Speaker 1: A few months ago, which, let's face it might as
Speaker 1: well be ten years ago. I went out on the
Speaker 1: road to promote my Mobituaries book. The names I was
Speaker 1: asked most about famous first brother Billy Carter, screen legend,
Speaker 1: Audrey Hepburn, and the original Siamese twins Chang and Hang.
Speaker 1: I'm imagining a wacky road trip with the four of them. Now,
Speaker 1: if in some parallel universe they were to take a
Speaker 1: road trip, I would hope they'd take it in the
Speaker 1: vehicle that was once synonymous with family fund and adventure.
Speaker 1: Please enjoy this mobid for the station Wagon, which I
Speaker 1: recorded for the audiobook version of the Mobituaries book, and
Speaker 1: please enjoy the bonus on the back end of this bonus,
Speaker 1: Death of a Leviathan the station Wagon to two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: My family had a station Wagon for a couple of
Speaker 1: years in the early nineteen seventies, but I was only
Speaker 1: three or four at the time, so I can barely
Speaker 1: remember it. It was yellow, I think, or maybe it
Speaker 1: was cream colored. Was it a Chevy? What I do
Speaker 1: know is that one afternoon my mother put my brother
Speaker 1: in the back seat after a doctor's appointment, and the
Speaker 1: car started rolling backward in the parking lot allah Angie
Speaker 1: Dickinson and policewoman my mother had to jump into the
Speaker 1: front seat and pull the emergency brake. This was reason
Speaker 1: enough for my father to trade in the station wagon
Speaker 1: for an Impoli sdan soon after, and just like that,
Speaker 1: the one thing that made us like TV's Brady Family,
Speaker 1: and who were more all American than the Bradies, was gone.
Speaker 1: For a few decades. From the mid fifties to the
Speaker 1: mid eighties, station wagons like the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, the
Speaker 1: Chrysler Town and Country, and the Ford Country Squire were
Speaker 1: as central to the American dream as the white picket
Speaker 1: fence and the basketball hoop in the driveway. These were
Speaker 1: the quintessential family cars. If y I the Bradies had
Speaker 1: at least two different station wagons, both of them Plymouth Satellites,
Speaker 1: and the bigger the wagon, the cooler the family. By
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, the Ford Country Squire was a nearly
Speaker 1: nineteen ft long behemoth and got a whopping eight to
Speaker 1: ten miles to the gallon. You could cram four or
Speaker 1: five kids into the back seat. But that's not where
Speaker 1: I wanted to be anytime I was lucky enough to
Speaker 1: ride in one, and I'm sure I befriended some kids
Speaker 1: because their families had station wagons. I headed straight for
Speaker 1: the way back with the seats folded down. The freedom,
Speaker 1: the danger. I loved being thrown against the side when
Speaker 1: the car turned, all the better when other kids were
Speaker 1: back there, all of us ricocheting off each other after
Speaker 1: a pizza party at Shakey's. Riding in the way back
Speaker 1: gave me the same out of control thrill I got
Speaker 1: from roller coasters. Related thought, I used to fantasize about
Speaker 1: climbing into the dryer so I could just spin and spin.
Speaker 1: It's probably a good thing I didn't figure out how
Speaker 1: to turn the dryer on from the inside. What gave
Speaker 1: these cars an extra flare was the vinyl applicate wood
Speaker 1: grain paneling. It made it feel like a house on wheels.
Speaker 1: The paneling was a throwback to the earliest station wagons,
Speaker 1: which were made mostly of wood. These wagons were d
Speaker 1: i y affairs. The customer would buy the chassis of
Speaker 1: say a Model T, then ordered the wood body from
Speaker 1: a coach builder or hire a carpenter to make it
Speaker 1: and bolt it on. It was just much lighter and
Speaker 1: easier to build the body out of wood, says my
Speaker 1: friend Matt Anderson, curator of Transportation at the Henry Ford Museum.
Speaker 1: The technology just didn't exist at that time to build
Speaker 1: a large body out of steel. By the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: these vehicles and any where beauties were known as woodies.
Speaker 1: The earliest station wagons were used on farms or as
Speaker 1: delivery vehicles and to transport passengers between railroad stations and hotels.
Speaker 1: That's how the vehicle got the name station wagon. This
Speaker 1: is the kind of factoid I love. By the time
Speaker 1: the baby boom hit, the station wagon had caught on
Speaker 1: with families. The first real modern station wagon is Plymouth Suburban,
Speaker 1: says Matt. It's got an all steel body. The name
Speaker 1: itself tells you how that vehicle was marketed. The rise
Speaker 1: of the suburbs was a big factor in the adoption
Speaker 1: of the station wagon. Now, it's true that station wagons
Speaker 1: were an absolute nightmare for any teenager learning to parallel park.
Speaker 1: They were larger than the standard parking space, the site
Speaker 1: lines were miserable, and I'm pretty sure that rear defrosters
Speaker 1: hadn't been invented yet. And of course they were dangerous.
Speaker 1: The way back was a death chamber. Are the more
Speaker 1: safety conscious. There was a rear facing fold up seat,
Speaker 1: introduced by Chrystler in seven. It had seatbelts, not that
Speaker 1: you could ever find them. It also had the benefit
Speaker 1: that someone sitting back there could call out whenever luggage
Speaker 1: strapped to the roof rack came free and tumbled out
Speaker 1: onto the highway. By the early nineteen eighties, the family
Speaker 1: station Wagon was already beginning to acquire value as kitch.
Speaker 1: We know this for a fact because in nine Warner
Speaker 1: Brothers released Harold Ramos's National Lampoon's Vacation. The true star
Speaker 1: of that movie is not the bumbling Chevy Chase but
Speaker 1: the wagon Queen Family Truckster, an enormous hearst like vehicle
Speaker 1: that is gradually gutted over the course of the film
Speaker 1: due to a combination of vandalism and incompetent driving. But
Speaker 1: as the movie Vacation was celebrating the station Wagon, its
Speaker 1: demise was looming. There were warning signs. The oil crisis
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy three made fuel efficiency a priority for consumers.
Speaker 1: The ingenuity of Japanese engineering was making it harder and
Speaker 1: harder to stay loyal to American cars that handled poorly
Speaker 1: and seemed in constant need of repair. Then came what
Speaker 1: car journalist Amos Kwan has called the testosterone robbing minivan,
Speaker 1: which Leaya Coca introduced to Chrysler in with better fuel economy,
Speaker 1: more headroom, and best of all, a sliding side door.
Speaker 1: The minivan was a hit among practical minded car pooling
Speaker 1: soccer moms. Mandatory car seats rang the death knell of
Speaker 1: the way back. The station wagon belonged to the golden
Speaker 1: age of the highway, the new system of interstates built
Speaker 1: by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Up through the eighties, that highway
Speaker 1: system represented nothing less than freedom itself, flight from dreary
Speaker 1: routines of city and suburb, access to all our nation's
Speaker 1: great beauty and natural attractions. But then, with traffic and
Speaker 1: suburban sprawl getting worse and worse, those endless highways were
Speaker 1: no longer our means of escape. They became another part
Speaker 1: of what we needed to escape from. And so after
Speaker 1: the minivan, we fell in love with the four wheel
Speaker 1: drive suv, the kind that, at least in the commercials,
Speaker 1: could drive right over a guardrail, plow through a rocky
Speaker 1: river bed and scale a craggy mountain at forty five degrees.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was the renewed nuclear fears of the eighties,
Speaker 1: or just a vague sense of looming catastrophe, but suddenly
Speaker 1: we all needed military grade vehicles of our own, something
Speaker 1: that could get traction on a glacier and stand up
Speaker 1: to machine gun fire if needed when the next blizzard, hurricane,
Speaker 1: or wildfire hit. Local and state authorities weren't going to
Speaker 1: save us. In two thousand eleven, Volvo announced that it
Speaker 1: would stop selling station wagons in the United States. Sales
Speaker 1: had dropped from forty to four hundred and eighty in
Speaker 1: two thousand ten. Auto buffs immediately began to mourn its
Speaker 1: path sing, But the truth is that by two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: the station wagon was already long dead. The Volvo wagon
Speaker 1: of the nineties was no more a real station wagon
Speaker 1: than a barn swallow was a real dinosaur. At best,
Speaker 1: it was a stunted descendant of the magnificent monsters that
Speaker 1: roamed American highways during the late Cretaceous period of American
Speaker 1: automotive history. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of
Speaker 1: auto safety. A boy. If someone gave me the keys
Speaker 1: to a nineteen seventy nine Ford Country Squire, I'd be
Speaker 1: sorely tempted to take a week off and ride that
Speaker 1: beast to the Grand Canyon, and other things from the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies that could have killed us McDonald's collectible drinking glasses.
Speaker 1: Ronald McDonald has been the mascot of McDonald's ever since
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, when he was first played in TV
Speaker 1: ads by future Today weatherman Willard Scott. In nine seventy,
Speaker 1: a lonely Ronald was joined by the hamburglar officer Big
Speaker 1: Back and the milkshake loving Grimace in McDonald Land, a
Speaker 1: spectacularly imaginative concoction of ad agency Needum, Harper and Steers,
Speaker 1: which seemed awfully similar to the then popular kids TV
Speaker 1: show hr Puffin Stuff. Google the images of Mary mc
Speaker 1: cheese and hr Puffin Stuff himself and you'll see what
Speaker 1: I mean. The courts agreed and ordered McDonald's to pay
Speaker 1: one million dollars to the show's producers, Small Fries. Given
Speaker 1: that the ad campaign had been so successful, the McDonald
Speaker 1: land characters became inescapable as a line of plastic action figures,
Speaker 1: a complete set of which goes for about six dollars
Speaker 1: on eBay and as collectible drinking glasses, each one brightly
Speaker 1: painted with a different character. It's a safe bet that
Speaker 1: a good half of the liquid I consumed growing up
Speaker 1: was via those glasses. But it turns out the glasses
Speaker 1: themselves weren't so safe. In July, the paint used on
Speaker 1: the exterior was discovered to contain led content up to
Speaker 1: eighteen times the legal limit. Although the company that manufactured
Speaker 1: the glasses, Owen's Illinois of Toledo, Ohio, declared that the
Speaker 1: glasses in no way present a health hazard, regulatory agencies
Speaker 1: weren't loving it. By that point, McDonald's had given away
Speaker 1: as many as sixty million of these i Q killers
Speaker 1: in various promotions over five years. Under pressure from the
Speaker 1: Food and Drug Administration, they agreed to cease distribution. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: my family missed the memo, and the glasses remained and
Speaker 1: now were covered up until about three years ago, by
Speaker 1: which point the images had faded to not much more
Speaker 1: than outlines. My mother's response, but the painting was on
Speaker 1: the outside. PS. Let's all raise a non lead painted
Speaker 1: glass to Willard Scott in the hopes that he lives
Speaker 1: to announce his own hundredth birthday Quayludes. The pilot episode
Speaker 1: of The Brady Bunch, just before they're married, Mike confesses
Speaker 1: to Carol that he has a case of nerves. Why
Speaker 1: don't you take a tranquilizer, asks Carol. I took one,
Speaker 1: says Mike. Well maybe you should take another one, says Carol.
Speaker 1: Nothing doing, says America's dad. I want to be calm
Speaker 1: for the ceremony, but there's the honeymoon to consider. Look,
Speaker 1: I have no idea how much of the Brady Honeymoon
Speaker 1: was fueled by synthetic drugs, but the fact that the
Speaker 1: quintessential family show of the era was promoting double doses
Speaker 1: of tranquilizers makes you realize how mainstream these things were. Queludes,
Speaker 1: the brand name for methoon, began as an insomnia and
Speaker 1: anxiety treatment and soon became a recreational drug, easy to
Speaker 1: get from a doctor who didn't ask too many questions.
Speaker 1: It fast became a popular club drug, sometimes called a
Speaker 1: disco biscuit, Highly addictive, even lethal when taken in large
Speaker 1: doses or mixed with alcohol. Coludes were finally banned in
Speaker 1: the United States in a law in Apple A day
Speaker 1: keeps the doctor away, right, not if it's sprayed with demeanor'side.
Speaker 1: The plant growth regulator, manufactured from the sixties through the
Speaker 1: eighties by the Uni Royal Chemical Corporation and sold under
Speaker 1: the brand name A Laar A Laura was sprayed on
Speaker 1: apples and other fruits in order to keep them on
Speaker 1: the tree longer, aiding the ripening process and most important,
Speaker 1: cutting down on labor costs for big fruit producers. But
Speaker 1: evidence that a law causes cancer emerged during the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: and the proof was overwhelming. A federal band finally passed
Speaker 1: Congress in A laar is still found all over crossword puzzles.
Speaker 1: Shag carpeting Okay, I can't prove that shag garpeting huge
Speaker 1: in the free love era of the nine sixties and seventies,
Speaker 1: ever killed someone. But according to a two thousand one
Speaker 1: piece in the British newspaper The Telegraph, carpets function as
Speaker 1: toxic sponges, soaking in all kinds of pollutants that we
Speaker 1: track in from the outside. Now imagine the billions of
Speaker 1: hippie micro organisms teeming inside those deep plush piles of
Speaker 1: looped yarn that make up a shag carpet. Trillions of
Speaker 1: the shag carpeting was inside a van. I'm not a
Speaker 1: licensed to pediatrician, but I bet that encouraging a baby
Speaker 1: to roll around a shag carpet from the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: would build up all sorts of immunity. Jarts. Jarts, also
Speaker 1: called lawn darts or javelin darts, were weighted metal darts
Speaker 1: about a foot long that people used to toss around
Speaker 1: the backyard trying to get them to land inside a
Speaker 1: plastic ring. If you threw them high enough, they could
Speaker 1: really gather speed as they plummeted to earth. Kids loved
Speaker 1: charts until the government, citing several injuries and at least
Speaker 1: one death, tried to banned them in After pushback from
Speaker 1: several dangerous toy lobbying groups, the Consumer Product Safety Commission
Speaker 1: agreed to a compromise charts would be allowed only in
Speaker 1: sporting goods stores. Then, seven year old Michelle Snow was
Speaker 1: tragically killed by a misthrown chart. Her father, David campaigned
Speaker 1: tirelessly for an outright ban, and eventually the CPSC voted
Speaker 1: two to one to prohibit their sale. I got to
Speaker 1: wonder about that one no vote electric blankets. On a
Speaker 1: cold winter night. During the Carter administration, there was nothing
Speaker 1: like curling up under a soft, cozy blanket laced with
Speaker 1: thick electrical wiring. Before safety features like an automatic shutoff
Speaker 1: became mandatory in two thousand one. Exposed or damaged wiring
Speaker 1: made electric blankets a serious fire hazard. We got rid
Speaker 1: of the two we owned when my father started worrying
Speaker 1: we could be electrocuted. Even today, the American Pregnancy Association
Speaker 1: warns that the heat from an electric blanket can decrease
Speaker 1: a mail user's fertility. Fun fact. In the vintage sci
Speaker 1: fi invasion film The Thing from Another World, the monster
Speaker 1: is freed from the block of ice in which he
Speaker 1: is encased when an electric blanket is casually tossed aside,
Speaker 1: melting the creature's prison and loosening him upon the world.
Speaker 1: You Fee you fee spelled u f f I was
Speaker 1: a kind of expanding foam insulation sprayed into walls and
Speaker 1: crawl spaces. As a kid, I thought it looked kind
Speaker 1: of pretty like ready whip topping. The problem was that
Speaker 1: one of the f's in u F stands for formaldehyde, which,
Speaker 1: when sprayed into the air, poses a cancer risk. When
Speaker 1: you fee's use became a cause of concern, manufacturers protested
Speaker 1: that symptoms of exposure were limited to watery eyes, nasally irritation, wheezing, coughing, fatigue,
Speaker 1: red or blotchy skin, severe allergic reactions, burning sensations in
Speaker 1: the eyes and throat, nausea, difficulty breathing, headache, malaise, insomnia,
Speaker 1: and orexia. Loss of libido. I'm running out of room here.