In 1925 my maternal grandparents bought a new Dodge, packed up their things, and made their escape from the anti-Black restrictions, injustice, and violence of Montgomery, Alabama: bound for a new life in Los Angeles, California.

Thanks to more newly paved roads and cheap automobiles, Dr. Peter Price Cobbs and Rosa Ellen (née Mashaw) Cobbs were able to see an American landscape they had not experienced before. They carefully planned out their route to California, stopping at places where they could find welcoming overnight lodging and other travel amenities. They did not have their choice of commercial places to stay overnight due to racist discrimination. They often stayed in private homes with friends—like in Phoenix, Arizona, where they visited one of my grandfather’s classmates from Howard University Medical School in Washington, D.C.—or people in their social networks. These hosts sometimes would have asked them to pay. Traveling in their own car across the U.S., my grandparents evaded some of the Jim Crow era humiliations they would have experienced on trains or buses.

They were pioneers in a new form of Black empowerment, resisting oppression through car purchases and driving. For many African American families like mine, the automobile became a significant tool in our social and economic mobilities, taking us from the South to northern, mid-western, and far west places like Los Angeles—and then onward and upward.

In California, my grandparents enjoyed their automobility and continued a tradition of driving Dodge and Chrysler cars. From the mid-1920s to the early 1950s, my relatives bought and resided in homes and invested in rental properties in neighborhoods that were part of the multi-ethnic, historic South Central (or Central Avenue) District with Central Avenue as its spine, running from downtown Los Angeles to Slauson Avenue. It was where most Black Angelenos lived during this era due to Western-style discrimination—racist covenants, discriminatory loan policies, and other anti-Black housing practices—which restricted their ability to live or purchase property in many other areas of the city.

The Central Avenue District was the hub of Black Angeleno life and community, with social and faith institutions, businesses, and a rich cultural milieu that included lively theaters and nightclubs and the emergence of an influential jazz, rhythm & blues, and gospel music scene. In these years Central Avenue was a thriving center of Black America, echoing 125th Street in Harlem, New York, and “Sweet” Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia.

My grandparents’ cars moved them around the city and through their new life, to and from work and community and social hangs as well as political organizing meetings. Their children—Prince, my mother Marcelyn, and Price—were all born in Los Angeles and into a family that moved them around the city environs until they were of age to drive themselves.

My grandfather was an internal medicine physician and used his car often to go to his office at 28th Street and Central Avenue, house calls, or the hospital.  He attended progressive political meetings with white, Black, Asian American, and Mexican American Angelenos in different neighborhoods, including the Central Avenue District, Hollywood, and Boyle Heights. They were involved in the Black freedom struggle, the labor reform movement, and electing representatives such as Democrat Augustus F. Hawkins for the California State Assembly, the second African American to hold this seat from Los Angeles. Hawkins would become the first African American west of the Mississippi elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Augustus F. Hawkins (left) and Alison’s grandfather, Dr. Peter P. Cobbs (right), worked together in the long Black freedom struggle. McLain’s Photo Service, 1940s.

In Los Angeles, my grandmother, a teacher who graduated from Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama, became a full-time wife and mother—and learned to drive. When she wasn’t taking her children to their social and educational activities, she was enjoying her independence and auto-mobility by driving to civic and social groups like her beloved Phys-Art-Lit-Mor Club, which focused on the study of physical culture, art, literature, and moral philosophy. My grandparents drove to Pasadena, Claremont, Lake Elsinore, Santa Monica Bay beaches, San Pedro, and beyond—for recreation, to visit family and friends, to participate in civic or church activities, and to go on vacation.

Los Angeles neighborhoods farther west and south of the Central Avenue district opened up to families like mine starting in 1948, as court cases and new public policies began to whittle away at discrimination. By the late 1960s, the city was profoundly changed thanks in part to the massive white flight following the 1965 Watts uprising, along with significant population growth and legal enforcement of civil rights laws that opened new possibilities for housing and employment in new districts for Black Angelenos.

In 1953, once my mother and her brothers were more or less out of the house, my grandparents moved across the city to an upscale neighborhood, Victoria Park, west of Crenshaw Boulevard and south of Pico Boulevard. Advertised as an exclusive West Adams neighborhood that was conveniently located near major street car lines when the tract was first developed, it was just 7.5 miles northwest, but a world away from their previous home at 4057 Trinity Street, just north of Santa Barbara Avenue (renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in 1983), near Central Avenue. To tour the beautiful Spanish-style, two-story stucco house that my grandmother wanted to buy at 1407 Nadeau Drive on a lovely street of Revival- and Craftsman-style houses, she disguised herself as a maid in a white uniform with a black apron and went with a white friend. My family members were some of the first African Americans to buy a home in the area, and we happily lived and visited there for many years, without any racist incidents. It was in this house where my parents were married in November 1957, in the living room.

Alison’s parents wedded at her maternal grandparent’s home on Nadeau Drive on November 28, 1957. From left to right: Prince Cobbs (mother’s brother), Margaret Wiliams (mother’s cousin), Albert W. Jefferson (father), Marcelyn (mother), Dr. Peter Price and Rosa Cobbs (maternal grandparents), Rev. Matthew and Mary Frances Jefferson (paternal uncle and aunt). Photo by Irving C. Smith.

I remember playing on my grandparents’ ample front lawn in the 1960s and giving greetings to the friendly white neighbors across the street. Or my brother and I would chat with Mrs. Mueller, a Black teacher some might have mistaken for a white person, who was always gardening next door.

My grandparents were among the earliest of a large wave of Black families who moved into the Crenshaw district and environs in the 1960s. Families moving west like mine were joined by newer Black migrants in westside neighborhoods adjacent to Crenshaw Boulevard such as Country Club Park, Oxford Square, LaFayette Square, and Jefferson Park. Others moved to Leimert Park, and the Baldwin Hills/View Park/Windsor Hills neighborhoods further south.

With less discrimination and increased mobility, my family shopped and dined all around the city. Our Crenshaw District visits were one of the places where my brother and I learned about “Recycling Black Dollars” at Black-owned businesses that my family patronized—at my mom’s favorite dressmaker, picking up fresh fish at Stevie’s Fish Market, stopping for lunch at the Stennis family’s Golden Bird Fried Chicken, and going to Jack & Jill youngsters’ events. Mom enjoyed shopping at Akron’s, too, a department store mostly featuring unusual and eclectic imported home decorating items, and the outdoor shopping mall, Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Center. I remember picking out my high school prom dress at the M. Cole’s boutique there: a wraparound dress made of powder-blue chiffon fabric with a ruffled asymmetrical hemline and a delicately patterned pink, yellow, and green floral design.

Alison (far left), Morris Williams, Albert W. Jefferson Jr. (brother), and Ingrid Hutt in front of her mother’s 1964 Dodge Dart during a birthday party, on Nadeau Drive in Victoria Park, 1964–65. Courtesy of author.

My parents’ Los Angeles histories were forged on the road, too. In the 1970s my mother became a reporter, which took her around Southern California in a corporate car, collecting building project information for a construction newspaper. My father fled Baltimore, Maryland, in a Ford in 1956 to join his older brother Matthew and his family to begin a new life under the California sun. Albert Watts Jefferson, Sr. was a high school literature teacher and built a rental property business on the side, primarily in the Athens Park area, near 120th and Main Street, where he moved in the early 1960s after my parents divorced. On many weekends, he’d pick my brother and me up at my mom’s Miracle Mile home, a place farther west than my grandparents’ Victoria Park home where he also sometimes picked us up––and we would often drive to see movies at the Vision Theater in Leimert Park Village, to the Baskin-Robbins store in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Center for a treat, and to buy comics and books at the Black-owned bookstore of one of his friends on Santa Barbara Avenue, a few blocks west of Crenshaw.

Today as people drive their cars, ride public transportation, and walk through the Los Angeles neighborhoods where my family lived, worked, and played—partly owing to the car’s utility—they bear witness to personal, familial, and communal histories of Black America. The car meant freedom, possibility, citizenship, and economic advancement. Shaped by the forces that hindered and helped Black movement, my family’s automobility has been a major driver of our story, itself a part of the of the capital-H Histories of Black Los Angeles and beyond.

The post In L.A., Driving the Road to Black Empowerment appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Improbably, the best monument to the old General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys, California, sits in a garage in Jamestown, North Dakota—the final car produced at the facility that in its 44 years of operation manufactured 6.3 million automobiles and employed thousands in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley.

The red 1992 Chevrolet Camaro Z-28 with Heritage black racing stripes is owned by an enthusiast named Leonard Stevenson, who’s lovingly maintained it ever since he watched it roll off the production line on August 27, 1992. Three decades later, his “Last Camaro” is a symbol to a vanished era of labor and a tribute to a way of life in the mid-20th century San Fernando Valley—somewhat suburban and temperamentally apart from the rest of Los Angeles County—that has all but disappeared.

When the GM plant opened in 1947, the Valley was experiencing a period of rapid expansion—transforming from an agricultural outskirt of Los Angeles into a thrumming hub of industry to meet the ambitions of post-war America. High-paying union manufacturing and production jobs from GM and other companies, coupled with the cheap cost of land for housing and the opening of a major transportation artery—the Ventura Freeway—in 1960, put the peripheral L.A. suburb on the map.

The blue-collar boom went bust starting in the early ’80s. Los Angeles continued expanding and the cost of living rose. At the GM plant, there were years of layoffs and temporary closures, leading to picketing from workers of United Autoworkers Local 645. Finally, in 1989, GM announced plans to relocate Camaro and Firebird production to a new facility in Québec. Employees hoped the company would keep the Van Nuys plant operating; it still produced 406 cars per day, the equivalent of nearly one every minute. But by 1992, GM was no longer willing to bear the cost of assembling cars—any cars—in Southern California, and union power was on the wane, nationwide. Time had run out for UAW Local 645. Some 2,600 workers were employed at the Van Nuys plant when it shuttered.

Leonard Stevenson read the news of the plant closure in the trade magazines, sitting at his home some 1,700 miles away in Ankeny, Iowa. He’d already owned two vintage Camaros—a 1969 Z-28 and a 1991 model that he wrecked in a highway collision with a deer. He decided he’d buy the last car produced at Van Nuys as it rolled off the assembly line.

It was an outlandish idea, but Stevenson knew it was possible: In 1987, another GM customer had been allowed to walk the assembly line at the shuttering Pontiac, Michigan plant, and to purchase the last Buick Grand National. Stevenson launched a charm offensive, writing GM executives and asking, over a period of months, if he could have the Camaro. The car company eventually bit. Possibly its public relations team saw an opportunity, with Stevenson, to deflect attention from the closure and the thousands of layoffs.

At 5:30 a.m. on August 26, 1992, a plant executive greeted Stevenson in Van Nuys and marched him through the vast facility, following the assembly line until they reached the final car—the Z-28, its body already coated in a cherry-glossed red.

Unsurprisingly, the general mood at the plant that day was sour: the average length of service for Van Nuys Plant employees was 20 years and the average wage was $17 an hour—about $35 an hour in 2022 dollars. Now, it was all being ripped away. Some workers donned protest T-shirts—“GM Sucks,” “UAW Local 645– ‘Unemployed’ Auto Workers”—as they stood witness to the end of an era. “What is the American Dream now? Now they’re moving on and leaving everybody in the dust,” Ed Johnsen, a 16-year employee of the plant, told a reporter. He had met his wife, Patti, on the job.

Stevenson’s visit offered the workers a small ray of light. The PR plan had been for him to walk the assembly line to watch the car get built, snap some photos, and head back to Iowa: a feel-good story about a car collector taking home a newly prized possession. But then something unexpected happened. Stevenson watched as first one worker on the assembly line, and then another, and then another, put their signature on the component they installed on the Camaro. They all wanted their names on the last car they’d ever build.

The executives asked Stevenson if he wanted them to stop. But Stevenson said he was fine with it as long as the signatures remained on the inside of the car, so they were not visible from the exterior.

August, 1992: GM workers in Van Nuys, California send their plant’s last car—a cherry red Camaro—off in style. The car’s owner, Leonard Stevenson, is at right. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

More than 2,000 people signed the 1992 Chevrolet Camaro Z-28. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

Everyone wanted a final goodbye with the car before it left the lot. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

Autoworkers at the plant showed Stevenson how they did their work. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

The average length of service for Van Nuys Plant employees was 20 years and the average wage was $17 an hour—about $35 an hour in 2022 dollars. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

And as the workers wrapped up, they also shared some of their knowledge with Stevenson. When it came time to install the car’s dashboard, technicians detailed precisely how they did it, showing Stevenson the computers that they used to confirm cars were built to specification. One worker even took off his Camaro belt buckle and handed it to Stevenson.

After the workers down the line signed the car, they turned in their badges and clocked out for the final time.

That evening, word spread about signing the car, and by the time Stevenson returned the following morning for the completion of assembly, he was greeted by many autoworkers who had previously turned in their badges. They’d all rushed back onto the floor to get a chance to put their own mark on the car. The drive shaft, the door panels, the transmission, the rear axle—all of it was signed. Painters left their marks, too, under the seat in silver paint, sealed in clear coat.

Overall, Stevenson estimates that more than 2,000 people signed his Camaro. In the weeks that followed, others sent him newspaper articles about the plant closure, and photographs of his visit. They wanted the last car to be a memento of what that plant had meant to them and their community.

The auto industry’s demise marked the beginning of the end of the Valley as a labor town. Automotive plants in L.A. suburbs of Pico Rivera, South Gate, and Commerce had all closed within the prior two decades; the Van Nuys Plant was the last facility standing.

Today, the Valley retains its outsider L.A. status in personality, but with the exception of the film and television industry, the working-class prosperity offered by those union jobs has vanished—as it has nationwide. As of 2022, the median home price in the San Fernando Valley sat at a whopping $901,500, out of reach for blue-collar workers.

When you talk to Stevenson about his trip to Van Nuys, it’s obvious how much the experience defined him. Over the years, he has reconnected with some of the autoworkers who made (and signed) his ’92 Camaro, and with the children of those autoworkers. “It’s brought me close to so many different people for different reasons,” he says.

To this day, former Van Nuys plant workers, who now live all over the country, have maintained communication via a 500-plus member Facebook group. They share former coworkers’ obituaries, and try to shore up missing connections, attending occasional in-person reunions and distributing commemorative T-shirts to keep the kinship and solidarity of their time at the plant alive.

The Last Camaro’s license plate is inscribed in their honor: 4UAW645—For United Auto Workers Local 645.

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Matthew Porter’s photographs of airborne vintage muscle cars, collected and accompanied by an essay by Rachel Kushner in a recent release from Aperture titled, The Heights, are simultaneously playful, nostalgic, and ethereal. The dreamlike worlds in which these flying cars exist are distinctly American landscapes—rural and urban—and they offer viewers a sort of time portal, transporting them into a sun-soaked scene from a 1960s or ’70s American movie. The realm Porter’s cars and drivers inhabits are times when the world is either waking up for a new day or letting another slip away—those times of transition when the light shifts and the color of the sky evolves by the second.

It’s not only the cars that are suspended in Porter’s images, but the viewer must also suspend disbelief when the cars rise to heights that defy logic—and gravity. And this is precisely because the images are illogical and were created not on the streets of New York, Los Angeles, or the Blue Ridge Parkway, but in Porter’s Brooklyn studio. He photographs the miniature muscle cars and backdrops separately, later combining the images digitally.

The fantastical worlds Porter creates evoke feelings of liberation, release, and flight—feelings we might not experience during an ordinary day, when our feet are resigned to the ground. But that’s precisely the magic of these photographs—their ability to take our minds to a light-filled landscape where we can feel the wind in our hair, having escaped from the burden of gravity and everyday life on Earth.

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In dozens of photographs assembled in the self-published Looking Backward: America’s Love Affair With the Station Wagon, Southern California-based co-authors John Jordan and Will Bodine recall the days when wagons were targeted mainly to the wealthy (the Buick Special Estate Wagon of 1941 had interior woodwork “worthy of a classic Gar Wood or Chris Craft” yacht, Bodine writes), and the times they borrowed their styling from chic sports cars (witness the trim on 1957’s “dramatic” Buick Century Caballero Estate Wagon). There are also rarities, like the 1958 Packard Clipper Wagon, with only 159 sold. But these were outliers, as the station wagon evolved to be the car of the modern family, a tool to help mothers shuttle children between suburban locations in style. The new arrangement of American homes and families was reflected in the very name of the 1961 Plymouth Custom Suburban, the car driven by the Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver.

Designed for ease—equipped with early automatic starters and automatic transmissions—these vehicles didn’t always handle with precision. Their big bench seats, with rudimentary seat belts, could flexibly accommodate a large number of children, while their window arrangements gave even the littlest kids a view of the road. Even though these cars often used innovative technology and design, they are remembered fondly because of the families they carried and the memories Americans created in them.

The station wagon’s greatest contribution to American life might be the unique perspective it offered its youngest riders: the pleasures and promise of the retreating open road. “There is an entire generation of adults that grew up in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s that saw America ‘backward,’” photographer Jordan writes in the book’s introduction; “By that I mean facing rearwards in the third seat of the station wagon.” In Jordan’s family, as with many others of the time, the family jockeyed for seats in the front, the middle, or the “wayback,” establishing a hierarchy for family trips. “In my family the front seat was the only one that mattered and all else was for second-class passengers or luggage. In other families it was the opposite. The third seat was a place to go to fool around and be out of reach of adult supervision. Making faces at the cars that followed was considered great fun.”

Car companies are making their SUVs more car-like every year, so it may just be a matter of time before a new generation of American kids forges its own station wagon memories, Jordan muses. But it’ll never be exactly the same again.

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Like so many industrious strivers who came to the United States at the close of the 19th century, Teich pursued his postcard business as a means of building a life for his family (and getting rich while he was at it, if he lucked out). But Teich’s American Dream also did something more. His linen-style postcards depicted an optimistic view of America, creating a unique record of national tourism and documenting the U.S. landscape from its smallest towns to its grandest natural wonders. The cards—and Teich’s runaway success selling them—also reflect an era when a boom in highway construction and an uptick in auto sales were changing the way Americans worked, played, vacationed, and communicated with one another.

Linen postcards, named for their embossed linen-like texture, were tremendously popular in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. There is no exact count, but deltiologists—people who study postcards—estimate that publishers developed over 150,000 different images and printed millions of copies. Cards typically depicted American scenes, venues, and businesses. They sold for a penny or were given away by local entrepreneurs or at tourist destinations.

Their runaway popularity was fueled by the country’s dawning obsession with the automobile, car travel, and car culture. In 1913, the Ford Model T became the first mass-produced automobile to roll off an assembly line; in the following decades, cars became more affordable and ownership rapidly increased. Federal Highway Administration statistics indicate that Americans registered over 22 million privately-owned automobiles in the United States in 1935. By 1952, that number had jumped to almost 44 million.

For as long as Americans could remember, road travel had been a dirty, dusty nuisance on unmarked and rutted routes. But the Good Roads Movement, founded in 1880 by bicycling enthusiasts, brought attention to the poor quality of American roads. Soon, state-based Good Roads Associations formed. They pushed for legislation to fund road improvements and local officials heard the call. In 1913, Carl Fisher, manufacturer of Prest-O-Lite headlights and developer of Miami Beach, formed the Lincoln Highway Association, which conceptualized and eventually built a road from New York City to San Francisco. The Federal Aid Road Act, enacted in 1916, provided the first federal highway funding and fostered the development of a national highway system. Ten years later, construction began for the famed Route 66, also known as the Main Street of America. Completed in 1937, its 2,448 miles of asphalt carried car travelers from Chicago to Los Angeles, crossing three time zones and eight states.

All these miles and miles of new roads allowed families to craft journeys to destinations such as the Grand Canyon, Arizona; Mount Rushmore, South Dakota; or the tropical shores of Florida. Itineraries were planned and maps carefully marked. Americans—enamored of the newfound freedom offered by personal vehicle ownership and thrilled to discover new and marvelous places—packed their suitcases, loaded their cars, and took off.

Linen postcard publishers didn’t miss a beat, photographing and printing thousands of images along those highways. Picture postcards weren’t new when Teich founded his company in 1898; they had emerged in France, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan in the early 1870s and had quickly become very popular. But the linen-type postcards Teich (and eventually his imitators) produced were distinctly American, rendered in an opulent style, depicting wonders from the corner luncheonette to Niagara Falls. Teich’s offset printing technique lavished cards in saturated colors and used airbrushing and other effects to reduce unwanted details. The visual result was a fantastical—and enticing—view of America. Postcard images of sun-dappled, sinuous roads captured the spirit and adventure of road travel.

Businesses that depended on tourism saw Teich’s cards as a great tool to attract customers, who found the images hard to resist on the postcard rack at a local drug store, Woolworth’s, or service station. Sensing opportunity, Teich employed a cadre of sales agents to obtain and manage regional accounts, who often photographed sites for postcard production. Teich believed that no town was too small for its local attractions to be made more beautiful by his art department’s color processes. Linen postcards advertised motels and motor courts with clean rooms and radios. Roadside eateries’ cards showed off delicacies: fried clams at Howard Johnson’s restaurants on the East Coast; shoo-fly pie at the Dutch Haven in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; all-you-can-eat chicken dinners at Zehnder’s Restaurant in Frankenmuth, Michigan. Cities advertised hotel accommodations on linen postcards, too, hawking stylish supper clubs with music and dancing, and restaurants with fine dining and cocktails.

One popular format for linen postcards was the “Greetings From” style, which had been inspired by the “Gruss Aus” (“Greeting From”) postcards Teich had known as a young man in Germany. The German postcards featured local views with subdued lettering and a muted color palette; Teich’s American incarnation reflected the popular streamlined aesthetic of the time, featuring the name of a state, city, or attraction—emblazoned in large 3D letters—with miniature images of regional scenes depicted within. Travelers to Miami, Florida could purchase a postcard from the Parrot Jungle, a tourist attraction in an unspoiled tropical forest, with bathing beauties in the letter “P” and parrots in the letter “J.” Drivers cruising along Route 66 in Missouri might select a large letter card containing tiny images of Meramec State Park and scenic bluffs along the Gasconade River, examples of the natural diversity they saw along the highway.

People sent the postcards, spending a penny on postage, home to family and friends. It was an easy way to communicate information, to be sure, but with a twist any Instagram fan today would recognize immediately: an offhand, entertaining visual brag that showed just how much fun the sender was having at a nightclub, hotel, national monument, or natural wonder in some faraway state. The linen-style postcard, with its cheerful utopian imagery, captured the spirit of hope and optimism Americans craved during the Great Depression and World War II—and found during the post-war years.

By the mid-1950s, the Eisenhower administration’s supersized interstate highway system had begun bypassing local and scenic roads, and newly constructed shopping malls led to the demise of Main Street shops. Travelers purchasing postcards embraced a new aesthetic, based on color photography, that included sharp outlines of realistic (and increasingly generic) images on a shiny surface. Production of linen postcards decreased—and so did the sense of optimism depicted in the colorful, air-brushed images they had featured.

Curt Teich died in 1974 at the age of 96. Four years later, his company officially closed its doors. His family donated nearly half a million postcards and artifacts to the Lake County Discovery Museum in Libertyville, Illinois, which began transferring the collection to the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2016. Today, researchers pore over those cards—picturing extraordinary natural landscapes and quotidian small-town scenes—for a glimpse of the past in an increasingly mobile America. When Teich arrived in the United States, did he imagine his company would create such a tangible record of American life? Perhaps not, but his penny postcards, with their picturesque utopian images, harken back to the nascent days of automobile travel and the thrill of discovering the sweeping expanse and profound beauty of the American landscape.

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On August 21, 1915, the Conklin family departed Huntington, New York on a cross-country camping trip in a vehicle called the “Gypsy Van.” Visually arresting and cleverly designed, the 25-foot, 8-ton conveyance had been custom-built by Roland Conklin’s Gas-Electric Motor Bus Company to provide a maximum of comfort while roughing it on the road to San Francisco. The New York Times gushed that had the “Commander of the Faithful” ordered the “Jinns… to produce out of thin air… a vehicle which should have the power of motion and yet be a dwelling place fit for a Caliph, the result would have fallen far short of the actual house upon wheels which [just] left New York.”

For the next two months, the Conklins and the Gypsy Van were observed and admired by thousands along their westward route, ultimately becoming the subjects of nationwide coverage in the media of the day. Luxuriously equipped with an electrical generator and incandescent lighting, a full kitchen, Pullman-style sleeping berths, a folding table and desk, a concealed bookcase, a phonograph, convertible sofas with throw pillows, a variety of small appliances, and even a “roof garden,” this transport was a marvel of technology and chutzpah.

For many Americans, the Conklin’s Gypsy Van was their introduction to Recreational Vehicles, or simply, RVs. Ubiquitous today, our streamlined motorhomes and camping trailers alike can trace their origins to the time between 1915 and 1930, when Americans’ urge to relax by roughing it and their desire for a host of modern comforts first aligned with a motor camping industry that had the capacity to deliver both.

The Conklins did not become famous simply because they were camping their way to California. Camping for fun was not novel in 1915: It had been around since 1869, when William H.H. Murray published his wildly successful Adventures in the Wilderness; Or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, America’s first “how-to” camp guidebook.

Ever since Murray, camping literature has emphasized the idea that one can find relief from the noise, smoke, crowds, and regulations that make urban life tiresome and alienating by making a pilgrimage to nature. All one needed to do was head out of town, camp in a natural place for a while, and then return home restored in spirit, health and sense of belonging. While in the wild, a camper—like any other pilgrim—had to undergo challenges not found at home, which is why camping has long been called “roughing it.” Challenges were necessary because, since Murray’s day, camping has been a recapitulation of the “pioneer” experience on the pre-modern “frontier” where the individual and family were central and the American nation was born.

Camping’s popularity grew slowly, but got more sophisticated when John B. Bachelder offered alternatives to Murray’s vision of traveling around the Adirondacks by canoe in his 1875 book Popular Resorts and How to Reach Them. Bachelder identified three modes of camping: on foot (what we call “backpacking”); on horseback, which allowed for more gear and supplies; and with a horse and wagon. This last was most convenient, allowing for the inclusion ‘of more gear and supplies as well as campers who were unprepared for the rigors of the other two modes. However, horse-and-wagon camping was also the most costly and geographically limited because of the era’s poor roads. In short order, Americans across the country embraced all three manners of camping, but their total number remained relatively small because only the upper middle classes had several weeks’ vacation time and the money to afford a horse and wagon.

Over the next 30 years, camping slowly modernized. In a paradoxical twist, this anti-modern, back-to-nature activity has long been technologically sophisticated. As far back as the 1870s, when a new piece of camping gear appeared, it was often produced with recently developed materials or manufacturing techniques to improve comfort and convenience. Camping enthusiasts, promoters, and manufacturers tended to emphasize the positive consequences of roughing it, but, they added, one didn’t have to suffer through every discomfort to have an authentic and satisfying experience. Instead, a camper could “smooth” some particularly distressing roughness by using a piece of gear that provided enhanced reliability, reduced bulk, and dependable outcomes.

Around 1910 the pace of camping’s modernization increased when inexpensive automobiles began appearing. With incomes rising, car sales exploded. At the same time, vacations became more widespread—soon Bachelder’s horses became motor vehicles, and all the middle classes started to embrace camping. The first RV was hand built onto an automobile in 1904. This proto-motorhome slept four adults on bunks, was lit by incandescent lights and included an icebox and a radio. Over the course of the next decade, well-off tinkerers continued to adapt a variety of automobiles and truck chassis to create even more spacious and comfortable vehicles, but a bridge was crossed in 1915 when Roland and Mary Conklin launched their Gypsy Van.

Unlike their predecessors, the wealthy Conklins modified a bus into a fully furnished, double-deck motorhome. The New York Times, which published several articles about the Conklins, was not sure what to make of their vehicle, suggesting that it was a “sublimated English caravan, land-yacht, or what you will,” but they were certain that it had “all the conveniences of a country house, plus the advantages of unrestricted mobility and independence of schedule.” The family’s journey was so widely publicized that their invention became the general template for generations of motorhomes.

When the Conklin family traveled from New York to San Francisco in their luxury van, the press covered their travels avidly. Courtesy of the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress.

The appeal of motorhomes like the Conklins’ was simple and clear for any camper who sought to smooth some roughness. A car camper had to erect a tent, prepare bedding, unpack clothes, and establish a kitchen and dining area, which could take hours. The motorhome camper could avoid much of this effort. According to one 1920s observer, a motorhome enthusiast simply “let down the back steps and the thing was done.” Departure was just as simple.

By the middle of the 1920s, many Americans of somewhat more average means were tinkering together motorhomes, many along the lines made popular by the Conklins, and with the economy booming, several automobile and truck manufacturers also offered a limited number of fully complete motorhomes, including REO’s “speed wagon bungalow” and Hudson-Essex’s “Pullman Coach.”

In spite of their comforts, motorhomes had two distinct limitations, which ultimately led to the creation of the RV’s understudy: the trailer. A camper could not disconnect the house portion and drive the automobile part alone. (The Conklins had carried a motorcycle.) In addition, many motorhomes were large and limited to traveling only on automobile-friendly roads, making wilder landscapes unreachable. As a consequence of these limitations and their relatively high cost, motorhomes remained a marginal choice among RV campers until the 1960s. Trailers, by contrast, became the choice of people of average means.

The earliest auto camping trailers appeared during the early 1910s but they were spartan affairs: a plain device for carrying tents, sleeping bags, coolers, and other camping equipment. Soon, motivated tinkerers began to attach tent canvas on a collapsible frame, adding cots for sleeping and cupboards for cooking equipment and creating the first “tent trailers.” By mid-decade, it was possible to purchase a fully equipped, manufactured one. In 1923’s Motor Camping, J.C. Long and John D. Long declared that urban Americans were “possessed of the desire to be somewhere else” and the solution was evident—trailer camping. Tent trailering also charmed campers because of its convenience and ease. “Your camping trip will be made doubly enjoyable by using a BRINTNALL CONVERTIBLE CAMPING TRAILER,” blared an advertisement by the Los Angeles Trailer Company. The trailer was “light,” incorporated “comfortable exclusive folding bed features,” and had a “roomy” storage compartment for luggage, which left the car free to be “used for passengers.”

Tent trailering, however, had some drawbacks that became clear to Arthur G. Sherman in 1928 when he and his family headed north from their Detroit home on a modest camping trip. A bacteriologist and the president of a pharmaceutical company, Sherman departed with a newly purchased tent trailer that the manufacturer claimed could be opened into a waterproof cabin in five minutes. Unfortunately, as he and his family went to set it up for the first time, a thunderstorm erupted, and claimed Sherman, they “couldn’t master it after an hour’s wrestling.” Everyone got soaked. The experience so disgusted Sherman that he decided to create something better.

The initial design for Sherman’s new camping trailer was a masonite body standing six-feet wide by nine-feet long and no taller than the family’s car. On each side was a small window for ventilation and two more up front. Inside, Sherman placed cupboards, icebox, stove, built-in furniture and storage on either side of a narrow central aisle. By today’s standards, the trailer was small, boxy and unattractive, but it was solid and waterproof, and required no folding. Sherman had a carpenter build it for him for about $500 and the family took their new “Covered Wagon” (named by the children) camping the following summer of 1929. It had some problems—principally, it was too low inside—but the trailer aroused interest among many campers, some of whom offered to buy it from him. Sherman sensed an opportunity.

That fall, Sherman built two additional Covered Wagons. One was for a friend, but the other one he displayed at the Detroit Auto Show in January 1930. He set the price at $400, which was expensive, and although few people came by the display, Sherman reported that they were “fanatically interested.” By the end of the show, he had sold 118 units, the Covered Wagon Company was born, and the shape of an RV industry was set.

Over the next decade the company grew rapidly and to meet demand, trailers were built on an assembly line modeled on the auto industry. In 1936, Covered Wagon was the largest trailer producer in an expanding American industry, selling approximately 6,000 units, with gross sales of $3 million. By the end of the 1930s, the solid-body industry was producing more than 20,000 units per year and tent trailers had more or less disappeared.

Arthur Sherman’s solid-body trailer quickly gained acceptance for two principal reasons. First, Sherman was in the right place, at the right time, with the right idea. Detroit was at the center of the Great Lakes states, which at that time contained the country’s greatest concentration of campers. Furthermore, southern Michigan was the hub of the automobile industry, so a wide range of parts and skills were available, especially once the Depression dampened demand for new automobiles. And, a solid-body trailer took another step along the path of modernization by providing a more convenient space that was usable at any time.

Today’s 34-foot Class A motorhome with multiple TVs, two bathrooms, and a king bed is a version of the Conklin’s “Gypsy Van” and fifth-wheel toy haulers with popouts are the descendants of Arthur Sherman’s “Covered Wagon,” and these, in turn, are modernized versions of Bachelder’s horse-and-wagon camping. Between 1915 and 1930, Americans’ desire to escape modern life’s pressures by traveling into nature intersected with their yearning to enjoy the comforts of modern life while there. This contradiction might have produced only frustration, but tinkering, creativity, and a love of autos instead gave us recreational vehicles.

The post Why Americans Invented the RV appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the early 20th century, a number of Americans, seeking a more expeditious means of hauling material that could not be crammed into or strapped atop the traditional motorcar, took their tinsnips to the family flivver, affixing a large box or old wagon bed to the rear of the chassis. The frenzy of vehicular DIY-ing soon encouraged smaller entrepreneurs to install cabs and hauling containers on the slightly modified chassis of the Ford Model T.

But the Ford Motor Company itself did not offer the first fully factory-assembled pickup truck until 1924-1925 with its “Model T Runabout with Pickup Body” and 20 horsepower engine. Chevrolet and Dodge made serious moves into pickup production in the 1930s, and once the wartime production restrictions of the 1940s were lifted, the competitive scramble to cash in on pent-up demand led to a steady progression of bigger, more powerful trucks, which by the 1950s and early ’60s boasted V-6 and V-8 engines supplying 100 horsepower, improved transmissions, and easier steering.

By that point the pickup was no longer simply an adjunct but another vital technological component of one of the most far-reaching transformations in American history: the mechanization and consolidation of Southern agriculture.

Beginning in the 1920s and accelerating rapidly after 1945, with mules proving no match for the tractor in planting and cultivating his fields, the farmer needed to make not just the production but the transportation of his precious crop more efficient. When its bed was framed by slatted wooden side-bodies extending up to cab height, a pickup truck could haul a bale of cotton five miles to the gin in scarcely the time it took to hitch two mules to a wagon. And the same was no less true when there was fertilizer, feed, and seed to be picked up in town.

For families on smaller farms where there was no extra money for a car, the pickup might be forced into double duty in getting the family to church, the doctor, the grocery store, or school events. In rural farming and ranching areas, children quickly learned to drive the family pickup in the course of finishing off their chores. Local authorities tended to look the other way when one of the youngsters, whose face could scarcely be seen over the steering wheel, was dispatched via pickup to the feed or farm supply store. And even when they reached legal driving age, the pickup often remained their only means of getting to and from school or practice or simply escaping the isolation of the farm for a few hours in town.

Like country singer Alan Jackson, who couldn’t “replace the way it made me feel” when his daddy let him take the wheel of his “old hand-me-down Ford,” even in middle age and far removed for their rural roots, Americans reared on a farm retained vivid memories of the ways that experiences with pickups defined various stages of their youth. As a seven-year-old boy, I lived for the thrill of riding to the gin sprawled atop a load of cotton piled high on our pickup. But several years later, I cringed at the mere prospect of accompanying my dad in the same mud- and manure-encrusted truck on a trip to town, where I knew I faced the absolute certainty of encountering the prettiest, most stylish girl in my class.

The same forces that embedded the pickup in rural life would eventually begin to erode the very foundations of that life. The dwindling prospects of any but the largest and most mechanized farming operations pushed much of the increasingly marginalized population off the land toward the beckoning bustle of the metropolis. Although Americans fleeing the farm took their memories of the family’s dilapidated old pickup with them, actually parking such a vehicle in your driveway guaranteed a cold shoulder on arrival in the studiously urbane and fervently aspirational ’burbs.

Soon enough, however, rising metropolitan incomes and the growing popularity of camping, boating, and other outdoor activities justified the acquisition of newer, better-kempt pickups, equipped with once unheard of comforts and conveniences like leather seats, air conditioning, extended cabs, automatic transmissions, and power steering.

Annual sales of pickups topped 2 million by 1980 and had surged past 11 million in 2017, and the enormous and sustained profitability of its truck line has led Ford to limit its future sales of traditional cars in North America to the iconic Mustang and the yet to be unveiled Focus Active. With even the entry-level Dodge Ram 1500 stickering in the neighborhood of $65,000, many of today’s pampered pickups stand little chance of hauling cotton, hay, livestock, or much of anything else likely to scratch them.

Though pickups continue to have some practical applications in theory, in practice, a great number of them serve their owners primarily as “lifestyle vehicles” or some might even say “lifestyle statements.” Indeed, for a sizable contingent of Americans, the pickup truck has emerged as a means of establishing their ties to a distinctly blue-collar identity in the course of flaunting their bourgeois prosperity. (Ironically, some older pickup owners, more concerned now with asserting their rural roots than flashing their middle-class creds, have fallen into a certain reverse snobbery, deliberately hanging onto vehicles like my 1994 GMC Sierra, which sports 110,000 miles on the odometer but not much of its original paint job.)

The pickup truck had become a fixture in country music well before 1975, when David Allan Coe disputed his songwriter friend Steve Goodman’s claim that his “You Never Even Call Me by My Name” was the “perfect country song,” pointing out that it made no references to pickup trucks, trains, mothers, drinking, and prison, all of which comprised the collective sine qua non of a legitimate country offering.

Only when Goodman inserted a new verse about a fellow who admits that he was “drunk” the day his mother got out of prison and laments that before he made it to the station to meet her in his “pickup truck,” she had been “runned over by a damned ol’ train,” did Coe admit that his friend had indeed achieved perfection in a country song.

More than 40 years later, the rusty rattletrap Coe had in mind is little in evidence in songs by Luke Bryan and others about good ol’ boys and gals dancing the night away to a deafening mix of country rock and hip-hop, or just sitting and sipping on the special “diamond plate” tailgate protector of a lavishly accoutered “big black, jacked-up” pickup, likely a Chevy Silverado, which Bryan himself favors.

With luxury pickups offering some of the highest profit margins in the industry, manufacturers are riding the pop culture wave, their truck ads awash in country artists and soundtrack. Luke Bryan now serves as an official “brand ambassador” for Chevrolet, and neither the cultural or economic distance between Music City and Motor City is as great as singer-songwriter Mel Tillis suggested 35 years ago in his classic, “Detroit City.”

Today’s fancy models may be portrayed in ways that seem to celebrate a wide-open, “anything goes” social outlook, but the pickup’s political implications have most commonly skewed right, even far right. The stereotypical combination of a gun rack and Rebel flag decal once conjured images of night-riding, racist thugs. Even sans flag, the racked shotgun or rifle (or both) invited suspicions that the driver was not simply a dedicated hunter but someone just itching to be crossed. Ironically, the proliferation of extended cab vehicles in combination with the increased risk of theft amid the burgeoning illicit traffic in firearms, has largely reduced the gun rack to a garage sale item.

This is not to say, by any means, that the image of the pickup is completely toxic. Across the political spectrum, aspiring candidates looking to tout their humble, homespun roots and values seldom pass on a photo op of them in, or beside, a truck, and, in this case, if the vehicle boasts a few nicks and scrapes, so much the better.

Although foreign truck manufacturers have forced their stateside competitors to pay more attention to fuel economy and vehicle dependability, “Buy American!” still seems to resonate in the pickup marketplace. Significant differences in overall production levels notwithstanding, it is striking that Ford sold nearly twice as many F-Series pickups last year as all of the leading Japanese heavy and mid-size pickup truck models sold combined. Marketing experts think it is no coincidence that potential buyers are reminded periodically that Ford was the only major automaker to refuse federal bailout funds during the last recession, a message that General Motors may have been trying to counter in a Chevy Silverado ad declaring “This is our country. This is our truck.”

If the pickup truck is deeply ingrained in our national life and culture, like America itself, it has been and remains many things to many people. For generations born on the farm, it may summon a wave of classically bittersweet nostalgia. For some whose experiences with it have been less “up close and personal,” it has at times been a metaphor both for unvarnished rusticity and a comfortable, laid-back middle-class existence. For others, it has been a disquieting signifier of latent violence or vigilantism and active prejudice.

More broadly, the story of the pickup truck affirms the historic capacity of Americans to adapt not only our social and political outlook, but also our cultural and consumer preferences to dramatic changes in the economic, technological, and demographic forces that have shaped our identity as a people.

The post How the Pickup Truck Carried the American South Into the Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I finally got the keys to California, I wondered how fast it would go. So, on the 210 freeway, I floored the accelerator and within seconds I was driving 100 miles per hour.

I immediately felt exhilaration—and fear. This speed was totally unfamiliar to someone who has spent his life driving beaten-up Toyotas. In California we like to think we can move as fast as our imaginations can take us, but this shiny red convertible named California moved too fast for me.

I was not driving my own car. Ferrari let me drive its latest California model—officially the Ferrari California T—for four rainy January days. I requested the loaner because I thought it might provide some escapist fun at a difficult time for our state and country, and because, on the north side of age 40, I deserve a mid-life crisis.

But for journalistic purposes, I wanted to know whether the rare car named for our entire state (it’s far more common to name automobiles for specific California places, like the Chevrolet Malibu or Tahoe) could really embody California. I suspected that the folks back in Maranello, the Italian town where Ferrari makes its cars, might just be using our state’s name to sell a pretty automobile.

My suspicions were wrong. The Ferrari California was a revelation—as wonderful as our most kaleidoscopic dreams of the Golden State can be. The real problem was that Ferrari’s representation of California may be too faithful. The car is so damn perfect that it has a way of reminding you of our state’s imperfections.

The Ferrari California aligns with the state on the level of metaphor. California is famously the “Great Exception” among American states, as the 20th century author Carey McWilliams named it, and California is an exception among Ferraris. But the nature of that exceptionalism might surprise you; California is not the most expensive or the most glamorous or the fastest Ferrari.

To the contrary, Ferrari markets the California as the most practical and versatile of its cars. In its ultra-luxury, high-end way, it nods to the realities of modern California lives—our business, our diversity, our traffic.

Joe Mathews driving a Ferrari California T. Photo by Louis Wheatley.

The California is not a sports car, but a convertible grand touring car, built for comfort, which makes sense if you’re a Californian who works far from where you live, has kids, or is often stuck on our state’s abysmally congested freeways. It’s got two doors, but also enough space in back to fit two children’s car seats.

“It is a little bit an exception,” Edwin Fenech, the president and CEO of Ferrari North America, told me by phone. “It’s able to be very versatile. You can drive it every day, and it’s very easy to drive. You can go to the grocery store with your car.”

This has frustrated some Ferrari purists, who seem to equate the brand’s value with extreme male self-indulgence (you’ll see it referred to disparagingly as the “chick” Ferrari online) and complain about everything from its cupholder to its eight cylinders (most cars make do with four or six, but some Ferraris have 12).

But Fenech said that versatility shouldn’t detract from the car’s mystique, or California’s. It’s supposed to represent our sun-kissed Hollywood beauty, the kind he experienced as a young professional who saved up to fly his grandparents to California and guide them on a long drive up the coast, from Los Angeles to Monterey to San Francisco. The memory of that trip is a touchstone for Fenech and his family.

“It’s a car that has all the attributes of being a Ferrari,” he said, referencing “high performance, elegance and flair.” He added pointedly that, in an era moving with surprising swiftness toward self-driving—or autonomous—vehicles, Ferrari wanted to affirm its support for Californians determined to steer clear of the trend. After all, what is more emblematic of the Golden State than our belief in primacy behind the wheel?

“We are the ones who are going to defend the right to drive,” Fenech told me. “Americans in California should have the right to drive every day … Don’t brainwash the new generation with autonomous driving—it’s so beautiful, driving.”

Fenech said that, while Ferrari makes all its cars in Italy, the U.S. and California also have defined the brand and its market. The race car driver Luigi Chinetti, who immigrated to the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century, pushed Enzo Ferrari to build his own cars and then imported them here.

Today’s Ferrari California draws on our current infatuation with everything mid-20th century. Ferrari produced three different California models between 1957 and 1967. (Filmmakers used replicas of a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spider in the classic ‘80s comedy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). The car became such a valuable collector’s item (some have sold for $20 million or more) that Ferrari revived the brand in 2008.

The newest iteration, the Ferrari California T, was introduced for the 2015 model year. Fenech said the car fits California in multiple ways. It’s designed with a dual-clutch automatic transmission and a technologically advanced suspension, which makes it easy to navigate through the dense neighborhoods of America’s most urban state. “It’s the most urban Ferrari in our range—you are able to drive it comfortably in the city,” he said. And the T stands for Turbo, as in the twin-turbo, 3.9 liter engine, which is a nod to our environmental awareness. It can still get the car to 196 miles per hour but uses less fuel and decreases the car’s emissions. (The auto press has speculated that all Ferraris will eventually be hybrids).

The Ferrari representative who loaned me the car encouraged me to do as much as I could with it. So I tested its California-ness. I drove it for 90 minutes through bumper-to-bumper traffic to my office in Santa Monica. I navigated potholes in downtown L.A. (The seats are so comfortable you barely feel the bumps). I made my rounds to the grocery store and the In-N-Out drive-through, complete with the requisite in-car consumption of a double-double. I chauffeured my kids to school, secured in their car seats in the back. And I carted luggage, golf clubs, and Little League equipment in the trunk.

The car held up. I felt far safer while driving it in a rainstorm or on bad roads than I do with my usual ride, a five-year-old Prius. With the top down, I loved the way that the car connected me with other drivers and pedestrians, some of whom offered a thumbs-up and asked what the car was.

When I took it out on PCH with the top down, the ride was joyful. And I’ve never had an automotive experience happier than the drive up Angeles Crest Highway, with the radio first playing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “California” (“It’s time we better hit the road”) and then R.E.M’s “Electrolite” (“Hollywood is under me. I’m Martin Sheen. I’m Steve McQueen. I’m Jimmy Dean”).

I didn’t want to keep this experience all to myself, so I took the historian Bill Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, for a spin, hoping for expert commentary on the car’s California-ness. He took exception to the suggestion that such a luxury item could be for anyone but the most moneyed Californians. But mostly, he just enjoyed the ride, and the respite from work. “It sure is fun,” he said.

Of course, the car, like so many wonderful things in our state, fails the core test of accessibility: the base MSRP of the Ferrari California T is $198,973. The one I drove costs $240,00. By Ferrari standards, that’s a bargain (the hybrid La Ferrari sells for well over $1 million), which is by design: An estimated half of Ferrari California buyers are new to the brand. But the car I was driving would cost this non-profit journalist more than three years’ take-home pay.

Which is another thing that makes the California very Californian. The good life is highly visible throughout our state. But only a few can afford more than a brief ride.

The post The New California Ferrari Goes 196 Miles per Hour, and Comes with a Cupholder appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And we VW enthusiasts are especially bummed out.

Volkswagen—the “people’s car”—occupies a special niche in American popular culture, an unlikely outcome for a vehicular brainchild of Adolf Hitler. It’s a pretty uncanny coup, really, that VW and its original model, fondly known as the Bug or Beetle, could be conceived at the dawn of the Third Reich and still find their way into myriad American hearts and households, so soon after World War II, no less. In the 1960s, the loaf-shaped VW bus (dubbed the “Type 2” when it arrived in America in the early 1950s) turned into at least as much of an icon as the famed Beetle, but it was of course the Beetle that first paved the way for VW.

A famously unorthodox and offbeat 1960s advertising campaign helped get the unusual-looking Bug rolling—and more recently a VW commercial became one of the most shared Super Bowl ads of all time (remember “The Force,” with the little kid dressed as Darth Vader?). But an alchemy more powerful than advertising has somehow fueled the VW phenomenon, an organic fervor—a force?—of the kind that most brands, automotive or otherwise, can only dream about tapping into.

With their novel rear-mounted, air-cooled engines, the original Bugs and buses were built to be simple, practical, relatively cheap to buy, and easy to maintain. That’s one reason so many are still on the road—and why even today people get the joke when Woody Allen’s character in Sleeper stumbles upon a 200-year-old Bug and the dust-encrusted relic starts right up.

But a few years before its supporting role in Sleeper, the people’s car had already become a Hollywood star in The Love Bug, the first in a series of giddy flicks about Herbie, the Bug with a mind of its own. That Disney movie first struck a popular chord in 1969—a few months before a lot of Bugs and buses rolled into Woodstock.

Disney and Woodstock. That says something, and further examples of how the Bug made inroads across the culture are too numerous to count, from the much-mulled-over Beetle on the cover of the Beatles’ (!) Abbey Road album, to Herbie Fully Loaded (Disney’s 2005 Love Bug reboot), to the recurring role of the indigo-hued New Beetle in TV’s Breaking Bad.

The bus has been variously known as a microbus, minibus, van, transporter, camper, station wagon, and a few other monikers reflective of the vehicle’s multipurpose applications. But as with the Bug, the basic structure and silhouette of the bus scarcely changed for several decades. So it takes an aficionado of sorts to differentiate between a model made in the 1960s from, say, the 1979 VW bus that’s like a member of the Hoover family in Little Miss Sunshine.

The bright yellow and white bus in the movie (nowadays on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum) fairly evokes sunshine on wheels, despite the stormy interactions among the six passengers—and in what other car could they all sit, scattered on utilitarian bench seats, as if in pews? Drive through any Southern California beach city and you’ll find that such buses (and Vanagons, the microbus’s boxier 1980s successor) figure prominently in the streetscape.

When I think about it, I had my own bit part in building VW lore, back when I would load up my Sunshine-style bus with my buddies and their surfboards. It all felt pretty cool, but where did that elusive notion of coolness come from? The VW “Beach Bomb” in my Hot Wheels collection?

Perhaps the blue VW bus that figures prominently on the cover of Bob Dylan’s album The Freewheelin’ somehow seeped into my consciousness. The lyrics to The Who’s “Magic Bus,” a staple of classic rock, might have fortified the pop alchemy, too, even if the song wasn’t about a VW.

My youthful bus driving days were still a few years before Sean Penn, as stereotypical Southern California surfer dude Jeff Spicoli, tumbled out of a smoke-filled VW bus in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Yet I drove a similar bus, and with my sun-fried, shoulder-length hair, I looked a lot like Spicoli (but had fewer tardies, and probably better grades and health habits).

Many years later, I was watching Little Miss Sunshine with my wife and kids and we laughed harder than most in the theater when (spoiler alert!) the microbus’s horn stuck. Our family’s own VW Vanagon—bought used and by then 20 years old—had had the same quirk. And in our gleeful response, in 2006, I heard echoes of Disney, Woodstock, Woody Allen, and many more.

The post Volkswagen’s Long, Strange Trip Through Pop Culture appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now, San Franciscans are, on average, younger and more prosperous, and when they ride the bus they are looking at their phones, where they can track the 22 Fillmore in real time. They can also probably see a digital readout of arriving buses at a stop, or receive texts and social media updates from San Francisco’s municipal transit agency. Any traveler can also open up all sorts of other smartphone and desktop apps to navigate the system, like Google Maps, Moovit, Rover, and Routesy. These days, when you ride the bus, you ride with Big Data.

The world of apps for transit started with a great deal of promise. Evidence from Seattle suggested that merely letting riders know when the next bus would arrive could actually make people happier with their bus and more likely to take another trip. Fully integrated apps now let people plan trips that move from trains to buses and private cars or bicycles at the ends. Eventually, this data-rich universe may encourage city dwellers to give up their cars, reducing traffic congestion, pollution, and greenhouse-gas emissions. So on a recent trip back to San Francisco, I tried using some of the local apps to see how they changed my experience.

I was taking part in a big civic—and economic—experiment. Though there aren’t yet any studies showing whether apps increase transit ridership, apps themselves are much cheaper than buses and trains and tracks and drivers. When apps are used to pay for fares (as they are in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, among other cities) they shift the cost of fare machines from the transit company to the riders. These complex changes in investment, risk, and time will continue as 10 percent of the world moves into cities in the next 15 years, and as self-driving cars start to prowl the streets. Uber has raised $15 billion in venture capital to move into the space between public and private transit around the world. And in the long run, these changes could create a richer transit universe for everyone, or a poorer one accessible mainly to the rich.

Munimobile’s ‘Rate My Ride’ feature.

I first pulled out my $29 Android smartphone along the T line on Third Street. The app produced by MUNI, the local transit system, required that I give it my email and create a password. Even though I’d given up my anonymity, the app didn’t seem to know exactly where I was. So I walked towards where I thought the stop was, only to find a digital readout saying that the next trains were coming in 12 and 14 minutes. Aha! Poorly spaced trains are a problem no app can fix.

That problem is important. As nice as information is, what riders really want is service. Candace Brakewood, assistant professor of engineering at CUNY, did research across three boroughs of New York from 2011 through 2013 and found that lines giving riders accurate information on arrival times increased ridership by as much as 2 percent on an average day. “When you aggregate that across NYC it’s very significant,” she told me. But she also looked at the impact of the weather, the economy, service changes, and multiple other factors and found what really increased ridership was more frequent buses and shorter trip times. This is hardly a Moneyball-type revelation from the crunching of Big Data. “Yeah. Commonsense,” Breakwood said.

Once the T arrived it was pleasantly crowded, with a mix of ages and ethnicities, and the ride on the tracks was mostly smooth. Some older black folks in suits were still enjoying Juneteenth, singing a song from another era. A younger woman with pink hair was drinking from a can. And a guy with long arms was waving them exuberantly as he talked on the phone. As we rolled past the ballpark it occurred to me that the city had spent a lot of money establishing itself as a party town, and the crowd of us here on the train was a truer reflection of that happy civic spirit—the 22 Fellini of it all—than many of the recent expensive infrastructure investments. An Asian grandmother with two little children boarded. The train lurched, they all nearly fell over, and then started giggling. The arm-waving man shot out of his seat and offered it to them. Our civic project rolled along.

What does this all have to do with apps? SF MUNI plans to release a new app component this summer that allows passengers to comment on the etiquette of fellow riders, along with train cleanliness, trip time, crowding, and comfort. Rate My Ride encourages readers to swipe right or left—in homage to Tinder, I guess. MUNI employees will monitor these swipes and “target specific train routes and bus lines” for improvements, according to Paul Rose, spokesperson for MUNI. “It’s one way to make it easier for riders to let us know how we can improve their transportation experience and further engage our riders,” he explained.

I tried to imagine myself swiping my fellow passengers on my phone, but to me the beauty of the bus is enjoying the way everyone gets along and ignoring the ways that we don’t. The singing was nice. I had no problem with a quiet drink. The seat hog at 23rd Street was an angel by Fourth and King.

So how do people rate other passengers’ etiquette, and how should the transit agency react to them? “There’s an idea that because apps are software they’re non-discriminatory and egalitarian. And if you put them in the hands of people they’ll naturally lead to good,” said David King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Arizona State University. But, King worries, it’s likely that the app will be hijacked by racist, sexist, or anti-poor opinions—just like platforms including Nextdoor.com, AirBnB, and Microsoft’s chatbot Tay, which became a raving fountain of hate-talk within hours.

What’s more, in the world of public services, some voices—particularly those perceived as white and middle class—are more powerful than others, attracting more sympathetic policing, more funding for potholes, more municipal love. MUNI’s app will be available only in English to start, even though bus announcements are often in English, Spanish, and Chinese. The agency says they expect to release the app in other languages. It could be harmful to only collect complaints from English speakers, but wouldn’t the very idea of the city itself be challenged if we all secretly complain about each other in multiple languages?

Perhaps more important, if the core issue with increasing transit ridership is train frequency and travel time, should MUNI spend its precious resources tracking and responding to passenger etiquette? Transit needs to be more rider-focused, but the meaningful difference comes when public transit is more plentiful and convenient. And citizens change that through engagement in the budgeting and planning process, not by writing bad Yelp reviews. At the moment, apps offer riders an illusion of control. In the long push-pull over transit service, though, the apps aren’t automatically a force for good.

On a trip back from the East Bay, I used Moovit to calculate my route. Taking BART and bus, the app said, would take 86 minutes, while an ad offered a button to call an Uber that would cost $21 and take 56 minutes. As it turned out, the app was wrong, and between BART and the 5 Fulton bus I got back home in 72 minutes for about $6. And of course, I got the whole Fellini too.

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