson. At the same time, Arthur Ashe was pitching tennis rackets on television. There are countless examples, there was a sea change in advertising and race around 1970, if not closer to 1968. Baiting people to engage in racial issues in a negative way for that 1977 commercial was neither necessary nor particularly historically accurate.
The thing is, CC has occasionally thoughtfully addressed social issues in proper context. Learning that GM manager Nicholas Dreystadt helped GM executives open their eyes about the ills of racism in business was enlightening. That is a constructive look at cars in their social context, and seems more fitting to the mission of CC.
There are old auto commercials readily available on Youtube that do feature bias, and it would be possible to tackle them, thoughtfully, as a topic for what they are.
I read TTAC for the articles, and ignore the commentary. Way too much thoughtless political comment, and I appreciate that CC is not TTAC, and I think that is the point some are trying to make here.
Now, going back to 1971, I’d like to buy Mr. Stern a Coke….
(I can’t seem to embed things here properly anymore.)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2406n8_rUw&w=560&h=315%5D
+1!
I’m not “coming out swinging”, I’m painting a more contextually-complete picture than you might be accustomed to finding in articles about old cars. Fact is, the ’64 Dart wasn’t just a product of the Chrysler Corporation, it was also a product of its time and all the attendant realities—good, bad, and indifferent. If you don’t want to read anything but “Gee, golly, the past was keen. Wouldn’t it be nifty to drive around in an awesome, perfect world of 29¢/gallon gasoline, sock hops, poodle skirts, fins and chrome, and cars like this filling the streets? Gosh, that’d be swell!”, then maybe you’d best avoid my articles.
I don’t think any of us want that, the best part about CC is that there is no love fest revolving around muscle car show queens(even though I love them) and instead a focus on regular cars and the environment they were part of, and the successes/failures and even the discussion of alternate realities. There is a balance to that usually, I just can’t take a hatchet job any more serious than I would a head in the sand love fest. Both outlooks are equally destructive, as both breed bitterness and conflict in the present.
Amen. From a philosophical point of view the whole idea of “progress” and whether today or the past was “better” is very much debatable.
Let’s talk about cars and leave the rest!
Yes! For left leaning whining we have Tumblr, for right leaning whining we have Sean Hannity. For cars we have CC.
And CC is mostly about the past. Now back to the important elements of the past I would bring back vis-a-vis this ad: Slant Six and Tourqe Flite in an A body MoPar.
The past is, just that. The past. A time or a place that used to exist but no longer does. I personally, like the past, because as someone drawn to history, I think the past is interesting. It’s a damn sight more interesting today.
There will always be good and bad things about everything, and I tend not to agree with either camp on the issue of whether the past was good or not. I think that the people who willingly ignore or forget some of the problems of the past tend to be ignorant, and shows a certain level of cognitive dissonance I’m not willing to tolerate. While I think that the people who exasperate and exaggerate the negative parts of the past, as some sort of proof that today is better, tend to be just as bad. Pointing at the past and going “See, everything was terrible! That’s why today is so much better.” is quite frankly idiotic, as if you’re ignoring the problems that might be going on today and you’re only defense is “It could always be worse.” A frankly lazy, but sadly not untrue copout.
I think its better to just try and analyze both what was good about the past and what was bad about the past, and just come up with a sort of neutral understanding. No, not everyone who wishes for the “good ol days” is backwards and stupid, just like people who lavish overt praise of the present are not enlightened and progressive. It’s missing the forest for the trees in both cases.
Besides, I’m always a firm believer that too condemn the past too much is shortsighted. After all, who’s to say the next generation won’t look upon some of our ways of thinking and modern ideals, and say that we were all moronic simpletons? No person who lived in their time period had access to the future, and it’s natural for every succeeding generation to critique their ancestors for the time in which they lived.
Future generations (assuming there’ll be a future for us at all) will surely look upon us as moronic simpletons, because—relatively speaking—that’s exactly what we are.
Honestly, if future generations are going to look back on all who came before them as moronic simpletons, maybe humanity is better off without a future. The goal is to learn from the past.
+1!
@dominic1955 Said: “I thought this site was about cars, not social commentary harangues…?”.
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Apparently you thought wrong .
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I lived them and there were many good aspects, many more not so much ..
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Me, I’d _love_ a ’64 Dodge Dart Hardtop Coupe, especially if the GT was available then .
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-Nate
64 well you couldnt get a Dart here an Aussie AP5 Valiant was as close as you got, my dad bought a 64 Vauxhall Velox no seatbelts flowthru after market heater no radio it was quite a bare bones car, but it was new and new cars were very hard to get with strict import and finance regs in place here.
Five times during the commercial, the voiceover guy refers to the vehicle as a “compact”. They sometimes forget that outside the corporate marketing strategy rooms, nobody calls any car a “compact” – maybe a “compact car” or more likely a “small car”, but I’ve never heard anyone say “I just bought a new compact today” unless they were referring to a small cosmetic make-up kit. The adverising guys need to start talking like normal people.
In the context of the time, that language was correct. I was a kid when the 60 US compact cars were introduced. My Dad bought a new 61 Falcon in the Fall of 60 and at the time it was quite common to say “I bought a new compact” today when referring to one of these cars. “Compact” quickly became a generic reference to this range of cars rather than an adjective for the size of car. That use of language continued for a few years.
Yep, For a time “compact” by itself was used as a term for compact car. Similarly “transistor” was used by itself for pocket radios (even after most other sized radios were transistorized.).
I still use “compact” and “subcompact” alone when talking cars.
OTOH, Calling small radios “transistors” or even “transistor radios” seemingly went out by the mid ’70s when TVs became nearly 100% transistorized.
A very interesting post and comments. The things that make me think the past was better was the fact I had a nice secure upbringing in country Australia, I didn’t have to go off to war as a young man, and it seemed there was more time to just enjoy life without the stresses of surviving in the adult world.
This has to make the past seem more attractive right ?
One thing I know that was better was looking forward to when the new models of cars were released, even the mild facelifts could be interesting, nowadays I can’t hardly tell the new ones from the not so new ones, and to be honest don’t really care about the new stuff. The Dodge Rams are impressive though, quite a few of them getting around here now.
I was born in 1962.
The underlying issue is that Daniel was likely very disappointed with lighting back then. Flashlights sucked, for example. All those lovely taillights but lousy bulbs in them.
We had a 64 GT convertible and loved it, kept it until it was too small for our family. Dad kept the receipt and extras from the dealer, I still have them. Only car he did that with. I watched it rot away as a youth, it was parked on my paper route in diminishing circumstances, bad repaints and tape on the top.
Socially, there were no racial issues. Factory town with every nationality you can conjure. As a kid I could walk past the Slovak Club and hear polkas blasting, etc. And I was out at all hours day and night, in “bad” parts of town, unsupervised. Skateboarded down steep hills at night with no helmet or reflectives and hardware store gloves. Somehow survived all the supposed terrors.
I’m glad we cleaned up our act in some ways, but we’re just as stupid and blind as we were then. Only with more “knowledge”, instantly available and of questionable provenance. That’ll surely help. No way someone would take advantage of that and screw up the world.
“Slovak Club”?, Cool, Are yinz from Pittsburgh an ‘nat? ??
Could be Johnstown, or just about anywhere in western PA in the triangle formed by Pittsburgh, Johnstown and Erie.
I’ve been to a lot of Slovak clubs, Croatian clubs and Russian clubs in Western PA over the years! In addition to various Italian Social Halls. Goos Times with family.
When I want to crack myself up, I say “modern technology” in that accent.
Which comes out somewhat like morn tecnowigy.
:^)
Yes, But yinz no them ahttatners can’t rillly do it no justice. I jest tellum eat a jumbo sammitch an rap a gumban arahnd der mauths! LOL!
All of this is easier to say than to write.
PS Pittsburgh and Chicago share the wonderful word: “Jagoff”.
The underlying issue is that Daniel was likely very disappointed with lighting back then. Flashlights sucked, for example. All those lovely taillights but lousy bulbs in them.
This!!
Heh, I see whatchya did there, but…no, actually, there was a lot to be said in favour of the lighting situation in 1964. There weren’t any LEDs, only incandescents and flickery fluorescents with lousy light quality, and halogen was the newest technology, that’s true.
But take car headlights: there was a grand total of four types on American roads: large round 6-volt, large round 12-volt, small round high/low beam, and small round high beam. Those types serviced every 1940 or newer vehicle on the road. They couldn’t compare to the levels of headlighting performance we have from today’s good headlamps, but neither did they produce today’s levels of glare. They were long-lived, inexpensive, readily available everywhere, easy to replace, and easy to aim.
Research and development on them was actively under way on them, so every driver got the newest improvements when they put in a new set of (cheap, easy) headlamps. Whether the car was a ’63 Beetle or a ’56 Imperial or a Mack truck, the owner got better headlamps every time they replaced them.
Most states had roadworthiness inspections that included headlamp aim checking and adjustment—nowadays, that’s no longer the case and it’s hard to get your headlamps aimed correctly even if you’re willing to spend money on it.
That said:
If you think there were no racial issues back then, it’s probably because you didn’t see ’em because you weren’t a minority or a foreigner. The primary main plum conferred by privilege is the luxury of never having to see, acknowledge, or think about privilege if one doesn’t want to.
And yeah, OK, you survived skateboarding stunts without protective gear, etc. Congratulations, you were lucky; far too many other people got maimed or killed by those “supposed terrors” you dismiss, which is why we don’t do things that way any more.
Also, traffic deaths are increasing…http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Risky-driving-sends-traffic-deaths-higher-10935725.php
And lead isn’t dead…from a post about the enviro considerations of civil aviation….
“Turns out that the 100LL avgas contains two grams of lead per gallon. Much more than the auto gas of the 70’s. And airplanes use a lot of gasoline, 4 gallons per hour and upwards, often much more. And that’s quite the amount of lead. They have to add special chemicals so the lead goes out the exhaust, and doesn’t clog up the engine or ignition. Still, some of it ends up in the engine oil, you can actually see it shimmer from the lead. You aren’t allowed to burn that oil – it has to be specially disposed of because of the high lead content. If the oil is so bad, what about the rest of the lead, which gets spread all over the atmosphere?
….I worked out, that for a cessna 152 (a small two seater), flying at around 100 knots, the amount of air raised to EPA limits for airborne lead is equal to all the air that passes under the aircraft’s wings to a height of four meters! That’s a lot of air.”
A compact car in America was smaller than the full sized, ‘standard’ cars of Ford and Chevrolet. The Studebaker Lark was a ‘compact with a full-sized interior’, because Duncan McRae sawed off the front and rear overhangs of the formerly ‘full-sized’ (tho’ narrow) Studebaker.
The Dodge Dart was a ‘full sized compact’ because it was longer than any other non-full sized car: tho’ its interior dimensions were exactly the same as the shorter Valiant, it rode a 110-inch wheelbase rather than the Valiant’s 106 (Dodge and Valiant wagons were all 106″)
As for the rest, I agree with Dan. And it ain’t about flashlights. And to the person who wrote that there were no social issues in your town during a time that Government was lying about how it was prosecuting an overseas war, that Martin Luther King was leading marches asking for civil rights, leading Universities around the countries limited attendance of Jews, Asians and other groups to ‘manageable levels’, and the FBI was maintaining dossiers on every single person of color who actually obtained a college degree (or even just attended), I’d say your perspective was a bit too narrow.
For my entire childhood, from the late 50s until into the 70s, my family alternated between GM cars and Ford cars. The only Chrysler Corporation driving friends my family had was my parents’ accountant, Herb, whose family only drove Darts and Valiants. We grew up thinking that Chrysler Corporation car owners were overly thrifty and a little odd. Or uncool. Now I know better.
Five times during the commercial, the voiceover guy refers to the vehicle as a “compact”. They sometimes forget that outside the corporate marketing strategy rooms, nobody calls any car a “compact” – maybe a “compact car” or more likely a “small car”, but I’ve never heard anyone say “I just bought a new compact today” unless they were referring to a small cosmetic make-up kit. The advertising guys need to start talking like normal people.
“compact” alone WAS used to refer to cars up through the 1970s, Not just in “ad speak” (I hit on this elsewhere on this thread.). BTW, I am not now, and never was in advertising, and I was in Highschool (late 1970s) before I heard of a “compact” as a distribution device for face make-up.(Not that that definition wasn’t around,Just because I didn’t hear of it..) Before that (to me) a “compact” (The word used by itself) was a type of car.