New reasons for the ‘Sunday car’ to make a comeback in America

There was a term used in my home when I was a kid that brings back great memories. That term is “the Sunday car.”

For those too young to remember, in towns like Youngstown, where most men worked in the mills, they would have an old car that they commuted to work in, so as to let the fallout of that sky of soot and clay from the smokestacks descend onto the fading paint jobs of the old second car. The soiled old flannel shirts my dad and his coworkers wore could rest comfortably against his LeMans’ already stained vinyl seats, and he drove home tired from the day but guilt-free.

This is because come Sunday, our shiny and spanking-clean Catalina would be pulled from the garage, and dad’s hip-before-grunge work clothes were replaced with the Sunday best, ala Margie’s Golden Needle.

The Sunday car had the elegant duties of driving us to church, surfing us to the Jersey shore in summer time, and visiting our cousin’s dairy farm in Erie for the Fourth of July. However, as modern society created four-driver families, white-collar work destinations, and soccer moms taking the kids’ traveling team to Scranton, the Sunday car disappeared into Americana obscurity.

Never fear, the Sunday car is roaring back to life. But instead of calling it the Sunday car, we should call it “the Someday car.” These are the vehicles that Americans own that will someday come out of the garage when gas falls below $2 or even $3 a gallon, and people can afford to drive these Detroit steel behemoths on a regular basis. I hate to say it, but some day may be a long way off.

While Hillary and John are trying to buy your vote for 18 cents gallon, and Barack is proclaiming this as pandering, Americans are doing a good job of looking at practical solutions where policy has failed them. CNN reports that drivers are spending money to purchase a used work car that has a small engine that gets good mileage.

The cost of this car is either paid for by gas savings from letting their fuel-hungry vehicle sit, or they justify buying the beater by not having to sell their SUV at a big loss.

Car pool

The other solution has been the re-emergence of that good old urban albatross — the car pool. My best friend from high school, Bob Murphy, is Youngstown’s example of what the rest of nation is seeing — car pooling is not bad. Even with a fuel efficient 4-cylinder car, Murph was spending an enormous amount on gas commuting to suburban Cleveland. Lucky for him, Murph works with several colleagues who also hail from the Youngstown-Warren area. As a result, not only is Bob saving roughly $200 on gas monthly by pooling with two other gents, but even better is the fact that he is saving 1,500 miles a month of wear and tear. And the inside of the carpool car is like being in a chatroom, but with live people.

I believe it was around the same time of the emergence of the Sunday car that we began to drift away from a smart-for-America policy on transportation. Eisenhower wanted to put a Chevy in every garage. Thousands of miles of streetcar tracks were torn up and companies like GM and Ford did everything in their power to market a shift to personal commuting. In my mind, this also led to decline of downtowns in America, as heading out to the mall in the suburb was now equally as accessible.

I recognize that it is easy for me to say this as I live in a city where I take the subway to work daily, and fill my tank roughly once a month, but I believe we should have had a higher gas tax a long time ago. Politicians would dare not bring up this idea as they knew the voter would be outraged. But America became hooked on cheap gas, and now as prices increase, we are transferring wealth from our paychecks to foreign countries oil-driven empires. On a recent trip to Germany, a cab driver told me he is paying roughly $7 dollars a gallon for gas. But he is okay with it. For one, he has a clean diesel engine garnering 35 miles a gallon. Second, he knows those taxes help pay for people to have good public transportation alternatives.

Sometimes we consumers need the very visible hand of government to tell us that driving 2 blocks to Rite-Aid in a Grand Cherokee is not the best use of resources. It’s a hard medicine for an independent-spirited country to take. But if we sacrificed more in our daily lives, we can all enjoy a little longer Sunday drive in our Someday cars.

By the way, for those seeking ideas on a good second car for work, check out the archives section on www.beaterreview.com.

X Planey is a Youngstown native who now lives and works in New York City.