A member of America's Greatest Generation of
World War II heroes reminisces about his first car.
I suppose that, under the circumstances, any car would have
seemed the best I'd ever owned. It happened to be a '36 Ford coupe.
For far too long I had been unable to drive it, having bobbed queasily
on a minelayer in the Pacific, dodging Japanese patrols for the duration.
But my folks kept it locked up in a shed, untouched, awaiting my safe return.
Now at last, on this spring day in 1946, the man I had become was ready to
pick up where the boy I had been left off. The engine turned over quickly
and the gears shifted smoothly as I backed out and rattled up the limestone
gravel road flanking our farm. I rolled the window down and
drank in the warm, sweet country air.
Rumbling along, churning up a cloud of white dust behind, it seemed
almost that I was in my ship again. The tapered hood looked like a sharp
prow, the bulbous fenders on either side like water spraying up; only now,
instead of an ocean of strife and death, I was sailing through
a sea of pastoral serenity. A vista of grazing milk cows,
shimmering wheat fields, wheeling starlings
and gleaming silos swept by.
The cadence of normalcy, of nature and man in seasonal harmony,
had finally supplanted the din and turmoil of the world's unnatural
conflagration. For four years I had heard only the incessant engines
of war-the chuff of jeeps and the chug of troop trucks, the wheeze
of steam boilers, the whine of fighter planes, the rumble of tanks,
the sky-shaking vibrations of overflying bomber formations.
In the humming of my old V-8, I heard now the veritable
anthem of peace. I have never forgotten that first post-war
drive, nor the car that provided it.
This thought provoking essay was written by Mr. K.J. Franks of Wooster, Ohio
and was awarded Second Prize in the 1986 Old Farmer's Almanac Essay Contest.
Thank you Mr. Franks for your service to our nation and for my freedom.
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