Emasculation

  My first car was a 1949 Studebaker Champion, with special overdrive. At 14, I drooled on the car as Dad and I looked it over. For $35 dollars of my savings, and the additional price and effort of a new clutch, I would be the envy of every single one of my friends. Best of all, I would do the work myself.

A dusty gold, it was sleek, with four doors, a three-speed manual transmission, a full six cylinders, all firing. A slight blue smoke came from the exhaust, but the spark plugs weren’t fouling and the tires were good enough for tooling along our back lot and the connecting couple of miles of dirt roads.

The previous school vacation, Dad had arranged for me to assist with an engine rebuild in a local garage. I never learned how much he paid that mechanic, but I showed up early, stayed all day, and happily hung onto every word as he patiently exposed the innards of a similar engine, kept it all in order, assayed what parts needed replacement, and then closed it all up again. I never complained of my dull headache from exhaust fumes in the closed garage, and carefully avoided washing my hands completely clean, just to be able to show them to my buddies whenever the conversation might follow my lead to the innards of cars.

The car was delivered to our old carriage house, which had had a car pit installed many years ago, when the horse carriages were traded in for automobiles. The replacement clutch was in the back, awaiting the moment when my excitement over tooling about the property might subside enough to smell the smoke from the slipping clutch.

The repair was assisted over perhaps a summer’s week by a succession of assistants, all hoping to dirty their hands and join the high rank of car mechanic. After reassembly and a patient adjustment of the clutch linkage, we backed the car out and headed for our proving grounds.

After a week or so of fun, we discussed and agreed that the car seemed sluggish, and would benefit from an oil change, grease job, timing check, and perhaps an adjustment of the distributor points. And, while we were at it, we should clean the spark plugs, if only to check their spark gap and to inspect the surrounding porcelain bit, a true mechanic’s only view into the combustion chamber’s combustion efficiency.

Several days of gapping plugs, setting points, checking spark advance against engine rpm, and then carefully reviewing the results brought us almost to manhood, when our language from breakfast to bedtime was an arcane assembly of acronyms, almost a secret language that we guarded to the exclusion of sisters, mothers, and the untutored.

After perhaps a month, we began speculating about a persistent tapping, soon consenting to the view that the valve tappets needed adjusting. Exploring another arcane process determined by the non-sequential firing order of the cylinders and whether the respective tappet was an intake or exhaust valve tappet, we thoroughly covered ourselves with engine oil spattered by the idling engine as we located and adjusted the offending tappets.

For perhaps a year, we passed through automotive phases of dreaming about supercharging that little engine, or adding a split manifold and four-barreled carburetors, to pep up our increasingly quick runs down the back roads. Fortunately, we never had the money or the time to pursue that dream, and I soon was distracted by another fancy, one that required clean hands, combed hair, and proper language.

A few decades later, with wives and children about the kitchen table, my buddies and I were sipping and  swapping stories about that dusty gold Studebaker. After a review of those moments when cars and boys were as inseparable as setting the points and manhood, talk turned to our modern cars, and to the respective neglect they survive, essentially emasculating us.

No modern car has points to file and adjust, or spark condenser to replace along with the points. Platinum-tipped spark plugs last 100,000 miles, and the manual suggests that they be left alone, so as to minimize the possibility of the mechanic introducing dirt into the combustion chambers.

No modern car has Zerk grease fittings, where the Champion had perhaps two dozen, grouped under differing schedules for greasing. Adding insult to injury, car manuals for modern cars suggest that the engine oil be changed only once a year or every 10,000 miles, whereas engine oils used to come in winter and summer varieties, and had to be changed at least every 2,000 miles, adding a minimum of two chances to be a boy under his car again.

The ability to detect a wearing tappet, adjust tie rods according to tire wear patterns, use a matchbook cover as the correct spacer for gapping the points of a six-cylinder engine, no longer are essential assets for a man. Rather, checking the fluids now means taking the wife’s car to the gas station and checking the windshield washing fluid level while the pump hums.

Well, all four of my grandchildren are prepubescent boys. The other day one of them said that his mother told him to ask me what points are….