Schwingin’, mufuggiz.

Why don’t cars have hood ornaments anymore?
Safety, aerodynamics, and style all played a factor

LACK of style, more like. Truth to tell, the reason cars don’t have hood ornaments anymore is because, in the final analysis, nondescript modern-day plastic eggmobiles don’t deserve ‘em. Anyways. Onwards.

Hood ornaments started as a disguise for homely radiator caps more than a century ago. Once upon a time, radiator caps were featured on the outside of the car so drivers could keep an eye on the coolant water vapor temperature. Those caps weren’t particularly fetching as a design feature, so automakers started getting creative by adding “car mascots.”

Early cars were not equipped with coolant temperature gauges. One enterprising company created the Moto-Meter, a temperature gauge mounted on the radiator. As manufacturers began to incorporate coolant temperature gauges, the Moto-Meter disappeared, but the hood ornament remained for some brands. 

Today, only a few high-end manufacturers still offer these gorgeous hood jewelry, like Rolls-Royce and Bentley. What happened to these mobile works of art?

The Safety Nazis got ‘em, like most everything else in American life that had class, style, and a certain je ne sais quoi about ‘em. But like I said, ya want a hood ornament, here’s ya a gottdamn hood ornament, bub.

That there chrome spear is from Christiana’s old 56 Fairlane Town Sedan*, which she lovingly called “Lainie,” for reasons which should be obvious.

* NOMENCLATURE NOTE: For the non-Ford-geeks out there, if any: Town Sedan=4-door, Club Sedan=2-door—or, as my old 54-55-56-Ford guru and mentor Don Stickler liked to say of the Town Sedans, you can always tell ‘em when you see ‘em because they had, and I quote, “too many doors.” Pic of mine and C’s beloved rides parked up side by side and nose to tail at the Diamond:

Photo snapped not long after I’d sold my 56 (at left) to a CFD-firefighter pal of mine, Chuckie Inman’s older brother, who yanked the grill (beat all to hell and gone, rusty AF to boot) and hood (which was the wrong damned one, from an earlier model of unknown provenance, so never really fit right anyhow) off altogether and mounted dual-quad Holly carbs atop an Edelbrock manifold because hey, why not? He’s incorrigible like that.

My beautymous Fairlane Club ran the grand old 292 Y Block mill, whereas Christiana’s had a nice little 289 tucked in betwixt the fender walls—a very common, easy-peasy mod with these cars (you don’t even need to change the motor mounts; just find yourself a Pony-car engine somewhere, drop ‘er into the bay, and bolt ‘er right up). Somebody had caught wise to that little swaperoo long before the black Townie had become the apple of my late wife’s eye. How we got her old Ford down from NYC is a heck of a story in its own right, gotta remember to tell youse guys all about it here someday.

Bought my 56 off a guy just across the Alabama line from Jawja—the very first exit, IIRC—who had been Pro-Street drag racing it; when I went to check the sled out, ol’ boy had to remove the fuel cell from the trunk and re-install the boring old stock gas tank while I sat on a tree stump outside his backyard garage/shop and waited, the agreed-upon purchase price of all of 2 grand cash money burning a hole in my pocket the whole time.

Once the fuel-storage issue was resolved I jumped behind the wheel, fired her up, and cruised that classy old girl all the way back to CLT (what, five hours? Six, maybe?) with nary a single hiccup the entire trip. She ran like a sewing machine ever afterwards, nary a smidgeon of trouble did she ever give me.

Well, excepting the time one of the control-arms tore loose from the rusted-out front crossmember and drove itself several inches into the soft, muddy ground at the Harley shop, et-up crossmembers being another well known and all too common fact of 56 Fairlane life. This was due to a piss-poor factory design that had the radiator-overflow outlet pissing directly down onto said crossmember and then just sitting there in a puddle, gnawing away at the metal.

Me and my friend Calvin dealt with that minor nuisance using some square stock culled from the H-D shop scrap-metal pile. We cut said scrap-steel down and welded it into a reasonable facsimile thereof; painted our handiwork in multiple coats of rattlecan Krylon black; and finally welded the whole sordid mess to the frame using Mark 1-Mod 0 eyeball measurements.

Which improvisational scrounging/fabrication/installation project, I freely admit, was not just one hundred percent straight and/or perfectly aligned when we were done. The car kinda crabbed down the road, like a small plane trying to land in a strong crosswind does. Not that it bothered my jerry-riggin’ ass none; I assure you I was NOT dissuaded in the slightest, and happily drove the auty-mobile for many more years having to rassle that huge steering wheel to and fro all the while so as to keep it between the ditches. Of course, I bolted up a custom Bettie Page suicide-knob of my own devising to help out, which I wound up getting a lot of use out of.

You know what Mike’s Iron Law #187 says, folks: whatever the headache, issue, or obstacle may be, there’s ALWAYS a workaround, and any real, true-blue American is ALWAYS gonna find it. Far as I’m concerned, that can-do, never say die spirit is a huuuuge part of what made America great to begin with.

(Original article via Insty)

Update! Seeing as how I’m sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing much tonight, might as well tell the gripping tale of how Christiana’s Lainie made her way down to her new NC home after we got hitched and set up housekeeping together.

Lainie’s prior residence was out in Old Tappan, NJ, in the attached one-space garage of my mother-in-law Xenia’s palatial abode there. Before Christiana acquired her, some previous owner had reupholstered the interior, re-carpeted her, did the engine-swap or had it done, replaced the suspect crossmember and re-routed the radiator overflow outlet, and had the car painted. All in all, though the paint had lost its luster and faded down to almost a matte black, she ran and drove just fine. Every other week C would go out and visit her mom, take the Fairlane out and tool around a bit, wash it, etc. There was a trustworthy auto-repair shop a few blocks away where she’d take the car for regular oil changes and such-like maintenance.

When we got married, the question arose of how we were gonna bring Lainie down to live with us. Although I offered, driving a 1956 Ford twelve (12) hours to Charlotte from NJ was simply out of the question. Christiana did some checking around and found a local auto-transport outfit who would ship the car to their Pineville facility at a not-quite-ghastly rate, whereupon we could come pick it up at our leisure and drive her to her/our new home.

Which is what we did. Somehow, though, once we’d gotten Lainie into the roomy two-car garage at our house, she seemed to fall into something of a snit, stubbornly refusing to start even though she’d made it home just fine from Pineville only a cpl-three weeks before. It was a mystery; after taking several stabs at trying to see what was up, I finally threw my hands up in disgust and walked away.

To this day I still feel guilty about that; Christiana never stopped imploring me to please, please, pretty please get her Fairlane back up and running again, but what with one thing and another—working at the Harley shop, touring with the band, mowing the damned lawn, etc etc etc I never made time to walk downstairs to the garage and just do it.

And then she was gone from me, her beloved Ford still stone-dead out in the damned garage while I sat upstairs doing my utmost to drink myself to death so I might rejoin the love of my life wherever her spirit may have fled before it was too late.

It still haunts me. I would sit at the bar in Snug Harbor and weep loudly and inconsolably, slamming drink after drink, my friends Ned and Jason on either side of me, their arms wrapped tight around me trying to protect me from myself as best they could. They were de facto bodyguards; on the not-infrequent occasions that some unknowing bar patron would ask just what the hell was wrong with me anyway, Ned and Jase would run them off immediately with a no-nonsense snarl, leaving no room for error in anybody’s mind.

The pain of losing Christiana, stupendous as it already was, was compounded by the anguish of knowing that the one thing my beautiful wife had ever asked me to do for her I had foolishly not done. I had let this wonderful woman down for no good reason; I knew I had, and it was too late now to make it up to her. To this very day I still have nightmares about it.

I couldn’t bring myself to ride my prized 06 Sportster anymore; I no longer gave a tinker’s damn about any of the things that had always made life worth living. I could hardly even go into the garage at all; Her Car was in there, and I hadn’t the intestinal fortitude to so much as look at poor Lainie now.

Until one balmy, mid-summer Friday afternoon, my dear friend Joe Lemyre piloted his own Harley Big Twin down from Boone, got all up in my grill, and snapped me the fuck out of it.

First off, Joe informed me in no uncertain terms that tonight I WOULD swing a leg over the Sporty and go riding with him, if only a short putt through the neighborhood. After we’d done that, got back to my place, and un-assed our respective scoots, he laid holt of my wrist with a grizzly-bear grip, dragged me over to dusty, slack-tired, cobwebbed-over Lainie and told me that tomorrow, come Hell or high water, we WOULD turn to, get cracking, and put her back on the road again. No matter what it took, how long it took, or how much it cost, it by God WOULD get done.

And damned if we didn’t do it. Took several months of wrenching, replacing worn-out or broken parts, draining the tank and replacing the smelly near-varnish with fresh gas. We installed new plugs, plug wires, and a Mallory electronic distributor. We borrowed a brand-spanking-new, high-buck Quicksilver 4-barrel from a friend and took the battered, clogged Motorcraft one-lunger off, wrapped it in red shop rags, and shoved it to the back of my workbench to await further developments. We Windexed the filmed-over glass; we wiped down the vinyl seats; we re-inflated the sagging tires to spec.

When we finally did coax Lainie into coughing, farting, sputtering life again at last, the cheers, shouts, and raucous laughter which erupted from the five or six of us in the garage that night rang in my ears no less gloriously than the sound of choirs of angels singing. As she gradually settled down to a smooth, loping idle there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen, nothing but happy smiles on every grease-smudged face.

And that’s another thing I will never, ever forget.

Yeah, any yay-hoo wants to tell me that internal combustion engines don’t have souls is gonna have to go peddle that horseshit someplace else, sorry. Ain’t no market for it here.