Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
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On my 10th birthday, Feb. 22, 1942, U.S. auto manufacturing came to a halt. For the next four years or so, instead of civilian cars, car companies produced military vehicles of all sorts for World War II. There just weren’t any civilian autos to buy.
Then in 1945, when it began to look as if the war might soon be over, carmakers started to advertise even before they produced the vehicles. Ford, for example, had an ad campaign built around the headline, “There’s a Ford in Your Future.”
When the first postwar cars started coming off the assembly lines in 1946, it was a sellers market. Both the manufacturers and many dealers added extras their customers had to buy to get a new car. If you didn’t want the extras, you didn’t get the auto.
This really bothered my dad. He was going to buy a new Chevrolet, but every dealer he went to said he would have to take several “extras” in order to get it. He refused to do that. I tried to tell him that all those extra things were benefits that he would enjoy. He said it was a matter of principle, and he refused to buy things he didn’t want.
Several years later, in 1952, while living in Colorado, I bought my first car. It was a used car, one of those 1946 Chevrolets that were loaded with “extras.” There was an air conditioner that was almost unheard of in prewar cars. There was a wide visor above the windshield to shield the driver’s eyes.
Then there was a gas cap opener. Just press a button on the dash and the gas cap flipped up. Oh yes, there was a compass attached to the rear vision mirror, plus a shiny chrome Kleenex holder under the dash, directly below the glove compartment.
But the oddest of all was some sort of fuzzy stuff the dealer had put on the car’s headliner. The man at the used car lot told me it had been sprayed on to improve the acoustics. He said it really improved the sound of music when the radio was played.
I really liked that car, and I think every one of those “extras” was beneficial. I told my dad about the car, and told him that he could have enjoyed extras like that if he hadn’t been so “stubborn” back in 1946. He smiled, but I could tell he didn’t think it was funny.
In December of 1953, my wife and I decided to come home to Marysville for Christmas. We would drive that 1946 Chevrolet. I was an Air Force instructor, and a couple of my students who lived in Ohio rode with us.
We drove straight through with the two students in the back seat. It was a dark, moonless night, and we were somewhere in eastern Kansas, or maybe it was western Missouri.
At some point, one of the students pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and stuck one in his mouth. Then out came his cigarette lighter that he ignited with his thumb. It was one of those Zippo lighters that produced a pretty long flame. His head was resting against the side window, and that long flame suddenly ignited that headliner.
Oh man, I had never seen fire spread that fast. In only a second or so, the entire underside of our car roof was ablaze. It was as if someone had sprayed gasoline on the underside of the roof and then lit it with a match. So there we were, in the middle of nowhere, and I thought we all might be roasted alive.
I tried to stop the car so we all could get out, but before I could pull off the road, the flash fire ended. Apparently the header itself was never on fire. It was the fuzzy stuff that had been sprayed on it. The fire was intense, but it lasted only seconds. Nevertheless, I think that was probably the scariest thing I had ever experienced.
We pulled into Marysville sometime in the afternoon of the next day. As we sat around the dinner table that night, I told my parents about the harrowing experience when the ceiling of our car was on fire. While I was explaining the whole thing, I couldn’t help but notice a smile on my dad’s face. It wasn’t a big smile, but I could tell he was enjoying thinking about something.
When I finished my story, he simply looked at me and said, “That’s what you get, when you buy those post-war “extras.” And I could tell by the grin on his face that he really enjoyed telling me that.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com