Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  His aunt Ruby, his mother’s sister, punctuated many disputes with gunfire, including numerous spats with her husband, whom she winged several times, and with her children, who fired back. One of his uncles was quick on the draw, too, and gravely wounded a man over a jukebox selection. His cousin gutted a man in a knife fight. A sister wounded her husband with a .357 Magnum blast to the chest. And though Arney didn’t learn the truth for years, the man whose surname he carries was not his father—his mother had been messing around with a truck driver, and that fellow, Arney’s real father, was accused of a shooting himself.

  As for Fern Arney, Tommy’s mother—well, she might not have been as crazy as some of her kin. But she was crazy enough.

  BACK TO AN earlier point: Car and man are about the same age, and arrived in Norfolk at the same time. While the Arneys settled into an apartment, the wagon was parked a few blocks away, outside Colonial Chevrolet’s modernist, glass-walled showroom. Chevy’s bow-tie trademark hovered overhead in neon. Painted across the windows was the legend: “1957 Chevrolet—Picture of perfection!”

  The dealership occupied the seam between the business district, to the south, and an inner suburb of once-grand mansions carved into apartments during World War II, and slipping into ever-seedier condition since. Much of Norfolk felt and looked as if the war hadn’t ended: Sailors from the Norfolk Naval Station, the service’s largest base and home to its Atlantic Fleet, prowled the town in loud, beery knots. The harbor bristled with radar masts and shipyard cranes, reeked of bunker fuel and tugboat smoke. Warplanes and helicopters crisscrossed the downtown sky.

  Away from the base and the harbor, a vacation getaway waited: Norfolk and its outlying villages boasted twenty-five miles of white-sand beaches, amusement parks, a lovely botanical garden, and some of the best fishing and duck hunting in America. A few courageous up-and-comers were colonizing farmland and forest at the city’s edge in new brick ramblers. Still, most of the population, in and out of uniform, was roughhewn, burred, urban—and most important to the salesmen at Colonial, tight with a buck. Norfolkians had a long-standing affection for Chevys, which included the least expensive cars built by General Motors. Trade was brisk.

  Chevrolet didn’t offer an array of sedans, compacts, and land yachts in 1957: Besides the Corvette, the company’s only model—or what we’d call a model today—was simply called a Chevy; distinctive nameplates such as Impala, Chevelle, and Nova came later. Every Chevy on the lot measured seventy-four inches wide and about two hundred long. All boasted the same 115-inch wheelbase. Most shared a heavy, rectangular steel frame, suspension, steering gear, windshield, dashboard, and instrument array. Coming or going, they were difficult to tell apart: Their front ends were identical, as were most of their tails.

  But within its single model, the Chevy assumed a great many forms. The ’57 came as a two-door or four-door sedan; a two-door or four-door hardtop; a two-door or four-door, six-passenger wagon; a four-door, nine-passenger wagon; a two-door delivery wagon; a sporty and expensive two-door “Nomad” wagon; and a convertible. A buyer’s decisions were just beginning, because within those styles he had to choose among three of what we nowadays call trim levels: the economical 150, with a bare-bones interior, a single color of body paint, and little chrome decoration on its flanks; the midline 210, with nicer seats and interior decoration, a little more chrome bling, and two-tone paint; and the Bel Air, the all-luxe version, with aluminum trim on its flanks, golden accents, and far greater cachet.

  Whatever he picked, the buyer of 1957 got a good-looking machine, perhaps the best-looking in American history, though that wasn’t the consensus at the time. The Chevy was not greeted as an instant classic. Its sales set no records; in fact, 1957 Fords outsold it, the first time that had happened since the Depression. Its reception from the automotive press, though positive, now reads as oddly detached; reporters ranked it neither above nor below competitors long since forgotten by pretty much everyone.

  Under its skin, the car differed little from the Chevys of 1955 and 1956, and the innovations that it did offer failed to excite the buying public in the manner its creators had hoped. Its optional fuel injection, the first offered on an American production car, was expensive and balky, and most buyers gave it a pass. An optional three-speed automatic transmission proved less sturdy and reliable than the cheaper two-speed automatic it was expected to replace. A new, optional 283-cubic-inch engine, rebored from an existing Chevy motor, was a very big deal, indeed—it was destined to be a Chevrolet mainstay for the next decade and beyond—but few recognized that at the time.

  So what did the car have going for it? In a word, optimism. The Chevy was a fusion of disparate parts that somehow not only worked well together, they gave the car an aura of fun, of happily nosing into the future. And in 1957, that future was airborne: Slotted into its curving hood were a pair of mock gunsights rendered in chrome, among the car’s many nods to military aviation. Its taillights mimicked jet exhausts. Its instruments were clustered in a dash that evoked a plane’s cockpit. Its fins resembled the tail of a Cold War fighter.

  Slipping behind the wheel, the buyer of 1957 joined the Jet Age.

  THE WAGON HAD not been on display for long when its first owner appeared on Colonial’s lot. He was a curious piece of casting, for Nicholas Carl Thornhill was not a Jet Age sort of fellow. Bald, paunchy, and sixty years old, he was neither an easy mark for advertising, nor a man much concerned about fashion or his own image, nor someone who’d buy a flashy new set of wheels just for the sake of having them. He’d put off buying a new car for years: Thornhill was a conservative spender, and handy enough with tools to keep his home machinery running long past its prime. One day that fall, however, Thornhill decided that his needs were no longer met by his aging Chevy sedan. It was time.

  So with his son Bruce, and his grandson, Bruce Jr., Thornhill left his home in Portsmouth, Virginia, for the twenty-minute drive to the dealership. On the way they passed the bustling naval shipyard where Thornhill had worked for twenty-seven years. They rolled past downtown department stores busy with shoppers and through a tunnel under a river, the Elizabeth, that separated Portsmouth from Norfolk and formed part of the largest natural anchorage on the East Coast. They drove by the marquees of one movie palace after another in downtown Norfolk, and among the girlie shows and beer joints aimed at sailors on liberty.

  On the lot, Thornhill narrowed his search to a wagon; an avid gardener, he wanted room for his plants, soil, and tools. He chose a vehicle from the middle of the lineup, a 210 Townsman six-passenger wagon with an all-vinyl interior and a V8 under the hood. It was gorgeous. Its paint gleamed; most of its body was swathed in a deep turquoise that Chevrolet called “Highland Green,” and its roof in a “Surf Green” so pale that at a distance, it looked white, among the best-looking combinations Chevy offered. Its chrome winked and flashed.

  The base sticker price was $2,456. Thornhill paid cash, and plunked down extra for a heater and an AM tube radio. His son drove the old Chevy home. Nicholas and his grandson took the wagon. It was a car on its maiden voyage, its glass spotless, its tires fresh. It was sure to turn heads.

  As he made that drive, Thornhill occupied a remarkable vantage point on modern American history: He had witnessed the rise of the automobile from plaything of the rich to household essential in a scant few years, then evolve to reshape the nation’s cities, redefine its notions of time and distance, remake its every habit—where people lived, where they worked, what they ate, what they did in their spare time. No invention had so quickly gone from incarnation to societal dominance as had the automobile in the United States.

  Born in 1897, Thornhill was four years younger than the first gasoline-powered American car, the Duryea Motor Wagon, and four years older than the world’s first mass-produced model, the curved-dash Oldsmobile. He was six by the time anyone drove coast to coast, and seven when the first practical headlight made motoring an all-day affair. He was well into his teens when the
electric starter heralded the end of hand-cranking and the advent of female drivers, and had been around for a quarter century when fully enclosed cars made motoring comfortable in all kinds of weather.

  And as powerful, wealthy, and tentacled as General Motors was in 1957, Thornhill was eleven years older than the company, and fourteen older than its bestselling brand.

  Folks in rural Alabama, where Nicholas Thornhill grew up, had long been marooned on their properties by mud and the slow pace of their horses and wagons, and like farmers across America seized on the horseless carriage. The young Thornhill watched as motoring exploded, partly because Henry Ford introduced the rugged, cheap, and easily maintained Model T, and partly thanks to William C. Durant, the grandson of a Michigan governor and a man with a gift for hustle and horse-trading: Durant bought a foundering car company, Buick, and combined it with later purchases—Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Oakland—under a single corporate umbrella. He called the outfit General Motors.

  Its expansion was so breakneck that GM soon developed a nasty cash-flow problem. Alarmed, his backers deposed Durant and assumed control of the business. Durant responded by creating new car companies, one of them named for his partner—a famous French racecar driver of the day, Louis Chevrolet. Chevys were such a success that in 1915 he was able to regain control of GM, before losing it for good after World War I.

  His replacement was a man with no experience running a car company; Alfred P. Sloan Jr. had spent his working life making roller bearings. But he had a head for marketing, and it was plain to Sloan that GM was competing against itself. Though Cadillac was established as the company’s luxury brand, all of its other divisions were pitching to the same customers. His solution was to refashion the brands into a hierarchy based on price. At the bottom was Chevy, aimed at the young buyer, the blue-collar worker, and the conservative; it would be a car for the everyman who might otherwise opt for Ford’s Model T. One rung up the price ladder was Oldsmobile, its cheapest offering a touch more expensive than the top Chevrolet; another step up was Oakland, later renamed Pontiac, its prices only marginally higher than Oldsmobile’s; then Buick and, retaining its place at the top of the line, Cadillac. GM’s 1926 annual report boasted that it built “a car for every purse and purpose.” When Nicholas Thornhill walked into Colonial Chevrolet, carving the market remained fundamental to GM’s corporate strategy, and Chevy was firmly established as the company’s all-American car for the all-American masses.

  In 1931, one of Sloan’s engineers had an epiphany while measuring the cars in GM’s stable: The dimensions of some models differed by next to nothing, yet each division engineered its wares independent of the others, in some cases turning out virtual duplicates—and spending a lot of unnecessary time, effort, and money in the process. Why not economize, the engineer suggested, by producing a few body cores that would be shared among all GM cars, and to which each division would then add its own unique grilles, fenders, hoods, and rear ends?

  Sloan seized on the idea and streamlined production to four sizes of car—the smallest, designated the “A” body, was shared by Chevrolets and small Pontiacs, the “B” by big Pontiacs and small Oldsmobiles and Buicks, and so on. Strip away its upholstery and carpeting, its chrome and wires and moving parts, and the steel box formed by a Chevy’s roof, floor, and pillars was the same used in the low-end Pontiac.

  The line’s shared bones went undetected by most buyers, thanks to the company’s efforts to give each division its own signature style. In 1935 it introduced the “Silver Streak,” a fluted chrome stripe running up the middle of a Pontiac’s grille, over its hood, and down its trunk; the streak was Pontiac’s trademark for twenty-three years. Forties Buicks acquired vertical grilles and a line of portholes down their front quarters, three on low-end trim levels, four on the ritzier Roadmaster. Oldsmobiles had wide, elliptical mouths, chrome rockets on their hoods, and small taillights that rode high on their rears.

  Cars might change from year to year—actually, they never failed to do so from the late forties into the seventies—but the styling cues carried over. The only GM brand that lacked them was Chevrolet, for which the corporate bosses thought identifying gewgaws unnecessary; everyone knew what the most popular car in the world looked like. Often, Chevy models borrowed inspiration from the other divisions.

  And so the ’57 came to boast a front end that in its proportions and celebration of chrome struck the automotive press as surprisingly upscale for a car of the masses, that bore more than a passing resemblance to the year’s small Cadillac. For the price of a Chevy, one got the body of a Pontiac and high-end looks—a car both humble enough to be within the reach of the working-class stiff and stylish enough to advertise his respectability, perhaps even modest prosperity. To announce that he was bound for the great middle class, if not already there. That he belonged.

  It also made the low-end car a heck of a buy. That, more than fighter-plane trim, might have spurred the wagon’s first owner to open his wallet. Nicholas Thornhill knew a good value when he saw one.

  FIFTY-THREE YEARS LATER, Earl Thomas Arney is sitting in his four-door, dual-axle Ford F350, about as big as a truck can get and still be considered a pickup—at more than twenty feet long and nearly eight wide, too massive to squeeze into most parking spaces, and a seemingly impossible chore to parallel park. It’s four feet longer than the ’57 wagon.

  He’s halted the behemoth on a narrow Norfolk street ten minutes from Colonial Chevrolet—or where the dealership used to be, before it joined its customers out in the suburbs—in front of a tumbledown bungalow in the middle of its block. We’re on a driving tour of Arney’s childhood, he and I, and this is the building he most considers his boyhood home.

  “Years after we lived here, I came back, and I asked the people who were in the house if I could look around,” he says from behind the wheel, his tone contemplative. “I thought that being in that house, seeing it again or walking through it, would help me understand what happened to me, and why things happened the way they did.” He sighs. “Thought it would help me find myself, help make me a better person.”

  “Did it?”

  He grunts, shakes his head. “Fuck, no.”

  The family’s move to the city was an act of desperation. Fred Arney, Tommy’s legal father, had been unable to calm Fern’s appetite for other men in Lenoir, the furniture factory town in the Blue Ridge foothills of western Carolina where they’d both been raised. He’d go to sea with the navy and Fern would be pregnant when he returned, and simple math dictated that he wasn’t responsible; Tommy was Fern’s fourth child by at least the third man. During one of his deployments, she even moved herself and the kids in with a local truck driver, Earl Thomas Green, who’d sired Tommy and for whom the boy was named. When the Arneys decamped for Norfolk, Fern was pregnant again, this time with twins, their father the same Mr. Green.

  The family lived in a succession of rentals before settling in the shack we now examine from the truck. Everything about the place seems undersized: It can’t be more than twenty feet wide, and its porch is too shallow to offer protection from the rain. The front yard is a tiny strip of crabgrass and bald earth. Fred Arney enclosed a back porch to create an extra bedroom, but even so, the quarters were tight: He, Fern, and six kids shared a single bathroom and eight hundred square feet of living space.

  Over the front door hangs a wooden bald eagle, head turned to the left, wings spread wide, sheathed in the same tired white paint as the house. I ask Arney if he remembers it. He shakes his head, then stops. “Wait a minute,” he whispers. “Wait a fucking minute. Fred Arney nailed that son of a bitch up there. I can picture him doing that.” We stare at the eagle in silence for a long moment. “Shit. I didn’t remember that until right now, sitting here,” Arney says. “If I had remembered, I’d have stole the motherfucker.”

  The house’s current occupant has been peering at us from inside the front door. He steps out now, an unkempt, hillbilly-looking old-timer, and hollers a
t us to get the truck away from his driveway, that we’re blocking it. In truth, the driveway is just a strip of rutted grass alongside the house, but Arney smiles and waves an apology, and eases the giant Ford down the street.

  He has fond memories of Fred Arney, who he says woke every day smiling. Others in the family don’t remember him so rosily, but most agree that the sailor chose to overlook the fact that he shared no blood with his brood. Arney recalls Fred giving him hugs and silver half dollars, and having a sense that he was looked after. The navy kept calling Fred away for months at a stretch, though, and during each, Fern would stray.

  What she lacked in looks—she was a short, stout woman, with blunt features and the dark complexion of her Cherokee heritage—she evidently made up for in recklessness. The kids knew that if their mother wasn’t home, they’d likely find her drinking with strange men in a bar up the street.

  Arney points out the place as we roll past. “We’d go in and try to get her to come home,” he says. “She wouldn’t come.”

  Instead, she’d tell them to get lost, often using one of her pet names for them: “little motherfuckers.”

  3

  LUNCH AT MOYOCK Muscle typically comes late. Painter Paul Kitchens, summoned to the midday meal in a 3:30 P.M. call from Tommy Arney, steps from the sweltering haze of the body shop, an all-metal prefab shed on a concrete pad that has baked all day under a cloudless Carolina sky, and into an afternoon at least fifteen degrees cooler but warm and sticky nonetheless. He passes within a few yards of the ’57 Chevy wagon as he makes a turn from the shed’s mouth, which faces north, and onto a southward path worn smooth by his work boots. This is within days of the county’s visit. The wagon hasn’t been touched.