A CLASSIC BUS RIDE AND SOME CLASSIC CARS

Iwas at school at a time when many cars now considered classic were languishing unloved, and often abandoned, while they were yet capable of being used as a schoolboy’s daily runner. This meant that many of these cars enjoyed a brief second life as they were temporarily restored to running condition.

I can think of three Model As (probably bought for only tens of dollars each) that were used to transport their youthful owners to and from school. I genuinely shudder now as I think of those extracurricular activities and the speeds achieved by some of those old cars loaded with four or five school friends. A Model A is considered a classic because of its place in modern motoring history, although, for me, it’s those memories of earlier times that makes them classic.

As well as those Model As, there were Morris Minors — one with an FJ Holden motor, and it still had Morris Minor brakes too! There was an old Chev Wentworth to which the youthful owner had added a twin-barrel Holley carb. The accelerator pedal for that was a strand of metal braid that stretched from the carb through the firewall and across the footwell, where it was then tied to the seat frame. I recall seeing it clock 70mph (113kph) on the speedo, although I have no recollection of how it stopped — or didn’t — from that speed. Today, I shudder once more.

As life progressed so did our motoring experiences. One memorable period is of being driven rather than driving. In the early ’70s, newly married, we travelled to the UK via the US. At that point, according to my diary, we spent over 100 hours being ferried around and across North America by Greyhound bus. Nighttimes were reserved for travelling, and we would peer down from that ‘Luxury Landliner’ (an oxymoron if ever there was one) at the occasional cars sharing the road, or across at the trucks and their otherworldly chauffeurs, who were bizarrely and dimly lit by the blues, reds, and greens of their dashboard lights. Trucks ruled the roads at night, and the refreshment stops in the small hours of the morning were lessons from another planet. As we stepped down from the bus, the air and the ground would be resonating — hundreds and hundreds of trucks would be parked up, motors idling, while their drivers were inside the roadhouse cramming grits, hash browns (unknown here at the time), biscuits and gravy, skins, turnip greens, and other unlikely sounding sustenance into

their massive bellies. It was probably there that I started to enjoy country music too.

In Reno, Nevada, we saw an Austin 1800 — surely the only one in the entire US — suspended from the ceiling of a casino. It was the prize for a particular jackpot machine; we weren’t even tempted to try to win that part of motoring history.

We saw Detroit at perhaps the tail of its most productive period from the windows of those Greyhounds. Factories that were actually miles long lined the road out of Detroit and into Canada. Those well-known Detroit automotive names were painted so big and bold that it seemed impossible to imagine that these very factories would be shut and left to rot only a few years later.

Out of the bus for once and hitch-hiking, we were picked up by a guy driving a Dodge Challenger. He could have been Kowalski himself. Up on Cape Cod, he dropped us off at a pub and told us to go in and ask for a Māori fisherman who would be in there. We duly found him. This in a country where, at the time, literally more than half the population had never heard of New Zealand.

Now, while the Greyhound bus is not actually a ‘classic’, personally speaking, that brand holds classic memories. I don’t actually want to own one, but, to my mind, it is a classic. The Dodge Challenger is a classic in some people’s minds, but not in mine for the usual reasons. However, that particular day elevates at least that part of US automobilia onto my list of classics.

So, for each of us, a classic is a classic. It’s purely subjective really, and, for that reason, we also want to write about old Skodas or Ladas (seriously, contact us if you have one of those) and anything else you might call your own classic.

PS. None of the passengers we shared buses with was dressed like those in the photo.