From the Vault of Art Shay: My Love of Cars
By Art Shay in News on Jan 4, 2012 8:00PM
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his photography archives, Art regales us with tales of the cars he's owned over the years and his fascination with the automobile.)
My bounty of years, good and bad, has been spent in the proximate time of the airplane and the car. I've hocked you enough about my heroic missions, surviving the bastardly Nazis and a plane crash flying blind in a Newfoundland snowstorm. I've also waxed about beating the 71 percent mortality rate each time I ... you know, geriatric talk.
But I haven't yet told you that I'm an absolute car nut.
It all began with a 70,000-mile used Plymouth Rumble Seat coupe I bought for $300 in 1946. I was back from the war, had good Air Force friends at the Pentagon and, in effect, was an unemployed 24-year-old writer and navigator in the Bronx with a wife about to get pregnant. It was winter. There was an opening at a base near temperate San Francisco. They needed an experienced celestial navigator to help fly the myriad amputees and otherwise wounded GIs back home from the Pacific.
I had about 10 months of college, had hoped to become a writer and Shakespeare teacher, and had sold one short story. I was making $10,000 a year, more than anyone in my DNA group had earned in 80 years. And now I had a car.
It was a gray beauty. You can see a near twin of it in High Sierra. Humphrey Bogart drives it up to a rickety garage at the foot of the mountains, gives the man a $5 bill, says, "Fill it up," and comes out of the washroom with his hand out to accept his two bucks of change.
It took us to the Pacific in six days, through an ice storm in Georgia that forced us to use a candle to keep the windshield from condensing. We drove up icy hills in reverse and the stick shift wasn't anything like the Jeeps I had leaned on at my English air base. We kept looking for a "cawl" that one Georgia mechanic said we needed. We finally found one for $6 in Texas where the eastern wife of a cowboy garage man said, "Honey, what you want is a coil."
Months later I navigated the first non-stop, low level — 30 feet over the water! — B-29 flight from San Francisco to Anchorage, Alaska. In an Anchorage bar I met the license commissioner of Anchorage, and for $10.40, I swore I was moving to town and got a bona fide set of blue and yellow, 1946 Alaska license plates. Turned out to be a pain in the ass.
Police would pull me over in Washington and New York, months later, and ask about job opportunities along the Alaska Turnpike. Girls would ask the best cities for finding husbands. DC tourists would hand me a camera and ask me to shoot their picture. The final straw: a nice lady with Virgin Island plates pulled up alongside me on Pennsylvania Ave., Capitol dome in the background, and posed us both, so a confused passerby could document us. "Alaska and the Virgin Islands," she said excitedly, "our two Territories."
I got Virginia plates next day.
I had planned to regale you with tales of other cars I owned: two Fords; a DeSoto; a '59 Lincoln Continental; several bigger Plymouths; a GM German junker; and a '79 Peugeot Diesel. Even my recent week with a loaner Chrysler 300, purported by the EPA to achieve 31 mpg on the road. I clocked it for 200 miles and got a mere 19.
Slap of the head moment: Bringing that ill-starred Peugeot Diesel out of the memory garage reminds me of the time I bought a car from Pete Estes, onetime President of GM. I was shooting him for Boys Life, the scouting magazine. Pete was a hard-working Scoutmaster. He helped me find film in the trunk of my Peugeot and said, "Why drive a piece of junk like this? I'll give you what we call a minister's deal on our new Oldsmobile Diesel; $6,000. Thirty or forty miles per gallon. More storage. An Olds, for God's sake."
Back in Chicago I hied me to Castle Olds in Morton Grove when Pete's flunkies delivered the car and paperwork. The Castle staff turned out en masse to see the guy Estes had stuck with a special order diesel. They'd see a lot of me: 15 service calls in 10,000 miles. Injectors, dual battery coordination, etc.
The last straw came when I was informed the company's lone diesel expert was in Detroit taking a course and would be back in a week, ready to keep fixing my prize.
I limped the car into an Evanston Subaru dealership, traded it in on a $5,600 Subaru and put 140,000 miles on it in three years and sold it to our cleaning woman for $700. She added another trouble-free 25,000 miles then sold it for $750. When the first starter wore out you could put that sucker in neutral, open the driver's side door, take a few pushy steps then put it into second gear to start.
Which impels me to end this wheeled rhodomontade by telling of owning the first Mercedes on my block. It was a 1959 model I bought from the Highland Park Mercedes dealer whose wife loved the racing green and leather seats, but couldn't fathom the shift stick. He took my new American Motors Rambler in trade for half the price. In effect I got a Mercedes with 5,000 miles on it for less than $3,000.
Alas, I got a flat as I drove into the O'Hare parking lot. I called Florence to get someone to the lot to fix the car while I was gone. Sadly, she called me in Texas. None of the garages in Deerfield had a metric lug wrench. In those days people had phone books, and she found a Mercedes dealer with a metric lug wrench. After 100,000 miles I traded the Mercedes for a brand new yellow Hudson Jet neither you nor your parents have ever seen.
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.