Pontiac is gone, but not the memories

The passing of the Pontiac is another sensible but sad event in a vanishing America of pop culture and commerce.

General Motors Corp., held together with federal loans and desperate to restructure by June 1, will eliminate the 83-year-old Pontiac automobile.

The public has had a friendship with, if not an attachment to the Pontiac since the first one rolled off the assembly line in 1926. But the brand goes back to 1893 and the first horse-drawn carriage built at the Pontiac Buggy Co. in Pontiac, Mich.

In April 2004, GM stopped production of the 106-year-old Oldsmobile, whose original company was the first to mass-produce cars and which pioneered the use of chrome and automatic transmissions.

I’ve owned both, and where the Olds was dependable and sturdy and practical, the Pontiac added the feeling you were behind the wheel of a race car.

My son, Jeff, once owned a beautiful yellow Pontiac Firebird. In August 1977, I drove with Jeff to his Navy base near Meridian, Miss. I flew home to Tucson, changing planes in Nashville where I read the news that Elvis Presley had greatly impoverished pop culture himself, by dying.

My admiration of the Pontiac car goes back about 60 years or more. My uncle, Louis E. Hooten, a youth baseball pioneer in Wellington, Kan., used his green 1950 Pontiac Chieftan as a tractor to care for our ball field.

Uncle Hoot pulled a huge grader-like apparatus to smooth down the infield dirt. I’m sure it would have wrecked a modern automobile, but the Pontiac didn’t even break a sweat, as it were.

My uncle also used his Pontiac as a truck, hauling all sorts of equipment, rakes and hoes and large metal water cans. When the Chieftan wasn’t a tractor or truck, it was a bus, transporting the Wellington VFW Cubs to ball games on the road.

My father-in-law, Clifford L. Wharry of Wellington, a man who knew much about cars, once owned a beautiful blue Pontiac Bonneville.

My own Pontiac was a used 1974 LeMans and I think it must have been abused early in life. It sort of drove at an angle, and it wore out tires at an alarming rate. But it was extremely comfortable and it would run like a rocket on four out-of-whack wheels.

The best years of Pontiac’s life, I guess, were the 1960s, the “wide track” and “muscle car” era. In style and performance, the Grand Prix, the GTO, Tempest, Firebird, Bonneville, etc. were superstars of the American road.

I don’t know why, but in this country we have a real love affair with automobiles. They are preserved in memory with an almost sacred veneration.

There are no more Studebakers, DeSotos, Plymouths, Kaisers, Frazers, Hudsons, Nashes, Ramblers or Packards.

Almost unbelievably, the Oldsmobile is gone and soon, the Pontiac.

If you’re old enough, you may remember the Indian head hood ornament -- or “mascot” -- of the Pontiac. You may recall the five chrome strips attached lengthwise on the hood and on the back of the car extending top-to-bottom on the trunk.

That stuff’s all collected in museums and memories now, bringing to mind another dearly departed American pop culture icon, the old Burma Shave signs along the highway.

One of them read, fittingly enough as we say farewell to the Pontiac:

“Within this vale / Of toil / And sin / Your head grows bald / But not your chin / Use Burma-Shave.”

Corky Simpson is a former Tucson Citizen columnist who writes a weekly column for the Green Valley News.