From car to computer crazed

When I was a kid, each fall on my way home from school I’d veer off the shortest route home to walk by a trucking firm that hauled new cars.

Well before I ogled newspaper photos of the new models, I would get an exclusive look at the sleek sheet metal riding on the open trailers and lined up in the trucking company lots.

This was not idle voyeurism. Every other year I knew that my Dad would buy one of these remarkable machines. A lot of people did. The Fifties were the height of the car culture. Detroit and its auto fantasy drove the bulk of American industry.

So as I’d approach the trucking lot in anticipation, I’d feel a rush of quasi-ownership. A compulsion really. An irrational lure.

For all kinds of reasons, besides the turning of hundreds of calendar pages, those days are over.

Today, cars last longer. We keep them longer. Much longer. We have to. I’ve lost my obsession for outrageous stylistic flair and the newest, latest. Owning a new car has no cache with my friends or family. My cars have been used for the past 20 years. Not clunkers exactly, but they’d been around their share of blocks.

Still, the feeling that I had approaching that trucking lot decades ago is still with me. Today, satisfying the consumptive urge costs less and achieves more — or at least I’d like to think it does.

What attracts me and millions of others now are new computers and associated geeky gadgets. The “much anticipated” label gets applied to every new mass-marketed computer device. These machines are “unveiled” just as Chevy Impalas and Pontiac Firebirds once were. Think no farther than the anticipation surrounding the iPhone 5, and the new Amazon tablet.

Here we have “not-so-major” purchases that still create buzz and carry status. Apple, today’s Chrysler or Lincoln or Cadillac, profits from high price tags partly for this reason. It also helps that the Cupertino giant is fixated on consumer satisfaction.

Computers are much more parts of our lives than cars were. And much more important to us. In fact, our cars rely on computers. Which is more difficult to replace, a stolen car or a stolen computer? We are “into” computers far more than we are "in" our cars. These wheel-less vehicles can transport us to real and imaginary worlds in nano seconds!

Oddly, points of comparison between computers sound similar to those once used in car marketing. Power, performance, speed, design. A current Intel campaign displays a sports car with half of its front appearance portrayed in x-ray. The caption reads, “Visibly_Smart....Stunning Visuals_Intelligent Performance”

No one ever told us we were “smart” or “intelligent” to buy the now iconic 1959 Chevy Impala but visuals and performance — computer selling points — were definitely in play.

Accessories also come into play. I have a new Mac Air (yes, Apple grabbed me again). Its keyboard lights up, presumably on the off chance I need to work on the Red Eye after the cabin lights have dimmed. The metallic graceful notebook is also light, thin and, well, sleek. These non-essentials no doubt played a role as I forked over a cool grand for an Air at the Apple “showroom.”

Didn’t cars once “grace” showrooms?

No list of comparisons would be complete without mentioning planned obsolescence, except in the case of computers you don’t get the feeling it is all that planned. The “latest technology” really is the latest. With cars, the basic technology never really changed until the introduction of the hybrid system.

Finally, there is the status-defining differentiation within lines. When Dad bought his new Buick, he bypassed the “entry-level” Special and the “luxury” Roadmaster and the similar, but less powerful Super. For him, the “Century” fit his persona. It was the closest thing that Buick had to a hot rod.

When I shopped Apple for my laptop, I too had a hierarchy of MacBook models to choose from. Good, better, best.

I got the feeling that the choices were there mostly to give me pause to ponder and engage with my options and prospective purchase. They defined the field. Besides, Apple seemed to be saying that it had given thought to my individuality. Steve Jobs had, in fact, considered me.

Buick showed the same marketing “sensitivity” to my Dad a half century ago.

Have we come all that far since then?

Buick convertible nights

I’m glad my dad, gone for nearly 23 years, never lived to see the bankruptcy of General Motors.

He was a GM guy. He routinely bought GM cars. When he didn’t, he learned to regret it. I remember his cursing a 1948 Ford he bought my mom. It refused to start on bitter cold January mornings in Illinois. He bought a ’50 Ford, but it refused to start even in the summer.

He replaced it with a ’52 Chevy and never looked back.

In the ‘50s my dad bought a new car annually. After a few Chevys, he graduated to Buicks, just the way GM wanted him to. From the start he bought convertibles. During the war, nimble Jeeps may have given him the open-air bug as they transported him to the B-29s crews he attended.

In the Buick line-up (Specials, Centuries, Supers, Roadmasters), he settled on the hot rod Century. Small body (at least for its time), big engine (for any time).

He’d keep a Century for himself for two years and then buy another. In the off years he’d buy my mom a new Buick, usually a Special. Small body, small engine. The Special, like the Supers, had three, not four, fake portholes. Dad would make her car a convertible too though Mom had fair, delicate skin and never put the top down. Dad probably anticipated that he might need to “borrow” her car, especially after I got my license.

Dad was nuts about new cars, and the nuttiness got into me. As a kid, I’d anticipate delivery dates weeks in advance. The night before the big day, I wouldn't sleep.

It took about 60 years for me to cure myself of the fascination. And while I could never match my dad’s extravagance, there was a time when I’ve cycled through cars just the way he did.

Recently I’ve mellowed. And though I’m tempted, I’ve stuck with my practical 1999 RAV4 for a record five years. It's about as far from a Buick Century convertible as you can get. Toyota is still in business and far from bankruptcy.

Dad was a urologist (he called himself a "plumber") back in the days of house calls. The houses were spread out across north-central Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Rockford was our home, but he’d do surgery and visit patients in Freeport, Belvedere, Rochelle, Monroe, Woodstock, Beloit and Janesville.

As a kid, I’d often go along with him in the summers or on Saturdays or even Sundays as hard as that is to believe. He knew all the back roads, and ,with the top down, he’d unleash the big engine and we’d slice through the thick summer’s air. The cornfields whisked by in flickering rows. Often he would sing into the wind and I’d join him. We made a motley duet belting out “Old Man River,” “Summertime,” “She’s Funny that Way.” Fortunately only the corn, the blackbirds and the cicadas could hear us.

Sometimes, on the weekends, the four of us — Mom, Dad, my kid-sister Kate and I — would take off for Milwaukee to see the Braves play. Or we’d drive in to Wrigley field to see the Cubs. I remember none of the games, but oh the long, two-lane drives home in the top-down nights. I’d stretch out on the back seat and stare up into a vast sea of stars. As Dad negotiated turns through the towns and the curves out on the highways, the stars would wheel above, first this way, then that, until, mesmerized, I’d drifted off to sleep to the wind song and the crickets.

I’d awaken to the silencing of the big engine and the shutting of the doors. Then I’d somehow stagger up to bed to dream.

"Across the fields to the Health Factory (or something)"

As I’ve delved further into the box of World War II letters that my dad wrote my mother, I've discovered new rewards.

I’ll share more about (and of) the letters in the weeks ahead. The history of the letters are hung up on a mystery of sorts. So far a preliminary search of government data bases fails to show Dad serving with the Army Air Force units he used as return addresses on the letters.

Is sleuthing this 60-year-old mystery worth it? Right now, let's face it, the Veterans Administration has its hands full.

So time — my time, and the government's — will tell.

In the meanwhile, my search of the letter box has uncovered a different kind of writing. I’ve come across some of the “stories" I encouraged Dad to write and share with me after he was forced to retire when a sudden on-set of delusions overwhelmed him. In the months and years that followed, Dad lost all direction, falling into despondency. Literal shock therapy hadn’t worked. Now I hoped writing might.

I knew from the letters Dad had written me that he was a fine writer, although he disparaged his efforts. He had a keen eye and brisk, easy style. I wish he had written more.

Though he wrote in the third person, his stories (so far I have found four) were mostly about his life as a surgeon and a urologist. You will see that he was much in demand and self-conscious about how he was seen, particularly by his patients and their families. He was a sharp dresser and had a no-non-sense, in-charge style. For all that, he liked to joke disarmingly at the bedside that, as a urologist, he was nothing more than a “glorified plumber.” Hospitals were no more than “health factories.”

In surgery, beyond the waiting room and the bedside, he was unpredictable: Charming, moody, funny, petulant.

But he was always professional — galvanized, and at times haunted, by the potential for and terrible consequences of surgical error.

I came to know him in this unfatherly role because I worked three summers in high school and college as a surgical orderly with him and other surgeons.

He was openly known to the surgical staff as “Wild Bill.”

In addition to practicing where we lived, in Rockford, Illinois, Dad was regularly called to the small towns that anchored farming communities. He raced along back roads in his Buick Century convertibles. “Dyna-Flow” captured their ride, power and flair. His cars were never more than three years old — comfortable rewards for his frenzied but rewarding life.

Let him tell the stories to you as he did to me.

Here’s one – a reflection really — which he openly suspected of being "9th grade." It's about a trip to a rural outpost — a Genoa, Belvidere or Freeport.

The throw-away, self-mocking title is his….

Across the fields to the Health Factory (or something)

Two kids rode the same horse down a dusty side road. The deep blue porcelain silos sparkled in the morning sun.

The back and white dairy cows gathered in the corners of their fields.

The oats were the lightest green of all. The darker trees in odd arrangements moved softly in the morning breeze.

A muddy creek oozed slowly beneath a rusty, one-track bridge. A red-winged blackbird perched on a cattail beside the creek.

The invisible meadow lark’s call came from nowhere, but somewhere.

An old farmer drove his tractor down most of the black-topped road

A sway-backed barn rotted on a deserted homestead. But nearby, just down the road, a huge white, working barn stood with its guardian silos. A collie barked as he drove past the farm.

Only the kids and the old farmer seemed to tend the country for many miles.

The road signs were rusty and leaning at crazy angles. Usually the signs bore no relation to the map. There must be a million “Town Line Roads,” all dwindling into “County Trunk F” at the wrong angle.

Often the surface dropped quickly from smoother black top to loose gravel and dust, then back again. He had learned to choose the next turn by gauging telephone poles in the distance.

Where was everybody?

No matter that he left the surgical schedule at home. He made mental lists of things he needed for the next case, the doctors to be called, tests to be run. He continually checked the rear-view mirror, the telephone poles, the road ahead.

He had learned to start with a full gas tank. No filling stations in dairy country. A few phones, but always on party lines — again he’d learned the hard way. A credit card call to a country phone operator was greeted with a sneer between suspicion and down right disbelief. If he didn’t call direct from one hospital to the next, he knew the line would go dead.

Gradually as he closed in on familiar ground — a water tower, a radio tower — he cut his speed to a reasonable limit. No hurry now. He knew the operating schedule would be late anyway.

The houses were newer, closer to the road, closer to the ground, closer to each other. And he knew he was closer to more trouble.

He had no time for food — a cup of coffee only. No time to think of the last case, of yesterday, of tomorrow. Only time to unpack his instruments, change into scrub clothes, cap, mask — and operate.