I have owned quite a number of cars since the late 1950s, but none of my cars have inspired me to write about them, at least not like the '47 Chevy Fleetline which was our family car from 1948 to 1956. One exception might be my very first car, a 1949 Pontiac which was my transportation for a few years in the late 1950s while I was in college at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. My Pontiac gave me lots of experience of learning to work on cars when they gave trouble. But our old '47 Chevy was my most memorable car, even though it was never actually mine.
Sometimes for boys growing up, their sense of growing up and being somebody gets all wrapped up in a vehicle -- sometimes a car, sometimes a pickup -- usually one or the other. We boys may even get to feeling that our car or truck is an extension of ourselves. If we have a great vehicle, we feel great about ourselves and about our life prospects in general. If our vehicle is not up to par, we don't feel very pert about ourselves.
We boys tend to enjoy being able to outdo our fellows. It's good if we can outrun them on foot. If we can't outrun them on foot, then maybe we can outdo them with our vehicle, whether in a flat-out race for top speed, or in a drag race such as was popular when my brothers and I were growing up in the 1950s. No, I was never a drag racer, never had a competitive vehicle for such, but I always enjoyed the stories of successes and failures, and the discussions on how to get one's car motor tuned to do its best in competition. I even dreamed of getting an old dog of a car like a '40s Plymouth and putting a 12-cylinder Allison aircraft engine in it so I could pull a surprise on anybody who wanted to drag race with me. Sigh, it never happened!
It wasn't only in performance that we boys got engrossed in our cars. Our old '47 Chevy was never much of a performance car, but it could be a show-out car if you wanted it to be. Sometimes a boy can take pride in his car's styling, and can do some customizing to make it look and sound unique. In northwest Arkansas in the 1950s, one popular style feature for our cars was to lower the rear, add fender skirts and curb feelers and white-sidewall tires, giving our cars that sleek and lean and mean look. At the same time, the young boys in California were lowering the fronts of their cars, raising the rear and adding big tires on the rear axle, like a dragster.
What did those West-coast guys know about styling? Since our '47 Chevy was our Dad's car, and had long been our family car, we couldn't get into a lot of customizing, but my brother Ben had the knack and determination to make the old '47 look great. He would spend all of a Saturday washing, detailing, waxing and shining the Chevy's sleek black lines. He also was able to split the manifold on the traditional old Chevy six-cylinder in-line engine and put on dual exhaust pipes and glass-pack mufflers. It definitely then had that young boys sound, that throaty roar and the splatting crackle of racking-off at 60 miles an hour in second gear. No longer did it sound like your grandpa's old Chevy. Now it had pizzazz!!
Actually, though, it was in its role as a show-out car that our old '47 Chevy met its demise. Our car was at a Pea Ridge basketball game in the early 1960s. There's no telling how many trips it had made through its lifetime to the old Pea Ridge Blackhawk gym which then stood at the intersection which we now identify as North Curtis Avenue and Pike Streets.
One of its famous trips to a basketball game included the side story in which someone came into the gym and hailed my Dad, saying, Russell, did you know there are some chickens roosting on the rear bumper of your car? Dad went out to the car to see, but decided not to disturb them, hoping that since they had ridden to town from the farm, maybe they would ride back the same way. And, indeed they did, riding the car bumper back home. You couldn't do that with today's cars, but bumpers were different in those days.
At an early '60s basketball game, my brother John had gathered some admirers around the car, and invited them to a joy ride in the old '47. Away they went, looking sharp and sounding off, heading east out of downtown. They took Patterson Road north for some distance, turned around, and were barreling back south on the same road, doing about 60 in the gravel. All of a sudden a rabbit ran across the road in front of them. Ok, we don't really know if it was a rabbit or a coon or a 'possum or a cat or John's imagination. There was a swerve to miss whatever was in the road, and the car went rolling down the hill and off into the ravine just north of the Camp's Auction Barn. Thankfully, none of the five or six friends with John suffered injury, except for the scare and brother John's wounded pride, but the poor old '47 Chevy!
The old car came out all crumpled and bruised, never to be the same again. Sad, but that's how our old '47 Chevy's grand show-out career came to an end.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister and on the board of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by email at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 10/17/2018