Dad's Threat Delivered

We were a large family and until my parents decided to purchase a 1967 Chrysler Newport station wagon, a navy-blue monstrosity of Mopar engineering excellence that was seemingly a city block long, when all of us rode in 'the car' it was a tight fit.

I have a dim memory of a black and white (yes a two-tone car) Plymouth, I always assume Belvedere because it sounds right (I might have been four years old or younger when Dad had it) that was followed by a Desoto, as black as night with fins, and the 'famous' Chrysler push-button automatic transmission (more on that in a minute). Desoto was a division of Chrysler along with Plymouth and Dodge back when everything was made in this county, not well necessarily but here anyway.

The Desoto was replaced by a white Chrysler Newport sedan with a red interior that used to get as hot as the Hades its color scheme reminded us of, during the summer, with bench seats in the front and back. Mom and Dad and whoever was 'the baby' at the time in a car seat between them were in the front and all the rest of us were in the back. We'd get restless if not downright asinine and then one of us would look up and see Dad's green/gray eyes in the mirror, staring at us (we'd grab the arm of the brother/sister next to us until ALL of us were peering into the mirror).

Once he had our attention, Dad would slow down to an ominous crawl (= pedestrians, assuming any such could be permitted on the Parkway (and no they aren't), would outwalk the Kenny car) and looking at each of us via the mirror would warn in a low-throated growl, "do not make me pull this car over." It always worked-we corrected whatever miscreant behavior we had been guilty of and the Newport would rejoin the stream of traffic at something approaching light speed (the only way Dad knew how to drive) and we'd go back to making great time, even if we were lost.

There was a day, our brother, Kelly*, always the mechanically apted one of the klan, inadvertently discovered the Achilles Heel of the push-button transmission: pushing more than one button at the same time caused ALL of them to jump ship and land in a less than orderly pile beside and, to some extent, beneath the brake pedal. It also caused Dad's face to turn colors not found in nature. I should note that Kelly's aptitude may well have come from the Montgomery Ward catalog as Dad had no understanding of anything even vaguely mechanical (and that included every car he ever owned).

Obviously, our father did figure out how to resuscitate the famous push-button automatic transmission (possibly with Kelly's help; I would NOT be surprised if this were the case) and it wasn't that many more years until Chrysler opted to not continue to be famous and went to a more conventional on the tree location for the automatic transmission selector.

I thought of all of this when I came across this news nugget the other day and shared it with my brothers whom, I suspect, had 'in the car with Dad' memories they can probably be persuaded to share with little prompting (I just remembered Mom's Renault R-5 also had a push button automatic transmission with 'electric brushes' come to think of it. Talk about 'good times').

Nothing, of course, will ever top the story of the cuckoo clock, oh-so briefly on the wall of the sitting room in the last house in which our parents lived together and the clock's sudden and terrible end. If Pete Seeger could have seen the carnage, he'd have doubled down on the emphasis of 'danger' and paid more attention to manic marauding marsupials, but too soon old and too late smart.
-bill kenny

* The older of my younger brothers (you do the math) dropped me a note way early this morning to advise my recollection is faulty. It was not he who had reverse engineered the Chrysler push-button tranny.
I'll wait for the actual miscreant to self-identify and would encourage you to move along now as there's nothing to see here.