Motoring Down Memory Lane

Pulled from a back shelf in the garage, the box was unexpectedly heavy, as if it were full of record albums or yet another two years’ worth of American Heritage magazines saved from the years when they were hardcover. It was a square box, just small enough to get your arms around, covered in green characters, maybe Chinese, and a sticky film of dirt.

Even before it was opened, it smelled of garage--that ageless amalgamation of gasoline, 3-In-One oil, ancient grass cuttings, moist concrete and the tarry spice of hot roof shingles. The cardboard was so old, one of the top flaps crumbled the moment it was touched.

Inside lay the mementos of a 70-year love affair, the hoarded proof of my father-in-law’s lifelong passion for cars.

Everyone knew Dick Stayton loved cars. Even after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six years ago, even as he struggled to recognize his young grandchildren, even during the last wandering months before his death in November, Dick could recite in detail the laudable features of every car he owned, and many that he did not.

For years, it was one of the few bridges between him and his son, Richard. When words failed, as they often did, the two could reminisce about the old Nash Rambler, or the Chevy station wagon that carried the family from Lakewood back to Indiana for countless summers.

But no one was quite prepared to find such physical proof of decades of fascination and longing. Showroom catalogs and descriptive booklets, stacks of them, from the late 1920s through the ‘60s, all touting new models, new lines, new technological breakthroughs by Ford and Hudson, Studebaker and Cadillac, Chrysler and La Salle, and others long defunct--Auburn, Essex, Stutz, Reo, Marmo.

In the box were two photo albums, covers tattered and unhinged, marked in black felt pen: “AUTOS.” Inside on page after brittle black page were pictures of automobiles clipped from the newspaper, yellowed to amber but otherwise perfect.

Cheesecake shots of car after car after car, organized by place of manufacture--Detroit, Flint, Auburn--some with prices inked into the margin of the photo. The most expensive is a little more than a grand.

On the front inside page of that album is a red ribbon: second place in Hobby Fair, 1929. Dick would have been 12, maybe 13; 1927 is the earliest of the dates on the hundreds of brochures in the box. In the other album are pencil sketches, good ones, of cars he had seen or imagined.

Born and raised in Indianapolis, he was crazy about cars from the time he was old enough to be crazy about anything. Hoosier pride was born in part of the burgeoning automotive industry--when Dick was a boy, Indiana rivaled Michigan and natives referred to Indianapolis as the “hub of the nation,” the place where all roads converged.

Dick’s father worked at the nearby Ford plant until illness forced a very early retirement. Every year, Dick and his two brothers waited longingly for the week of the Indy 500, when cars of all sorts filled the still-small city. Not just race cars, but the new models, the limited editions.

These weren’t just any cars; they were the cars of the future, the cars of a little boy’s dreams. The city gleamed with them, sang with them.

For my husband, now a father himself, the painstaking lettering in the albums, the spacing of the neatly trimmed pictures, conjured an odd sense of paternal pride--he could appreciate how much effort it took a young boy to accomplish such a thing, how much time and attention.

And the sheer volume of the catalogs, the years they spanned, made tangible to him the roots and endurance of his father’s obsession. Richard had just given him a picture of our two children in a frame that included a model of a 1920s sedan; it still sits on the shelf in front of Dick’s arm chair, right where he could see it every day.

But the box also made my husband sad. Looking through the booklets, it is easy to hear the same siren song Dick heard. The pamphlets, some the size of magazines, are gorgeous. On thick, often textured stock, the pictures of the cars are mouth-wateringly lovely.

In the days before color photography, the creative teams wisely went with drawings, evocative portraits that seem like something out of a fairy tale. The lines are clear and graceful and the colors gleam--emerald and garnet and deepest sapphire.

Stately sedans and sporty roadsters captured in scenes of idyll and adventure--in front of mansions and castles, cresting sylvan green hills and zipping along neatly busy streets. The people driving and awaiting the cars are all imperially slim in furs and fine suits, glamorous in stance and frozen gesture. Even the typefaces are pleasing and perfect--Art Deco and Bodoni and Roman Oversized.

The lure is as simple and tantalizing as a gingerbread house: Who would not want to be in such a setting, who would not want such freedom, such sophistication? Who would not want to own such a magnificent thing as a coupe or a touring car, when clearly it is a portal to another sort of life, a realm of daydreamed magic and satisfied desire?

When Dick’s father succumbed to Parkinson’s, when he became too ill to work or to really parent, life changed for the family, especially for Dick, the youngest of three boys. Even before the Depression hit, there was no money and little time to nurture the talent that is obvious in his sketches; any plans for college were set aside.

Dick worked for years as a waiter at the Lincoln Hotel in Indianapolis; eventually he opened a Gamble’s mercantile in Linton, Ind., and became the first purveyor of television sets in town.

For years, this new-fangled contraption satisfied his engineering urge. The Stayton house was inevitably full of broken and misfiring sets for Dick to work on.

He owned only one new car in his life--the Nash Rambler. The others he bought used, because he knew a used car was a better bargain. He never owned a car fancier than a Chevrolet Caprice, which he still spoke of years after he could no longer drive it.

“I always wonder what he would have been like if things had been different,” Richard says now. “If he had had a chance to do whatever he wanted.”

Sifting through the contents of the box, one can see the country change as well, and the American dream shift--the lithe glamour of the 1920s and ‘30s gives way to a more sensible imagination in the ‘50s and ‘60s--the women no longer draped in silk and furs, the men in their brown suits and fedoras more junior executive than gentry.

Now there are photographs of the engines and more detailed information; clearly, the buyers have become more educated about the innards of the auto.

One booklet from Ford offers the Ford-a-Scope, 3-D glasses through which the various glories of the V-6 rise from the page in a pinkish haze. The fairy tale has become more suburban and soon will give way to the sleek, sexualized photography of the modern print ad, the pulse-racing television commercial.

Where before we longed for grace and beauty, for the picturesque, now we strive for speed and power, for mechanical muscle that does exactly what we bid.

For Dick, as for many, the summation of the American dream was to bring his family to California. The reason he gave his reluctant wife and her irate family 40 years ago was the education system. In California, he reasoned, he could send his son and two daughters to college. Which he did. But looking at that box, it’s hard not to think that the real reason Dick came to California was the cars.

The Depression wiped out many of the car manufacturers in Indiana; although the state is dotted with automotive museums and a few manufacturers, it never regained its status.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles was becoming a city built just for cars, California the state of the endless freeway. Dick never took his family on a vacation that did not involve driving, often great distances.

It’s as if Dick’s love of cars became too big for Indiana. He needed to be in a place where people understand that a car is more than just a means of transportation, it’s a symbol of dreams.

Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.