take a walk around an old air base.....even if the majority of the buildings are gone, there's still the oil stains on the tarmac or the hangar floors. Even better, climb inside an old warbird from WWII...imagine the guys that sat there. Many weren't even out of their teens, but sent out with a piece of machinery and a job to do. Touring an air show doesn't work as well, because there are always crowds and lines. There's a place outside the city of Richland, WA. It was a trailer park, with so many mobile homes and families that it was (behind Seattle and Spokane) the third largest city in WA by population. Those were the folks building and working on the nuclear facilities in Hanford. You can still drive some of the weedy streets and see the foundations for the community centers, laundromats, and even the pads for the trailers. Years later, we used to use a couple of those streets as impromptu drag strips. Still, thinking of the moms pushing laundry carts down the lane, dads taking the bus out to "the area", kids riding their bikes. All gone now but the concrete and asphalt and the occasional fire hydrant. I like old buildings, ghost towns, old aircraft, old trains, and anything from yesteryears that has been "abandoned in place". I also like anyone with similar appreciations. dj
You're absolutely right. And for the record, I don't necessarily think about certain eras. Rather, I think of ALL of the eras and generations that these "relics" were a part of. And yep, that definitely includes the good and bad times. For me, that just make this whole feeling (whatever it is) seem much stronger.
Definately not alone Love the history of these cars - think of the men who built them, the kids who rode in them who are now old and grey - if still here. Owner's info proudly typed into the owner's manual - meticulous maintenance records written with a pencil 50+ years ago on a piece of paper that started out as a tree 100 years ago - tangible pieces of the past you can hold in your hands. I've found old road maps, church bulletins, the aforementioned coins, a Barbie doll, socks, candy wrappers - things that belonged to some person. I can extend this "nostalgia" to those times when unfortunately you have to send a car on down the line - one you've stripped every conceivable salvageable part from - and you move the 'remains' to the recycler. I always take the VIN and Body Tags as a sort of memory of a once-shiny new car - and an interior scrap (if it's got one) - hang them in my garage as a tribute to the car that is no more...sounds stupid maybe, but in my mind, anything with 'round headlights' is worthy of remembering. The "Sitting and Rotting" thread on here is phenomenal, but also saddens a part of me - I feel they all 'deserve' a little better. My 2 cents.
I'm with you guys. I just wish my wife and those around me could understand our affliction, or addiction, or what ever it is... .
I'm glad you guys get it. My fiancé thinks I've lost it when I start talking about what a car has seen and been a part of. Your converse are not shop shoes. Buy boots.
I feel ya man. I get the same feeling and it bums me out that I long to go back to a time that I wasn't even alive to experience
I have feelings myself when I see an old race car or pass though a town that is either dieing or already dead. I don't know that nostalgic is the correct word but it is one that everyone is familiar with even if it is not totally correct it at least is as a good as any to get everyone's creative juices stirring. I have had opportunity to travel this old country of ours and there are time that I get deep feelings of regret for those times that are lost to us. I guess this is a little creepy but somehow deep down inside I get the feeling that some old car or dilapidated building at one time had a life of sorts and that it must have been good for it before it became forgotten. Maybe it is a sort of foreboding, as one who needs to come to grips with one's own mortality. Like I said maybe it is just a little creepy.
you guys are all too deep for me. I like old junk. all types. old days were cool, nowadays things kind of suck.
I guess I'm not crazy. I spend alot of time thinking the same thoughts. On a historical note, when I bought my '51 Hudson I found a letter from 1958 in it. The letter was from a lawyer stating the person, I am assuming who owned the Hudson, owed $10,000 in medical bills and legal action was about to take place. Always wonder what this fellows life was all about. The letter is dated July 1958. The car also still had '58 Minnesota plates on it when I bought it in 2005. When I pressure washed the undercarriage I began to wonder what parts of the country this old Hudson had picked up the dirt in and why was it going there. I also found 1919 and 1929 pennies in my '29 Sedan when I turned in upside down to clean it out when I bought the body. I feel like some of the others that said they feel like they have missed out on some good history.
Yes the same goes for me, after a couple years now of being around cars, building my own and only being 19 i get that same old feelling all the time! Off the Mckenzie River in Eugene Oregon, Ive walked the bank and found a mile strectch of cars that were shovled into the river back in the 40's I was told. MAngled around tree roots and pinched between old concrete/blacktop from ripped up roads I get the same old feeling looking at them, wondering, wanting to take them all back out, of which is not possible but I did get a 37/38 plymouth front fender! The feeling that has been discussed has gotten bigger and bigger over time and after selling my first build awhile back, Im on the hunt, The hunt to fill that feeling I get when looking at pictures or in a junkyard, or a river bank. Choosing the car where that feeling is at its finest is where its hard, and thats where im trying to decide on a 38' pontiac coupe now..........Trying to fill that old feeling.....
It has been several years ago now that I went hunting for hot rod fodder with an old friend. he had a line on a bank that an old farmer had used old car bodies to stabilize. Fella said if we could pull something out of there worth having we could certainly have it. Talk about an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, Of what I would recognize there was a zephyr coupe, a chord and at least 2 deuces. A 55 for Victoria that from what was left of the paint was the same color as out first race car. almost nothing salvageable. Then all at once my buddy says hey look at this. A model A cowl still had factory paint on it and in near perfect condition for lieing on the bank since the '50s at the very least (the 55 was the newest body there). I walked over just below where he was standing him and he picked it up and handed it to me. We went home victorious, found probably the only piece of salvageable metal on the heap. he eventually built an A roadster pickup from it and traded it for a '40 coupe, his dream car.
Boy.. you guys really hit it on the head. I started getting this feeling in high school and got into refinishing antique furniture. Every piece has a story. Then on to antique tractors. Now old cars and especially old trucks. Anything old that I can bring back to life gives me a lot of pleasure and just thinking about the history behind each piece is a feeling I too cannot describe. Just recently I got a hold of a neon clock from the 40's that hung in a old bank for years. Just thinking about all the people who looked at it every day is mind blowing. Another thing is old gas stations, They really fasinate me. A couple close to me have been vacant for years. Truley not just nostalgia.
Are you my long lost brother, you took the words right out of my mouth, I am just looking at an original 47 Ford coupe that I sold and is going to Australia, never to be seen in this area again. Larry
Like another member says in his signature line....longing for the day when America was great, when the chrome was thick and the women were straight. That was before the American dream for our children and grandchildren was given away.
You speak for a lot of us, and glad you did...I was fortunate enough to have been a part of the 50s and 60s, so the remnants of these cars speak memories to me, can't stop staring at them and thinking of the time when they were built and raced... ...and old air bases? Me too!! Wandered around Craig AFB near Selma, Al, you could almost hear the ghosts of the past, the Presidio in San Francisco, toured it with my daughter, we both felt the same thing, the past is very close by....Crissy Field, where some of the first military planes landed, hardly recognizable any more but it's still there.... ...and old drag strips, even from Google Earth, you can still sometimes see the outlines (Lions, San Fernando, Colton --- Google Earth "Sam Snead Golf Course, Colton, CA, and it was right above it)....walk the ground and you can still sometimes think you smell the nitro and tire smoke....
Well, my car days started by admiring the cars G.I.'s had on the base my dad was stationed. Mostly muscle cars, but a few hot rods tossed in. I always gravitated towards the older cars. My buddies thought I was kinda odd to admire an old '55, when a new ('69) Camaro Z-28 was parked next to it. The older cars just had "class". They have a story to tell and if you try, you can hear it. In todays world of Malibus that look like Toyotas, an old car cruising down the road is a treat for the eyes and ears. It's not nostalgia.... it's respect.
I sit and look through the windshield of my as yet unfinished '40 Chev and muse about what the world was like when this car was new. The second world war had not yet erupted, there were no flourescent lights yet, no television. What did the original owner wear? What music did he hear when he turned on the radio, big band swing by Goodman, Miller, Basie, the Dorseys, etc.? How much did gas cost, where did he go shopping?- megamalls were still decades away. Where did he live?- houses and apartments were much smaller and more austere. The world was a much smaller place, instant worldwide communication did not exist, air travel was in its infancy, to cross the ocean you took a ship. Architecture was beautiful and gaudy, travel by car took days because the road system was minimal, no freeways yet. Photography was black and white, milk was delivered in glass quart bottles, professional sports were played with sportsmanship, very few things were made of plastic, etc, etc, etc... Old buildings, machines, musical instruments, various other old objects have the same effect on me. I'm glad.
Funny that I see this thread, just yesterday an old hay shed got torn down . First thing that popped in my head was the thought of all the people through the years that have worked the fields around our place. I felt sort of a sinking feeling seeing this.
GOOD GRIEF!!!! Three pages in a matter of hours in its first day...what a bunch of candy-ass, sensitive, wuss-like, girly men. Feelings, Thoughts, Tears, Nostalgia? Geeeeezzz.... Oh crap I just contributed, and I soooooo have this un-explainable, un-curable, yet completely fulfilling disease. So count me in Brother Tommy. I would be lost without the part of me that loves old cars, and long for the automotive romance of hot rodding in days long gone.....Damn I need to go do something manly...LOL Hope to meet you Tommy, and boy do we have a tiny little old wrecking yard in our neck of the woods, I will have to tell ya where it is when ya get to the area, for a nostalgia fix.
So true. Though I did not grow up in those eras we so much admire and respect, both my parents did. Not everything was all peaches and cream back then as some have wrote about on this thread, but alot of people, not all, took pride in their work, family and possessions....it wasn't that mentality of "oh, I'll just go out and buy (put on credit) another one" or letting their kids run about wild in a store, workplace etc. and not doing a damn thing about it. My wife and I try our damndest to instill the values our parents taught us to our children. It's a tough battle, but I hope someday they will get it (they are still young) I enjoy talking and most of all listening to some of my good customers that grew up in those times tell me about their lives. Just this month, one of my customers came in to have his car worked on holding something in his hand. Many did not know what it was. When someone asked him if it fell off his car, he said "oh no, he'll know what this is (pointing at me). He handed me an old 1/4" Blue Point carburetor adjusting tool I offered to buy it from him, to which he refused. He was just happy to see it would be put to use again. I love old vehicles, buildings, furniture, toys, music....the list goes on. To see, hear and feel these things usually brings a smile to my face. I just can not see these new cars, furniture, electronics, toys.....being around 50+ years. Many things nowadays seem so disposable.....it's sad really
That died in the 70's I'd say. So right about cars being mostly boring. Recently I looked at the colors offered on a certain make and they had black, white, dark blue and about four different shades of gray. Where are the brilliant colors? Something that sets the jellybeans apart? Whoever is deciding what we want out of Detroit (and elsewhere) needs to be bitch slapped.
Not to go on a tangent but I think the vast majority of the members on this board have a part of our life styles disciplines and behavior that's rooted in the past. It's our gear head gene that manifests this appreciation for the past in building traditional cars. Just my .02
It's not just nostalgia or remembering the glory days of the past, my wife says it's my passion. What ever the feeling is it runs deep in this crowd.
What most would call a rusted out piece of junk, people like us view it as a living, breathing piece of history. It would be my dream to stumble across a old car abandoned in the woods. If cars could talk, there is no telling how many amazing stories you would hear at a junkyard. That's just my two cents.
Threads like this one are exactly why I waste so much of my life on the HAMB. It is the only place I have found that understands this feeling, and the eloquence with which it is expressed shows me that I share a common bond with so many people I will never meet face-to-face. For that reason alone I would like to thank TommyR for starting it. The best I can do to contribute to it is to quote myself from another post a couple of years back. I know exactly what you mean man,but for me it's the whole nine yards,the cars,clothes,chicks,music,furniture,architecture and the complete absence of gangsta rap,gangsta-billies and rat kulture.That period in time still exists in glorious black & white and technicolor, in a place in my head I call Finksville, along with a liberal sprinkling of neon, sleaze, and by todays standards, mild delinquency where the '50's ends in '63.My friends and I try to emulate it in our everyday lives, much to the confusion of all the grey people in their soulless silver car,sleepwalking through this soulless,grey rodent race modern day existence seems to have become. I spend as much time in Finksville as possible. No poodle skirts allowed. Paul thanks again Tommy.
Man, You guys are going all soft on me Seriously, I understand completely. Every time I ride past an old abandoned farm I think, this was once filled with someones dreams and aspirations. Same when I see an old car or truck wasting away in a field. It always reminds me that once upon a time that vehicle was brand new, shiny, and fresh from the dealer's lot. Let me stop before I get too sappy and you guys label me a " kupcake".....Don.
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