To Mercury, with love and squalor...

By Jim Heffernan

So it’s official…Ford Motor Co. is killing off the Mercury, once again demonstrating the impermanence of just about everything in your life if you live long enough.

Gosh, I loved Mercs, as we usually called them. I even loved them before James Dean drove a ’49 Mercury two-door in “Rebel Without a Cause,” a movie that came out in 1955, the year I got my first driver’s license.

I must have seen that movie half a dozen times before I grew up, always admiring that deep blue ’49 Merc and dreaming that one fine day I would own one. In my late teens, I actually did own a beat-up gray ’50 Merc (’50 Mercs were almost identical to ‘49s except they had different dashboards, door handles and some other exterior trim).

The clutch slipped so badly on my ’50 Merc that it was a challenge to go up steep hills, but who cared? It was a Merc, similar to James Dean’s. When the brakes gave out one time, it hit a utility pole head-on, mutilating the front bumper, bending it in where it had struck the pole. Who cared? Who had money to fix it? Not me. I didn’t like to work then.

So I kept driving it, bent bumper and all. Once, stopped in downtown Duluth for a red light, I recognized the mother of a kid I knew from school walking with another woman across the street in front of me. I heard her remark to her companion something about what a disgusting car it was.

It wasn’t disgusting to me. It was like the car James Dean drove in “Rebel Without a Cause.” Sort of. That made it special.

A buddy of mine actually got a dark blue two-door ’49 Merc exactly like the “Rebel” Merc, but it had been through the mill. It looked pretty good at night if the moon wasn’t too bright. We used to sit and stare at it after dark.

I had a ‘48 Mercury engine in my first car, a 1940 Ford DeLuxe Coupe. It had more horsepower than the original Ford V-8 until it blew up (“threw a rod” in technical terms) one summer evening on old Highway 61 near Nopeming. A mechanic friend replaced the shot motor with a ’49 Merc engine (even more horsepower).

I have taken it upon myself to mark in writing the passing of American cars in recent years. Oldsmobile made it into my book, “Cooler Near the Lake.” The recent demise of Pontiac was, like Mercury, the loss of an iconic brand. So was Plymouth, although I never FELT for Plymouths. We used to call them “flatshafts,” a term referring to problems in the bowels of their six-cylinder engines. James Dean wouldn’t be seen dead in a Plymouth, although he was seen dead in a Porsche.

And now Mercury. They’ve just been Fords in different clothing in recent years, but they’ve always been there. They were introduced the year I was born. And if you live long enough, you see the impermanence of just about everything in your life. I know, I said that, but it’s worth repeating. Looks like now we’re even losing the Gulf of Mexico.

Concerning the headline above: If he were still alive, I would apologize to J.D. Salinger, who wrote a short story, “To Esme With Love and Squalor.” But Salinger’s dead, too, demonstrating the impermanence of… Well, you know.

Note:  To read about the demise of the Mercury, check out today's NY Times article, "Ford to Stop Building Mercury After 71 Years" by Micheline Maynard HERE.  And... thanks to Gary for noticing the typo on the headline. It's Mercury... not Murcury :-)

Pontiac Without Tears

By Jim Heffernan

First they came for the Plymouth, and I did not speak out because I did not drive a Plymouth. Then they came for the Oldsmobile, but I did not speak out because I sold my one Oldsmobile years ago. Then they came for the Pontiac, and I am finally speaking out.

Not that I care that much that General Motors announced last week it is scaling back its nameplates to Cadillac, Buick, GMC and Chevrolet, and dropping Pontiac except as a “niche” car.

What’s a niche car? A car driven by a German philosopher?

The only reason I bring all this up is that it seems so incredible that certain things that seemingly have been around forever and were likely to remain a part of our lives forever can suddenly disappear. No Pontiacs? It’s like saying there is no Santa Claus, or that peanut butter might be unsafe for human consumption, or that those big, tall banks in New York City, with fancy plazas and imposing signs above them, are insolvent.

Here’s a letter I never received:

“Dear Mr. Blogger, my name is Virginia and my little friends say there will be no more Pontiacs. My father says to go on the Internet and ask. He says that the Internet knows everything now. So I ask you, will there be no more Pontiacs?”

Yes, Virginia, there will be no more Pontiacs (or bananas). We will only have memories of this middle-range GM automobile that in its day had a reputation for being the hottest thing on four wide-track wheels.

It had several incarnations, but starting in the late ‘50s (after they dumped the straight-eight engine and installed a high-horsepower and huge cubic inch V8), the Pontiac was the car to own if you knew what was important in life: Burning the rubber off your rear tires on takeoff, beating the car next to you in an impromptu drag race at a traffic signal, or cruising the highways at upwards of 100 mph, drinking gas through dual four-barrel carbs like a desert rat at an oasis.

I owned two Pontiacs, one a 1964 Grand Prix two-door hardtop with an engine so powerful it could pull a steam locomotive into history. On the highway, if you weren’t watching the speedometer carefully, it would creep out of the 80s and into the 90s mph without straining. Highway cops would not accept the excuse that the car was speeding, not the driver, when they pinched you. This was back in the days when cops pinched woman drivers, too.

My other Pontiac was a 1969 Catalina convertible with an eight-track tape player in the dashboard and a wide-track stance at the wheelbase. It also would go very fast, but I was a family man by then, so I tried to keep in under the century mark on the highway for the sake of the children.

Long before Pontiacs were considered “hot” cars (in 1958 some models like Bonneville had side chrome sculpted like a space rocket) Pontiacs were distinguished by chrome stripes running up the center of the hood and down the trunk like the centerline on a highway. Also, the hood ornament was an amber sculpture of the face of a noble Native American, presumably Chief Pontiac, after whom the car was named. The chief’s face lit up when the lights were turned on. You don’t see that kind of thing on cars anymore.

Maybe if they still had stripes and the hood ornament they could have saved Pontiac. Maybe not.

NY Times: Its Muscle Car Glory Faded, Pontiac Shrivels Up