I hark back to the days when Arkansas boys and girls — in the business of love, courtship and sometimes marriage — would sit very closely to each other in the motor vehicle they happened to be traveling in.
It was not uncommon to pull up behind a vehicle at a stop sign and see a couple sitting so close together you couldn’t run a piece of dental floss between them.
The male of the species was the driver, of course.
I have seen short girls all cuddled up next to the driver — a girl so short you could only see half of her head sticking up above the back of the seat.
I have seen girls half-a-head and sometimes a whole-head taller than their driver boyfriend.
It’s a funny sight to remember nowadays, but it wasn’t particularly funny back in 1965.
It was just a boy and girl getting mostly in the driver’s seat, making a statement of sorts. It was how a young man told the world that he’s got a date. She was saying the same thing.
He’s mine.
She’s mine.
It takes two to Tango. That is, it takes two youngsters in agreement to cram into the driver’s seat and leave 80 percent of the bench seat unoccupied.
Those were the days when seat belts, if there were any, were a hard sell. Back in those days seat belts were just good for keeping a knocked-out motorist trapped inside a wrecked and burning vehicle. It took a long while to persuade the driving public that seat belts were good. At the same time First Lady of the U.S., Lady Bird Johnson, was trying to persuade motorist not to throw trash out of car and truck windows onto the highways and byways.
The practice of boys and girls sitting close also lent itself to a good practical joke.
Three boys in a pickup truck required a driver and one riding shotgun and one in the middle. That shotgun rider could duck down and create the appearance that the driver and middle seat passenger were fond of each other. That wasn’t funny.
ost pickup drivers kept a billy club made in shop class under the driver’s side front seat.
No one did the date gig better than my friend James (not his real name). He had a 10-year-old Rambler Ambassador around the time B.F. Goodrich introduced the Radial TA tire with raised white letters.
Motorists who could afford the Radial TAs put them on everything from the Dodge Polara to hay wagons.
Me and James couldn’t afford Radial TAs but that didn’t stop James from creating white letters on the tires he ran.
James discovered he could flatten a piece of chalk lengthwise and run that chalk lightly over any numbers or wording that adorned the General Jet-Air tires he was running on his Rambler.
It created the appearance of something like raised white lettering.
He was made fun of, even bullied, outside the shop class where he whited up the lettering.
The next time I saw James, he had a date in the driver’s seat of his Rambler, sporting General Jet-Airs with white sidewalls and white lettering. James had dealt a hard blow to the man.
His girlfriend was cute, too. She was snaggle-toothed at the passenger’s side top bicuspid position, but she still had a pretty smile.
I got a date with her later after she got wise to James.
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Frank Wallis has been an Arkansas journalist most of professional life with career stops at the Batesville Guard, the Arkansas Democrat, the Baxter Bulletin and the Stone County Leader. Contact him at: cfw0722@yahoo.com
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