While looking through some old issues from 1967 and 1968 of the Ruidoso News — the newspaper that my father and mother ran for almost 20 years — I’ve run across many interesting things. I’ll post a longer article about the newspaper and my father soon. But in the meantime I’ll pass along some things about automobiles of the era.
The weekly report from the police department lists details of various automobile accidents. Many are the result of someone’s car skidding on an icy road and veering into oncoming traffic. In one such incident, the crash was enough to send someone to the hospital.
The crash involved a 1968 Pontiac GTO (the IN car for gearheads at the time) and a 1967 Plymouth. But despite the apparent severity of the crash, the police report said there was a miniscule “$150 damage to each vehicle.”
In another slippery road accident, a Ford pickup smashed into a Porsche. Damage to the Ford was $25 and damage to the expensive German sports car was $400.
In today’s world, I’ll bet damages to those vehicles would have topped $10,000 each (or probably $20,000 in the case of the Porsche.)
In another accident, a woman forgot to engage the parking brake on her 1963 Ford while stopping for an afternoon cocktail at a local pub. While sipping her martini, her sedan rolled across the street and smashed taillight first into the Covered Wagon Curio Store. on Sudderth Drive. According to the police report, damage to the vehicle was $50 and there was “$5 damage to the building.”
And in today’s world, the owner of the building would probably have filed a lawsuit for damages to lost revenue while customers avoided the building during the investigation.
Also in the paper was an ad for a brand new 1968 Chevy half-ton pickup for just $1,998. I spotted an ad on the Internet last week asking more than $80,000 for a professionally restored version of that truck. Average plain old “used” versions of that same truck are fetching around $15,000.
But what really caught my attention was a nationally produced advertisement in the Ruidoso News for a 1967 Chevrolet Impala. I’ll show it below, but the feature being touted in the ad was the smoothness of how the ashtray worked. Never mind that you’re wrecking your lungs while driving and smoking, your hands won’t be overworked when pulling out the receptacle for your cigarette butts. The smooth ride of the ashtray was because of “four shiny little ball bearings” installed in the rack to make its extraction and re-insertion is effortless.
Neither of my wife’s car or our pickup truck even have ashtrays. My classic 1975 BMW 2002 has three of them — two in the back seat and one in the center console, just down a bit from the all important cigarette lighter.
My wife’s car has a feature that allows you change the color of the car’s interior accent lighting to six different shades. Maybe in 40 years, someone will make fun of that feature as being trivial as we cruise around in zero pollution vehicles to help fight climate change.
aero-cordero.com 