[count-your-change]

You better believe it! There is nothing like driving a big heavy car at 80 mph and just float along like you're sitting in an easy chair.
They were cars worth singing about unlike the little tin boxes now that only a contortionist can get into and the commercials are of cars skidding on wet pavement or of some skinny gal with her dress sliding up around her backside trying to get out of the car.

[ottbmare]

I have no trouble believing it was wonderful to drive a big heavy piece of Detroit iron at 90 miles an hour. Been there and done that. I’ve had that experience too.

And I have no trouble believing that it was good marketing to have some glamorous movie star advertising a consumer product while clad in a beautiful gown.

What I was wondering was, did the people of the period not look at the three dorky-looking guys driving with lovely, vivacious Dinah Shore and think, “Those guys look gay.” In real life, nobody ever gets into a car and drives along singing; didn’t that bother consumers? Did it really motivate them to buy?

I’m asking because I was a very small child in 1959, and I’m trying to understand my parents and the apparently golden time in which I was born. I’m wondering how we can take steps toward recapturing the best of America’s past. It seems there was a sort of naïveté, a willing suspension of natural skepticism. Was this a reaction to the sorrows of World War II?