THE SADNESS OF A WORLD WITHOUT PONTIACS [7-27-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Curmudgeon—THE SADNESS OF A WORLD WITHOUT PONTIACS [7-27-26]

 

The main thing I hold against Ronald Reagan is the demise of the Pontiac automobile. Not directly, of course. He was four years dead when the last Pontiac came off the assembly line. But he was responsible for killing the Pontiac, the most important car of my life.

I hold many things against Reagan, even though I also have respect for him. He wasn’t a very good actor, and he wasn’t a very good president, but he was a good enough actor to act like a good president, and that’s really all that American voters require. I don’t think he was ill-intentioned. Like so many young people, he just got in with the wrong people. He wanted to be part of the “in crowd,” and the “in crowd” always makes you think you’re in, so that they can use you to their own ends. [1]

I first started riding in Pontiacs when we lived in Indianapolis, because Aunt Dorothy lived there, and she always drove Pontiacs. Whenever we got to go someplace neat, it was in Aunt Dorothy’s Pontiac. When it came time for me to take my driver’s license exam, after we had moved to the farm near Oakland City, my family had no car, so Aunt Dorothy took me in her Pontiac to get my license. When I started to college, it was Aunt Dorothy’s Pontiac that I went back to IU after weekends at home, as she drove back to Indianapolis after her weekend at home to care for her mother.

 

My high school friend, Mike Dickey, always drove Pontiacs, because his father was a Pontiac dealer. All through high school, all my double dates--which was most of my dates, since I did not have a car—were in a Pontiac.

Also, one of my main run-around friends in high school, Bob Keeton, always drove a Pontiac. I was best man at his wedding. I rode with his parents all the way from Oakland City, Indiana to Rochester, MN, for the wedding, in a Pontiac.

 

Most importantly, I went to my own wedding in a Pontiac. My roommate, Tom Cone, had a Pontiac at school our senior year, because his father was a Pontiac salesman. I had a very unreliable lemon-yellow Anglia [English Ford], and when it didn’t want to go to church on a Sunday, so that I could preach, I borrowed Tom’s Pontiac.

On the afternoon of my wedding, though, I did not borrow it. I just ran to Tom and yelled, “My car won’t start. Give me your keys.” I didn’t worry about Tom. I knew he’d find some other way to get there. He did. I never thought to ask how. Without a Pontiac, I would never have gotten married.

Oh, wait. Maybe it’s Barack Obama instead of Ronald Reagan that I should blame. When General Motors was about to go belly-up, Obama agreed to bail them out with government loans as long as they stopped making cars they couldn’t sell. They kept the Chevy and Cadillac and GMC lines and dropped Oldsmobile and Pontiac.

 

Maybe it’s just as well that the Pontiac automobile closed out. All those Pontiacs, so important to me, looked like real cars, distinctive, not like these current cars that all look alike, regardless of maker, like they are all produced on the same mimeograph machine. Chief Pontiac would be embarrassed by those final 2008 cars.

 

Well, at least I am sure that the demise of Pontiac is the fault of somebody else, even though I never bought one.

John Robert McFarland

1] I’ve told many times how I had the very last word on Reagan. When he died, the last of his several funeral services was in Tampico, IL, where he was born. I was preaching at the Tampico UMC then, a part-time appointment in retirement, and I was asked to give the benediction at that service.