“Is it a Chevrolet?”

This is the Bow-Tie I had on our Astrovan.

As of November 2011, the Chevrolet brand is 100 years old.
Not much has been made of it.
No mention of it my Car & Driver magazine.
The only magazine mention I got was my Hemmings Classic Car magazine.
And that was because the Chevrolet brand has so much history attached to it.
It became the dominant brand in the General Motors line-up in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Chevrolet is no longer the almighty colossus it was in the ‘70s; poised per government scuttlebutt to take over the entirety of automobile manufacture.
Those government guys were a bit off.
Chevrolet was powerful, but:
—A) It was selling what the public wanted, more-or-less, and
—B) It had competition, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Corporation.
Its greatest competition was Japanese.
The Japanese were marketing to meet Chevrolet’s fatal flaw, its inability to make an attractive small car.
GM tried mightily, but their heart wasn’t in it.
And it was GM, not just Chevrolet.
General Motors had been building pretty much the same car since the late ‘30s, across all five product-lines.
Although on different wheelbases: A, B, and C (C being the largest).
Every time ya see a Cadillac think gussied up Chevrolet on the bigger wheelbase, with a Cadillac engine and different front and rear clips.
But between the wheels they were pretty much the same car.
Take the side-trim off a ’55 Chevy and it looks like a Buick.
Which it is, sorta.
Except Chevrolet and Buick had their own engines; until the ‘70s.
I remember the flap that occurred when Oldsmobile started installing the Chevrolet SmallBlock in its midsize cars.
The last car my parents drove was an ‘80s Buick, but it had the Chevrolet SmallBlock, very anemically done.
No mention Ford and Chrysler had been using common engines across their product-lines for years.
The media went ballistic. Supposedly General Motors was pulling a fast-one!
Then during the early ‘60s, General Motors started branching out; smaller wheelbases, midsize and compact.
This went across all five GM brands. Even Cadillac introduced a small car, the forgettable Cimarron, based on the GM J platform for the 1982 model-year (e.g. the Chevrolet Cavalier).
Other manufacturers were doing the same, Ford the Falcon and the Fairlane, and Chrysler Corporation with various small and midsize cars — like the Valiant.
Yet Chevrolet was still selling a full-size car, based on the other GM full-size offerings.
It was a Chevrolet in name, but also an Oldsmobile or Buick. And Cadillac was more-or-less the same car.
It seemed like Chevrolet had lost its bearings; like it was no longer marketing cheap and reliable transportation.
They might sell small cars, but so did the other GM brands.
When Chevrolet introduced its Nova, a small, cheap and reliable car, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick all wanted their own versions: the Oldsmobile Omega, the Pontiac Ventura, and the Buick Apollo, which is what “Nova” stood for: N-O-V-A.
Chevrolet was no longer manufacturing what appealed to my paternal grandmother: cheap and reliable transportation.
My grandmother was very much a Chevy-person; basic transportation. Everything else was mere posturing.
GM’s profit was in profligate gas-guzzlers.
A giant market for small cars arose in California, and spread east.
GM’s response was the Chevrolet Vega (before that was the Corvair, an even greater marketing mistake).
The Vega was nice-looking, especially the GT hatchback — I had one.
But its motor was cast-aluminum without iron cylinder-liners.
The aluminum-alloy was heavy with silicon, and the cylinder-bores would get lapped with acid, to etch away the aluminum to leave a silicon bore-finish, which wore as well as iron.
Trouble was, if the motor overheated, the block warped, destroying linearity.
The bores would wear so much the engine burned oil like a mosquito-fogger.
Beyond that, a lot of the structural integrity of the car, which was great at first, was in thin panels that quickly rusted away.
Without that paneling, the front-end of a Vega would droop as it collapsed.
My Vega did that, much as I liked it, and babied it.
It became a low-rider.
Look under the hood, and all the inside fender-walls had rusted away.
Without those fender-walls, the motor and suspension mounts bent upward under the weight of the engine, lowering the front-end.
I also got heavy rust around the windshield.
The windshield surround was a thin panel that filled with salty slush.
Despite all that, I’ve always been a Chevy-man.
It goes back to my parents always driving Chevrolets, and Chevrolet fielding its revolutionary SmallBlock motor as I came of age in the late ‘50s.
The Chevy SmallBlock is the motor that finally put the famous Ford Flat-head V8 out to pasture.

Photo by BobbaLew.

A Ford Flat-head V8 (note flat cylinder-head casting on left cylinder-bank. Both head-castings are finned cast-aluminum Offenhouser [“off-in-HOUZE-err”] high compression hotrod parts — stock flat-head cylinder castings are cast-iron and not finned).

And the Ford Flat-head inspired the hotrod movement.
It was cheap and available, and responded well to backyard hot-rodding.
But so too was the Chevy SmallBlock, which breathed much better than the Ford Flat-head, since the SmallBlock was overhead-valve.
Soon hot-rodders were replacing their Flat-heads with Chevy SmallBlocks.
Doing so was worth the trouble.
The Chevrolet brand was founded by Louis Chevrolet and ousted GM founder William C. Durant on November 3, 1911.
Louis Chevrolet was a famous French racecar driver and mechanic.
Chevrolet was not a low-priced car at first, but General Motors acquired Chevrolet in 1918 (with Durant re-entering).
Chevrolet was positioned by then GM president Alfred Sloan to sell a lineup of mainstream vehicles to directly compete against Henry Ford’s Model T in the ‘20s.
Chevrolet became a venerable icon.
In the ‘50s, when I was growing up, Chevrolet came to symbolize the great destiny of America after World War II.

Photo by Eleanor Hughes. (“Eleanor Hughes” is my mother.)

The ’39 Chevy crippled in New York City on the first day of our vacation to New England in 1951 (I was seven). The condenser had burned out.

Photo by Eleanor Hughes.

My father in front of our ’41 Chevy.

The first car I remember is a ’39 Chevy, the car that apparently replaced the ’33 Chevy my father had when he got married in 1941.
They may have still had the ’33 when I was born (1944), but the ’39 was what I remember.
My father began looking for a replacement about the time he started his new job at Texaco’s Eagle Point oil-refinery in south Jersey.
The ’39 broke its timing-chain one afternoon returning from the refinery.
We purchased a well-kept 1941 Chevrolet from someone in our church.
The ’41 Chevy was one of the most popular used cars of all time. (The others were the ’57 and the ’64.)
The ‘41 was an antique when we bought it about 1949, but it looked great.
It was equipped with various non-stock options, a spotlight and a metal windshield visor. It was a Special Deluxe; only four side-windows instead of six. It was powder blue.
It was in great shape visibly, but I remember it overheating on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Pittsburgh during a vacation-trip to Arkansas.
It had a clogged radiator.
I remember my father fixing it by removing the thermostat (not advisable, but he didn’t know that), and replacing the gasket with a cutout from a Ritz cracker-box.
Soon after we purchased the ’41 we went to mighty Rohrer Chevrolet east of Camden, NJ. (Rohrer Chevrolet no longer exists.)
We went out back into the service area, and there on the wall was a Texaco sign.
All was right with the world.
We bought Chevrolets, and my father worked for Texaco.

This was my siren-song growing up. What a great country America was, and our family drove Chevrolets.
Chevrolet symbolized a shining future.
Furthermore, in the 1955 model-year Chevrolet introduced a revolutionary V8 motor, the vaunted SmallBlock.
It had a light-weight valve-train, so could rev to the moon — just like in Europe!
As mentioned above, the SmallBlock revolutionized hot-rodding.
Beyond that, Chevrolet introduced the Corvette, a sportscar wannabee, for the 1953 model-year.
To make it more a sportscar, the SmallBlock was installed, and a four-speed floor-shifted transmission was introduced.
All this stuff could be easily installed in a ’55 Chevy, a four-speed SmallBlock.
The SmallBlock in a ’55 Chevy was the same engine-block as in a ‘Vette.
The concept swept me along all through high-school and college.

Photo by BobbaLew.

My dream: a ’55 Two-Ten hardtop. (This thing was four-on-the-floor; ‘Vette motor).

Photo by BobbaLew.

The wagon.

My dream was a 210 hardtop like the car pictured at left, or perhaps a stationwagon, more practical. (My parents purchased a ’57 SmallBlock wagon after my freshman year in college. It was phenomenal, a 283 PowerPak with four-barrel carb and dual exhausts.)
In 1954 my father began looking for a replacement for our ’41.
By the beginning of the decade, Chevrolet was offering automatic-transmission, its two-speed PowerGlide. (“Slip-and-slide with PowerGlide!”)
The ’41 wasn’t automatic.
We were considering a ’50 or ’51 at first, but my father came across a 1953 210 two-door with tinted glass, only about 5,000 miles.
It was from a matron in Philadelphia (across the river from where we lived in south Jersey).
A ’53 in ’54 is almost new, the newest car our family ever bought.
$1,200, and my father had to borrow from my paternal grandfather, a stickler about money.
He was probably asking my father for that money every week.
That ’53 Chevy was the car I learned to drive in.
I will never forget the first time I depressed the gas-pedal and felt that old turkey move.
Our ’53 became known as “the Blue Bomb,” partly because it was dark navy blue, and partly because it was such a pig.
As was his custom, my father never took care of it.
When it finally failed inspection, at 10 years and over 100,000 miles, it failed because its brake-shoes were worn through to the backing-plates.
The shock-absorbers were totally useless. Bouncy-bouncy-bouncy!

Photo by BobbaLew.

The Blue Bomb after my accident.

And the ’53 was the car I slid into the back of a Mercedes-Benz at an icy railroad-crossing.
Our ’53 was the most damaged; the Mercedes not at all.
My father had a local shop do only basic repair, enough to make it operable.
No cosmetic repair.
So I drove it with a punched-in face for a while.

Photo by BobbaLew.

The Beast.

1968 Triumph TR250 (same color as mine).

My first car was a sportscar, a Triumph TR3 nicknamed “the Beast.”
It wasn’t a Chevrolet. (Gasp!)
After I got married in December of 1967, we got another sportscar, a brand-new 1968 Triumph TR250.
It was awful, totally useless as basic transportation.
One afternoon in 1974 I noticed a used 1972 Vega at Taylor Chevrolet near where we lived in Rochester, NY.
(Taylor Chevrolet went defunct, was torn down, and replaced by a supermarket.)
It was a GT hatchback, four-on-the-floor, with a two-barrel carburetor for added performance.

Mine was red with a black stripe.

It was much more pleasant than our TR250, mainly because it served well as basic transportation.
I drove it quite a while, but it was the last Chevrolet I owned until 1993.
It rusted to smithereens, as Vegas did, plus fell apart.
It also overheated, the bane of all Vegas (see above).
I drove it all the way to my parents in northern Delaware, and my paternal grandmother, who was living with my parents, looked at it soulfully a few minutes, and plaintively asked me “Is it a Chevrolet?”
“Well, sorta,” I answered. “It has the Chevrolet name on it, but it’s not the Nova.”
Novas were very basic; the kind of basic transportation my grandmother would approve.
She was asking me the saintly question: “Was the Vega sensible; a Chevrolet?”
My uncle (my father’s younger brother) was in deepest doo-doo because he bought Fords.
He liked a car that responded to the throttle, and Fords sorta did.
To my grandmother, performance was disgusting. What mattered was that the car start and run reliably.
That supposedly was Chevrolet.
After the Vega I fell to buying Volkswagens, a ’76 Dasher stationwagon, and then a ’78 Rabbit.
They were our first front-wheel-drive cars, and also our first automatic transmission, which meant my wife could drive them.
When the Dasher became unusable I bought a giant Ford E250 van, the most memorable vehicle I’ve ever owned.
My macho brother-from-Boston, also a Chevy-man, test-drove it, and loudly declared “There’s only one problem. It ain’t a Chevy!”
That van was auto-tranny, and I traded the ’78 Rabbit for a brand-new ’83 Rabbit GTI.
That was a five-speed; my wife couldn’t drive it.
Our van rusted apart, so we bought a brand-new ’89 Honda Civic All-Wheel-Drive stationwagon.
It was auto-tranny, so my wife could commute with it.
It lasted 13 years, and went 160,000 miles.
We’d still be driving it, but it suffered a minor crash that totaled it.
It was like Honda was building the cars Chevrolet should be.
But then I noticed Chevrolet was building a desirable vehicle, the All-Wheel-Drive Astrovan.
The siren-song arose again: “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet.”
I bought one. Dinah triumphant!
We drove it 12 years, 140,000 miles, despite it throwing various curves at us.
It broke a torsion-bar, requiring replacement of both.
(The front-suspension of an AWD Astrovan was by longitudinal torsion-bars, parallel to the frame-rails; not coil-springs.)
Most irksome was a “check-engine” light that winked at me if I drove hard.
Finally the engine barely ran, but a local Chevy dealer successfully diagnosed why — the dealer where I bought it never did — and it ran fine after that. (Defective oxygen-sensor.)
It began leaking oil. A gasket had failed.
Another problem that occurred occasionally was a lockout switch that wouldn’t let you put it in gear if it stuck.
This acted up twice, and the stuck switch could be fiddled free with your toe.
But the second time was when we arrived for Amtrak’s Auto-Train. I was afraid the stuck switch wouldn’t allow Amtrak employees to load our Astrovan.
(“Auto-train” is a railroad-train to Florida where you take your car along; in this case our Astrovan.)
So over the years, three switches.
They were a cheap design, bound to eventually fail. My grandmother wouldn’t have been pleased.
Our Astrovan became ungainly, and started falling apart.
So I turned it in for a new 2005 Toyota All-Wheel-Drive Sienna minivan, not bad, and much better than our Astrovan, which always seemed cheap.
So for the moment we are Chevy-less.
Dinah is in the background.
But I went to a Chevy dealer not too long ago to look at a new Chevy Equinox.
Our 2003 Honda CR-V is getting on in years.
The salesman was a viper, he wouldn’t let us out of the dealership without selling us a car.
But the folding rear-seats were not dog-friendly. (They aren’t in our CR-V either.)
I had to be unsociable.
You are a viper, I become a viper!
We walked out.
Despite that, Chevrolet has made 100 years.
And I’m still a Chevy-man. I wish I could buy a Chevrolet!

• “Carb” equals carburetor.
• “Tranny” equals transmission.
• My wife is “automotively challenged.” She has difficulty driving.