Jetstar 88

As a preschooler, my parents, with my brother and sister and I, moved from Everett, Washington to Bellevue. Everett was a navy town with a shipyard where my grandfather worked as a welder during the war. There were truck farms, shake mills and gill-net boats in unkept yards of rundown homes, featuring old apple and peach trees and wild blackberries invading everything. It was unsophisticated, blue collar, as was most of post-war America. Getting to Bellevue required traveling the slow, winding Bothell Highway. This was not done casually. Bellevue was Seattle's fast developing eastside suburb, at a time when suburban living was a completely new concept.

Scattered among the tract homes, Bellevue still had forests and a few small farms that were ultimately surrendered to development. It was vibrant with change, and we were riding that hovercraft to the future. You could feel it. My father was a sales rep for a hydraulic components company. He was part of the male executive class, now long gone, that wore suits every day. They would occasionally meet after work in a dark bar with red felt wallpaper and red leather booths. His car had catalogs on the back seat describing mysterious freon couplings and braided hose. His new company car in 1964 was an Oldsmobile Jetstar 88, named with the same inspiration as my bike I describe in my first blog. The interior was red vinyl living room furniture. Our personal car was a 55 Chev Bel Air with three-on-the-tree, manual steering and manual brakes. It was not equipped with turn signals, an option my father deemed unnecessary. You had to crank the window open and stick your arm out to signal a turn. Often, you were braking and shifting while doing this, which kept you more than busy, especially if you were lighting up a Chesterfield at that moment. He was sensible however, ordering the car with dual exhaust.

The company car was new, my school was new, our house, the stores, roads and clothes were all new. Grandma didn't live down the street; aunts and uncles were hundreds of miles away. The original canary-yellow Boeing 707 test planes passed low overhead. We were a nuclear family in the dawning atomic age. We had Wonder Bread, Jiffy Pop, Spaghetti-O's, Velveeta and Cragmont Cola... in steel cans! In 1962 the Seattle World's Fair arrived, christened Century 21. The century ahead was shaping up to be amazing.

On occasion we'd stop and visit relatives in small rural towns in British Columbia or Eastern Washington. I was 11 years old, but I felt superior. My Great Grandparents lived in Prosser. It's all too easy to feel superior to people who live in a town named Prosser. I was on solid ground assuming they had not seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They listened to Ira Blue on the radio at night. They had a wood stove in the kitchen, wore orthopedic shoes, and owned a 1930's pickup with a worn-out brown leather seat. It appeared as though it was never painted and smelled strongly of grease. You no longer smell grease unless you're on a work barge, or around old construction machinery.

These were extended families settled in their towns for many generations. They farmed, did construction on the dams and highways, and worked for the railroad. With pictures on the mantle (Delbert in his uniform, just before shipping out to Korea), doilies on threadbare furniture, and religious enthusiasm, they gathered the clan for pot roast and boiled potatoes on Sunday at 4 o'clock. The table was set with mismatched tableware, my great-grandmother's dill pickles canned the previous fall, and corn, strawberries and rhubarb for pie from the garden. Our Uncle, sporting a tattoo acquired in the Philippines during his tour in the merchant marines, would sneak off for a drink. Everyone knew (knowing pretty much everything about everyone in town) but no one spoke of it. We always went there; they never seemed to travel, remaining, for better and worse, comfortably locked in an era existing 20 years before we arrived, with each visit repeating the previous ones. This world stood revealed to me in sepia tones. Exchanging warm goodbyes, we'd pull out of the hard-packed dirt worn into the lawn, under majestic oak trees, in our bright red tangible symbol of the jet age. The musty house with lace curtains, the chicken coop by the tool shed, the vegetable garden, would all recede in the rear window, contented as much as not, to remain settled in a past unchanging.

Fitzgerald wrote that "Gatsby believed in... ...the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther." And so it was, we drove off confidently, enthusiastically, toward Century 21 in our Jetstar 88, only to lose it somewhere in the grinding passage of time, along with our innocence, and far too much of our idealism.