With Toyota, General Motors and the Chrysler corporations dominating the news — not just who’s having trouble selling cars but who’s building them and how they’re building them — I thought once again it’s time to stumble down memory lane about automobiles.

For those of us young, blue collar males whose childhood was in the ’50s and ’60s, automobiles were the dominant force in our lives, along with rock and roll music, the Pittsburgh Pirates and 16-year-old girls that we knew we would never have (see last month’s Valentine’s Day column that said you’ll never get the cheerleader). As I’ve said before, the arrival of the new model automobiles in my young manhood was like the secrets of the atomic bomb — we knew they would be there but we weren’t sure what they looked like or how it would happen.

No one, repeat no one, drove a Japanese-made automobile. There’s an old throwaway line that held true in the ’50s and ’60s — “Those are the wonderful people that brought you Pearl Harbor.” And anything, repeat anything, made in Japan was cheap and probably was indirectly used to kill Marines on Saipan.

My father — and you can see (above) a picture of his car — always did two things: looked for the union label on anything he bought and didn’t allow foreign made products in the house.

One of the largest mistakes I made in my life was the third car I bought. It was a used Triumph TR3 sports car. I’ve written  before about working at the Edgewater steel mill on the outskirts of Verona, Pennsylvania. Pulling into the parking lot the first morning with the top down on my Triumph, all the mill hunkies came over and stared at me and said, “Hey boy, how many American workers did you put out of work buying that car?”

Now believe me, I love sports cars and still do, but other than a beat-up Volkswagen when I was in grad school, I’ve never bought another foreign car.

I really get a perverse pleasure watching the Japanese automobile industry take a dive. I know that’s not politically correct, but every time I see someone driving one of those I go back to the parking lot at Edgewater Steel and think to myself, “how many American men and women did you put out of work building that car?”

Now the Japanese build cars in America, as do other foreign-owned companies, but it’s only because the American Congress forced them to do so. But always remind yourself that any profit goes back to that home country.

Cars to us as kids meant one thing, actually two, freedom and sex. Don’t you think it’s fascinating that drive-in movies, a function of the automobile, have become a thing of the past? Don’t kid yourself; it isn’t because of Pay-Per-View movies that you can get at home.

I remember my favorite drive-in growing up was called the Hamarville Drive-In, home of the Hamar-Villains, the first authentic outlaw motorcycle club I ever came in contact with. We made jokes that the speakers didn’t work in the last four rows of the Hamarville Drive-In and no one noticed. On a soft summer night in the Hamarville Drive-In someone would say, “Listen, you can hear the crickets” and someone else would say “Man, those aren’t crickets, those are zippers.”

How about a show of hands of anyone over the age of 50 whose first sexual experience occurred at a drive-in? Ok, put your hands down. For me I can tell you the title of the movie. I saw the beginning of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I’ve never seen the end of that movie to this day. But it was the automobile that I thank for introducing me to one of the sweet mysteries of life.

So much for the rest of my driving experiences which included car crashes, DUIs, getting towed and impounded and every alcoholic’s most difficult questions on Sunday morning: “Where is my car?” and “Whose car did I bring home?” Or one of my favorites from my childhood, “What’s your uncle’s car doing on the lawn?”

Automobiles meant something…they had meaning. Today I have a Ford Hybrid. I’ve never liked a car this much but I really don’t love this car. The cars that I’ve loved seemingly are like the women I’ve loved — something’s always wrong with them and you can’t help yourself — you always want to get in and go.

So now my passion is motorcycles (see photo at left). For the uninitiated that is called a Boss Hoss — a Chevy V-8 automobile engine put on a motorcycle frame, which really is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Which leads me to ask this question: Who did shoot Liberty Valance?

Peter