{"id":122,"date":"2019-11-01T22:46:39","date_gmt":"2019-11-01T22:46:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/?p=122"},"modified":"2019-11-01T16:48:53","modified_gmt":"2019-11-01T16:48:53","slug":"me-and-the-automobile-part-3-of-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/2019\/11\/01\/me-and-the-automobile-part-3-of-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Me and the Automobile (Part 4 of 5)"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Professoriate to the Corporation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Driven by this peculiar form of the reputational demon, I found and acquired a two-year old 164E, Volvo\u2019s first luxury sedan. It answered perfectly to the purpose. She, too, was blue, but with a powerful six-cylinder, fuel-injected, dual exhaust, engine; a four-speed \u201cshort stick\u201d manual transmission with electric overdrive, and the first leather-upholstered saloon cabin of my acquaintance. I immediately lowered the new car slightly, added stiffer struts and shock absorbers, wider alloy wheels and \u201chigh performance\u201d Pirelli tires (attractive as much for the brand name as for their quality). \u00a0Again, I was the envy of those at the college who knew anything at all about exotic cars and accessories, \u00a0and of and for Volvos in particular.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But I acquired the 164E to declare independence of my colleagues, not to win their admiration. I was trying, unsuccessfully, to mute the sneaking conviction that my falling enrollments were my fault, not that of the College\u2019s marketing and enrollment strategies. I certainly felt that \u00a0I was beginning to lose the nascent and unnamed competition with those with whom I joined the college. For all of us\u2014and, we suspected, for the administration and for students\u2014this competition was measured in enrollments and other less leading indicators of popularity. (My efforts to overcome my sense of inadequacy were not yet successful enough to immunize me from this terrible tyranny.) And so I began seeking the kind of study opportunities that abound in academe\u2014ones that convene in warm, exotic places; that give you a chance to show off with a paper or \u201ckeynote\u201d speech; that are funded by one\u2019s employer because they provide \u201cprofessional development\u201d. In short, ones that would carry me out of (rather than around in) Gambier for a Summer, a semester or a year.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My first strike was a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at the University of Georgia on the Idea of Privacy in the Western Tradition. (One could still openly study Judeo-Christianity and even the \u201cdead white males\u201d who contributed to it\u2014although such preoccupations had already become faintly suspicious.) But it was exciting to find in the universities libraries in Athens, GA, in Blackstone\u2019s Commentaries on the Laws of England, affirmation that child-bearing in what Tocqueville called \u201cthe European monarchy\u201d was a public or civil, not a private, matter. After all, it distributed legal responsibility for the environment (via Riparian Rights and the Prevailing Lights Doctrine, for example) and of property management in general. Mere reference to such observations is currently inadmissible by either the friends or the foes of abortion!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This initial strike led to the mother lode\u2014Directorship of the 1980-81 Newberry Library Program in the Humanities in Chicago, on the Idea of Privacy in the Western Tradition. The resulting encounter with Chicago was so fascinating that I landed what I interpreted as \u201ctrial\u201d employment \u00a0as a \u201ccredit trainee\u201d at the \u00a0First National Bank of Chicago in the Summer of 1981. It went well enough that I journeyed to Gambier the following Fall to decide \u00a0in the familiar surroundings of the College and its Department of Political Science which path I would take into the future. The answer was left entirely up to me. I chose banking. Its appeal lay entirely in its being the path less taken!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The 164E bore me through the NEH Seminar at the University of Georgia and on into Chicago for the Newberry Library program with smooth power and fine balance. It was a wonderful, perhaps even a great, car. It bore its wide stance, stiffened suspension, and powerful purr with aplomb over West Virginia\u2019s twisting, switch-back roads and through the \u00a0Gaps in which had arisen the extraordinary figure of Doc Watson and the sophisticated furniture industry of North Carolina. The car stumbled only once; during a weekend trip from Georgia to Charlestown, SC, \u00a0she sprang a fuel leak as I entered the town of Aiken, South Carolina. One of the injectors had failed. The 164E\u2019s mechanical formulae and ratios were directed by an on-board computer, thus releasing me from maintaining the supply of replacement parts required by its predecessor (and from even the pretense of being the car\u2019s mechanic). Nevertheless, I got an injector from a Volvo shop before the fuel-tank emptied or the car caught fire, and installed it in 110 degree temperatures in an asphalt parking lot in Aiken. By the time I finished the job, I was standing 4\u201d deep in the asphalt. After I extracted both feet and shoes from the pavement, I finished the trip to Charleston and back to Athens, trouble free. High point of the trip? Touring The Battery by horse-drawn buggy at a slow saunter. No car can do it as well.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The 164E\u2019s tank-like construction (it presaged the square, blunt form of the 240 series, without the squareness and bluntness) saved the life of son Sam and a couple of his friends. They were attacked by a pickup truck in the grip of road rage as they set out for home from a concert in Kent, Ohio\u2014the host city of \u00a0Kent State University. The truck rode up over the rear bumper and crumpled the bodywork and upper structural members of the chassis forward to the cushions of the back seat\u2014at which point the principal structure of the car blocked the A-frames and steering assembly of the truck from making any further progress in peeling the body work off the car. Although the truck and perhaps even its occupants may not have been entirely injury-free, they left the scene with greater alacrity than could Sam and his entourage. Nevertheless, before the night was out (and after several \u2018phone calls to select a convenient (i.e., patrol-free) route home and to determine that the transmission and brakes could still be operated, at least minimally) the mangled Volvo turned up in Gambier. Its passengers struck me as \u201cchastened\u201d. I still don\u2019t know what precipitated the incident\u2014and wouldn\u2019t have been at all surprised to learn that a part of it had been an America First attitude among callow midwestern pickup truck users in the \u201ctown\u201d who despised its \u201cgown\u201d for precipitating the governor\u2019s much earlier invitation of the National Guard. In any case, I didn\u2019t report the incident and found a back-yard body worker who did a fine job restoring the car.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hence, the 164E lived on, only to meet its doom at the hands of son Sam two years later. He was home from his Freshman year at Dartmouth, and helping us get what we needed from Gambier to Chicago\u2019s Gold Coast for the year at the Newberry Library.\u00a0 The incident that \u201ctotaled\u201d the 164E \u00a0was a collision precipitated by a Yellow Jacket hornet that entered the cabin through an open window on a hot August day and harassed either Sam or the girl whom he had \u201crecruited\u201d to help with the work. Again, no one was seriously hurt, but two automobiles\u2014one an extraordinary driving machine, indeed\u2014were presumably retired forever from the nation\u2019s highways.<\/p>\n

A car that I asked Sam to lease the very next day, to finish the moving errands he\u2019d started, met very nearly the same fate in very nearly the same way. A bee (perhaps yesterday\u2019s Yellow Jacket wishing to repeat the experience?) tortured the same recruit, I was told\u2014thus distracting the same driver with a similar consequence. I reported the cash I paid for the damage to the rental-car agency as an \u201cinsurance loss\u201d. The IRS saw it, instead, as a \u201cgift\u201d to Sam to cover his responsibility for the injury to the rental. That pretty completely drained me\u2014of morale as well as cash\u2014and Sam and I agreed that running the Newberry\u2019s Book Store on furlough from Dartmouth in 1980-81 (an opportunity generously offered us by the Library\u2019s directors) would be good preparation for his taking fuller advantage of his matriculation. He did a nice job of it, as all of us noticed, and graduated in good standing a year after those with whom he entered as a Freshman.<\/p>\n

Although Ellie and I were by then separated, I drove her and her mother up to Hanover from Chicago for the Commencement. I was car-less at the time, and the three of us floated down I-90 in a rented Lincoln Town Car. It was so wide that I expected to hear scrapping sounds as we made our way through turnpike toll booths. It was so long that I was able to escape overhearing the conversation between Ellie and her mother\u2014into which I was not in any case invited.<\/p>\n

One sign that the bookish part of Dartmouth never really got Sam\u2019s attention was that the College refused to give him his \u00a0diploma until his book-store debt (most of it for skiing equipment, with the use of which he broke a leg) had been settled. \u00a0I refused to pay it off–until his grandmother proposed to do it, instead. (Most other of my cash \u201cgifts\u201d to Sam were to cover ministrations to those for whom he cared but to whom he had no moral or legal obligation. I admire his character on this point, suspect that he got part of it from me, and wish that both of us could better afford it.<\/p>\n

When I stayed in Chicago at the end of the Newberry year, instead of returning to my Kenyon professoriate, I went without a car of my own for three years. I didn\u2019t really need one. I was living inside the Chicago Loop very near my employer, the First National Bank of Chicago. Renting to visit my mother in Ohio was convenient, although it restricted me to conventional, uninteresting machines. (Trains and sometimes planes kept me in touch with my college-enrolled children.) And then, when my new career began showing promise, I re-entered \u2013and was again thrown back from\u2014the luxury car market. This time it was a five-year-old BMW 700. It was big, powerful, quiet, smelled \u201cnew\u201d and seemed flawless in both appearance and performance. The purchase seemed one among friends; the car had been offered exclusively within the Bank by one of First Chicago\u2019s in-house lawyers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Professoriate to the Corporation Driven by this peculiar form of the reputational demon, I found and acquired a two-year old 164E, Volvo\u2019s first luxury sedan. It answered perfectly to the purpose. She, too, was blue, but with a powerful six-cylinder, fuel-injected, dual exhaust, engine; a four-speed \u201cshort stick\u201d manual transmission with electric overdrive, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":268,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/268"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions\/128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engage.augsburg.edu\/frame\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}