Sometimes there’s nothing basic about transportation
By Bill Fields
I never paid too much attention to four-leaf clovers or cracks in the sidewalk, but once, playing Kreskin’s ESP at a neighbor’s house in 1969, the “mystery pendulum” made a prediction the famous mentalist would have been proud of.
Many years later I’m not sure what I really think about “extra sensitive perception,” as Barney Fife called it. That particular Sunday afternoon, though, gave me a reason to believe.
With a notable exception of stranding us in Tabor City when it broke down returning from the beach one time, our well-traveled Plymouth station wagon — which took my parents to their jobs and my sisters to college — remained reliable transportation. There had been no talk around our kitchen table about getting a new car, no inkling of the possibility. When the board game said otherwise, it seemed as outlandish as forecasting I would be one of the tallest, fastest boys in fifth grade.
In less than two weeks, I was getting into a ’69 Ford Fairlane 500 with my dad as he drove it off the lot at Jackson Motors in Pinedene. At that point, if Kreskin had said Brooks Robinson was going to come to town and spend a week teaching me how to play third base, I would have believed him.
It was a beautiful automatic transmission (Cruise-O-Matic) automobile, a four-door sedan the lightest of blue, the color of the Tar Heels before television demanded a bit darker hue so the uniform numbers would stand out. It had comfortable and roomy bench seats. It had a large trunk. It had seat belts!
The Fairlane carried us to Florida for the first time, and on the way back stopped at Six Flags Over Georgia. It idled in heavy traffic in Atlanta and pulled over for a scenic vista on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
At different times, the Fairlane smelled like Salems, chili dogs, Brut 33, a stringer full of farm-pond bream, Juicy Fruit and the sweat of 36 holes on a July day.
I got my driver’s license in that car in 1975. I picked my mother up at her bank job, in the winter, when the sun set early, tuning in WABC New York while I waited for her in a parking space on Broad Street. I drove it to junior golf tournaments in Henderson and Myrtle Beach, to my senior prom via the JFR Barn, when gas was 69 cents a gallon.
Mom and Dad loaded me and my belongings in August of 1977 and took me to college in Chapel Hill, to my room in Old West. Less than three years later, I was behind the wheel driving south toward home with my tears and my sport coat for Dad’s end game with cancer.
The Fairlane went to Stoneybrook, Carolina Cougars’ games, a Supertramp concert, the GGO, North Carolina Motor Speedway and to Atlantic Beach in the wee hours, when that seemed like the perfect call one spring night senior year in college.
I never got a ticket in the Fairlane, but once, exiting Pinecrest High School in a long line of cars, I had to be at my most persuasive to convince a highway patrolman I was not the idiot tossing firecrackers out the window.
In the summer of 1981, after graduating from Carolina and setting out into the real world, it seemed like the time was right to move on from the Fairlane that had served so well. It was a dozen years old and had about 115,000 miles on it. There were nicks on the back bumper from changing into golf spikes in parking lots. The paint was corroded at the driver-side window, so often did my father rest his arm there.
From the same lot that had been home to the Fairlane before our very unexpected purchase, in what had become Bill Smith Ford, I bought a white Escort that would be mine for a decade. After spritzing the Fairlane and vacuuming the interior at the self-serve car wash, I drove it to the house of man near West End who had answered my classified.
I got $300 from the sale but still felt kind of empty getting rid of a car that had grown old as I grew up. PS
Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north 30 years ago but hasn’t lost his accent.
