~AUDIO~---images---comment---transcript---notes---links---site navigation
Sorry, I haven't yet recorded the document.
audio---~IMAGES~---comment---transcript---notes---links---site navigation
This article was too big for an 8x11 scanner, so it was scanned in two pieces. I've reattached them using merging software, but it seems to me that the print isn't as clear as it is in the original scans, so the original scans are below.
audio---images---~COMMENT~---transcript---notes---links---site navigation
Nearly 40 years after Will's death, his younger daughter, Kay, writes about the car she remembers from her childhood. I was surprised to read that Will's Buick was dependable. How many letters have I read that mention Will working on the Buick?
audio---images---comment---~TRANSCRIPT~---notes---links---site navigation
The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, Thursday, December 28, 1989
My father's Buick made me shudder
by Kay Lundeen
The question in the headline above Mike Royko's recent column keeps coming back - to be answered:
"What was so wrong with your father's Oldsmobile?"
Absolutely nothing, Mike. My father's Oldsmobile was a thing of beauty that gives me joy even in remembrance so long after.
It was my father's Buick that brought me heretofore untold mortification.
You complain, Mike, that today's Buick and other cars look all so much alike that now, unlike in the old days, it's difficult to distinguish one make of car from another. Would that could have been said about my father's Buick!
But back in the early '30s, when every other car on the road had windows that rolled up and down, there was my father's Buick - a touring car, "big and brawny," as Mike puts it, with a high-sitting black body, black tarpaulin roof and OPEN. That means no windows, just year-round "fresh air conditioning."
There was the difficulty. As soon as closed cars appeared on the scene, open cars became objects of wonder, or in the case of my father's Buick, of acute embarrassment to me, soon to be a teenager.
During those Great Depression days my father, a U.S. Army engineer, obviously was more interested in the practical than the aesthetic aspects of a motor vehicle. He wanted a car that was dependable, and certainly his Buick was that.
It was also expandable. Whenever it rained on a school morning, the family up the street with five children phoned to see if my dad could drive them to school along with his own four youngsters. Somehow we all fitted in. The little jump seat in the back helped, and perhaps the lack of windows enabled some of the older kids to hang out just a little.
But most of all my father's Buick was reliable. On several occasions he drove the family from Georgia up to Massachusetts to spend the summer on Cape Cod. That was a five-day expedition with overnight stops at individual little tourist cabins. On a later trip we found that someone had built cabins attached to each other and come up with the word "motel."
The trips above the Mason-Dixon line were not uneventful. One time in Baltimore we were greeted by school children sticking their tongues out at us. This was not, I think, inspired by the appearance of an open car, but because of our Georgia license plates. From our viewpoint, we had arrived "up North."
Breaking the monotony of those long rides was the delight of spotting a Burma Shave ad. Spaced so they could be read phrase by phrase as one traveled at an acceptable speed, the messages printed on red and white signposts usually were recited by us in chorus. My favorite "The bearded lady...Tried a jar...She's now...A famous movie star...Burma Shave."
Somehow the uniqueness of my father's Buick was less worrisome to me outside of my home town. It was having my contemporaries associate me with this monstrosity - the "family chariot" as best friend dubbed it - that caused me humiliation.
In an open car, you see, which sits high off the road, every passenger is clearly visible. One afternoon as a sixth grader, I was with my father when he decided to stop at the neighborhood shopping area. Since I couldn't be invisible, I prayed that none of my classmates would be in the vicinity. Even if their parents had no car, they would not understand this conspicuous antique.
Alas, my father's Buick was spotted by two girl friends and, although I averted my eyes, I felt sure I had been seen. Sure enough, the next day at recess, they cornered me and asked if I had been up on 10th Street the day before. Whatever my answer - and I was too flustered then to recall it now - my red cheeks must have given me away. Are we ever more sensitive than in those years from 10 to 12 to teens?
Unfortunately, the men who designed my father's Buick had never heard of built-in obsolescence. That venerable motor car lasted and lasted.
When I was high school age and attended a small girls school, I dreaded the rainy days, for on those mornings my father continued to drive me to school. I arranged for him to drop me at a back entrance and always tried to scoot out before I had been spotted.
Years later, I compared notes with my two brothers.
The engineer, like our dad, had no recollection of anything wrong with riding around in an open car. But my younger brother, now a lawyer, admitted that as a "big man on campus" during high school days, he had shared my feelings. He tried to arrange on those rainy mornings that my father deposit him a block from school.
But in the eventful year of 1935, my father's Oldsmobile entered our lives. Replacing the unmourned, black, open Buick touring car was a handsome, green, four-door, CLOSED sedan. No doubt, Mike, that unlike most of today's cars, it could be identified as to its make. But in the way that mattered to me, my father's Oldsmobile looked like every other car on the road. In my Dealer's Book, there's much to be said for anonymity.
Kay Lundeen of Eugene was women's editor of the Register-Guard from 1954 to 1964.
My father's Buick made me shudder
by Kay Lundeen
The question in the headline above Mike Royko's recent column keeps coming back - to be answered:
"What was so wrong with your father's Oldsmobile?"
Absolutely nothing, Mike. My father's Oldsmobile was a thing of beauty that gives me joy even in remembrance so long after.
It was my father's Buick that brought me heretofore untold mortification.
You complain, Mike, that today's Buick and other cars look all so much alike that now, unlike in the old days, it's difficult to distinguish one make of car from another. Would that could have been said about my father's Buick!
But back in the early '30s, when every other car on the road had windows that rolled up and down, there was my father's Buick - a touring car, "big and brawny," as Mike puts it, with a high-sitting black body, black tarpaulin roof and OPEN. That means no windows, just year-round "fresh air conditioning."
There was the difficulty. As soon as closed cars appeared on the scene, open cars became objects of wonder, or in the case of my father's Buick, of acute embarrassment to me, soon to be a teenager.
During those Great Depression days my father, a U.S. Army engineer, obviously was more interested in the practical than the aesthetic aspects of a motor vehicle. He wanted a car that was dependable, and certainly his Buick was that.
It was also expandable. Whenever it rained on a school morning, the family up the street with five children phoned to see if my dad could drive them to school along with his own four youngsters. Somehow we all fitted in. The little jump seat in the back helped, and perhaps the lack of windows enabled some of the older kids to hang out just a little.
But most of all my father's Buick was reliable. On several occasions he drove the family from Georgia up to Massachusetts to spend the summer on Cape Cod. That was a five-day expedition with overnight stops at individual little tourist cabins. On a later trip we found that someone had built cabins attached to each other and come up with the word "motel."
The trips above the Mason-Dixon line were not uneventful. One time in Baltimore we were greeted by school children sticking their tongues out at us. This was not, I think, inspired by the appearance of an open car, but because of our Georgia license plates. From our viewpoint, we had arrived "up North."
Breaking the monotony of those long rides was the delight of spotting a Burma Shave ad. Spaced so they could be read phrase by phrase as one traveled at an acceptable speed, the messages printed on red and white signposts usually were recited by us in chorus. My favorite "The bearded lady...Tried a jar...She's now...A famous movie star...Burma Shave."
Somehow the uniqueness of my father's Buick was less worrisome to me outside of my home town. It was having my contemporaries associate me with this monstrosity - the "family chariot" as best friend dubbed it - that caused me humiliation.
In an open car, you see, which sits high off the road, every passenger is clearly visible. One afternoon as a sixth grader, I was with my father when he decided to stop at the neighborhood shopping area. Since I couldn't be invisible, I prayed that none of my classmates would be in the vicinity. Even if their parents had no car, they would not understand this conspicuous antique.
Alas, my father's Buick was spotted by two girl friends and, although I averted my eyes, I felt sure I had been seen. Sure enough, the next day at recess, they cornered me and asked if I had been up on 10th Street the day before. Whatever my answer - and I was too flustered then to recall it now - my red cheeks must have given me away. Are we ever more sensitive than in those years from 10 to 12 to teens?
Unfortunately, the men who designed my father's Buick had never heard of built-in obsolescence. That venerable motor car lasted and lasted.
When I was high school age and attended a small girls school, I dreaded the rainy days, for on those mornings my father continued to drive me to school. I arranged for him to drop me at a back entrance and always tried to scoot out before I had been spotted.
Years later, I compared notes with my two brothers.
The engineer, like our dad, had no recollection of anything wrong with riding around in an open car. But my younger brother, now a lawyer, admitted that as a "big man on campus" during high school days, he had shared my feelings. He tried to arrange on those rainy mornings that my father deposit him a block from school.
But in the eventful year of 1935, my father's Oldsmobile entered our lives. Replacing the unmourned, black, open Buick touring car was a handsome, green, four-door, CLOSED sedan. No doubt, Mike, that unlike most of today's cars, it could be identified as to its make. But in the way that mattered to me, my father's Oldsmobile looked like every other car on the road. In my Dealer's Book, there's much to be said for anonymity.
Kay Lundeen of Eugene was women's editor of the Register-Guard from 1954 to 1964.
audio---images---comment---transcript---~NOTES~---links---site navigation
This article was in the album that Kay made for Bill's birthday in the 1980s:
KAY'S ALBUM FOR BILL'S BIRTHDAY
Years later, I compared notes with my two brothers.
The engineer, like our dad, had no recollection of anything wrong with riding around in an open car. But my younger brother, now a lawyer, admitted that as a "big man on campus" during high school days, he had shared my feelings.
Bill was the engineer brother, and my father, Roger, was the lawyer brother.
AG, Fred's daughter, remembers that Will always drove a Buick. And yet, according to Kay, the Buick was replaced by an Oldsmobile in 1935, the year before AG was born. My speculation is that AG never saw the Oldsmobile to remember it. She might have seen it as a very small child (she lived with Will and Kathleen briefly after her mother died), but by the time she was remembering things, perhaps Will was taking the train from Atlanta up to Woods Hole for the summer. I know that he took the train up in 1943, because my mother recalled that my father (Will's younger son) picked Will up at the train station in Massachusetts the day my parents were married.
But (my speculation continues) Kay talked about Will's Buick so much that that's what AG thought he always had.
KAY'S ALBUM FOR BILL'S BIRTHDAY
Years later, I compared notes with my two brothers.
The engineer, like our dad, had no recollection of anything wrong with riding around in an open car. But my younger brother, now a lawyer, admitted that as a "big man on campus" during high school days, he had shared my feelings.
Bill was the engineer brother, and my father, Roger, was the lawyer brother.
AG, Fred's daughter, remembers that Will always drove a Buick. And yet, according to Kay, the Buick was replaced by an Oldsmobile in 1935, the year before AG was born. My speculation is that AG never saw the Oldsmobile to remember it. She might have seen it as a very small child (she lived with Will and Kathleen briefly after her mother died), but by the time she was remembering things, perhaps Will was taking the train from Atlanta up to Woods Hole for the summer. I know that he took the train up in 1943, because my mother recalled that my father (Will's younger son) picked Will up at the train station in Massachusetts the day my parents were married.
But (my speculation continues) Kay talked about Will's Buick so much that that's what AG thought he always had.
audio---images---comment---transcript---notes---~LINKS~---site navigation
LINKS TO OTHER RELEVANT PAGES IN THIS WEBSITE
DOCUMENT LISTS FOR PEOPLE:
- WILL: DOCUMENTS ----- Related
- THE NEXT GENERATION: DOCUMENTS ----- Bill, Kay, and Roger
audio---images---comment---transcript---notes---links---~SITE NAVIGATION~
WHERE AM I?
- THIS PAGE IS: 1989-12-28 ARTICLE BY KAY ABOUT WILL'S BUICK
- THE PREVIOUS PAGE IS: 1988-11-30 LETTER FROM EDIE TO AL, PETER, AND PEGGY
- THE NEXT PAGE IS: 2007 MEMORIAL FOR KAY
- DOCUMENTS FOR THIS ERA: AFTER 1979
- COMPLETE DOCUMENT LIST BY DATE
- THIS CHAPTER IS: CHAPTER 23: DOCUMENTS LIBRARY
- THIS MODULE IS: MODULE IV: DOCUMENTS
- TABLE OF CONTENTS
- HOME PAGE
WHAT OTHER LISTS OF DOCUMENTS ARE THERE?
- DOCUMENTS BY WHERE THEY WERE WRITTEN ----- Oregon
- DOCUMENTS BY SOURCE ----- Barbara