Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  And so cookie-cutter neighborhoods bloomed, the prices of their houses kept within a recent sailor or soldier’s reach by cheap land and assembly-line construction of the sort that had turned out B-25s, tanks, and Liberty ships. Hitting the market at the same time were the first postwar American cars. Sales were off the charts.

  The Korean conflict came and went, and the Thornhills witnessed their city again transformed. Out beyond the two-and-ones on Portsmouth’s ragged edges, swamp and slash pine now vanished under tracts of new houses that looked nothing like those that had come before. They had big windows and three or more bedrooms and multiple bathrooms and all-electric kitchens, and they were set back from sinuously curved streets on lots that dwarfed those closer to the city. Many included an additional room for the family car.

  Midwifed by the explosion in auto ownership, Portsmouth and America at large had a new middle-class ideal—which was reinforced in the daily papers Thornhill read, with their splashy ads for split-level floor plans, electric ranges and dishwashers, lawn mowers and swing sets. Magazine advertisements peddled products and subtexts: One, ostensibly for Texaco gasoline, showed a posse of mischievous Dalmatian puppies snatching steaks and wieners from a backyard grill; another, for Pendleton, pictured a well-groomed young homeowner in a flannel shirt barbecuing kebabs. Gleem toothpaste pushed images of families gathered on suburban patios. No matter the product, no matter the pitch, cozying up to suburbia’s clean, wholesome, and stressless image seemed a good idea.

  No dummies, Chevrolet and other automakers got into the act, positioning their cars as part and parcel of the town and country lifestyle. Thornhill may have already been mulling his upcoming purchase when, in January 1957, an ad in BusinessWeek boasted about the Chevy’s power. “That new V8 in the ’57 Chevrolet is as quiet as a contented cat and as smooth as cream,” its copy read. “And it’s cat-quick in response when you ask for action!” The accompanying image wasn’t of a Chevy chewing up the road, but of a modernist suburban house with two cars in the driveway, a Corvette and a Bel Air Sports Coupe. Standing beside them was a clean-cut dad, child in his arms, listening to the Bel Air’s engine.

  The reputed idyll just out of town was even more overtly championed on TV. The same autumn that Thornhill bought the Chevy, Leave It to Beaver debuted on CBS with a famously idealistic take on the adventures of a wide-eyed prepubescent boy of the white suburbs. The crises that Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver faced were low-grade, but the settings in which he managed them were amazing: Beaver’s house was substantial, its furnishings quietly stylish, its every room—including the kids’ bedrooms—purged of so much as a micron of dust. School presented mild crushes, no humiliations, no terrors. The surrounding neighborhood was a quilt work of baseball diamonds, weedless yards, and woods free of animal or human predators. Beaver’s mom, boarding school and state college alumna June, wore pumps, pearls, and dressy frocks while vacuuming; his dad, the wise and judicious Ward, was a successful white-collar professional who wore crisp dress shirts and tightly knotted neckties seventeen hours a day, drank oceans of coffee, drove a late-model car (he was among those who picked a ’57 Ford Fairlane over that year’s Chevy), and rarely lost his temper—and when he did, he didn’t raise his voice.

  Pretty as this picture was, it seemed a riotous mess next to the placid harmony of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, airing over on ABC. The “adventures” of the suburban Nelsons—father Ozzie, mother Harriet, and polite sons David and Ricky—included hours spent discussing articles in the evening paper, engaging in light, loving banter, and attending dances, concerts, and circuses together. Each of their evenings featured “a fine, big dinner.” Ozzie, his source of income vague but clearly ample, was put together even while tinkering in the garage; in one episode, he mowed the lawn while wearing a tie, a smart cardigan, and black oxfords. Like Ward Cleaver, he never raised his voice; on the contrary, he was mild, self-effacing, a touch uncertain. Harriet stayed busy at the local women’s club, and by darning socks, cooking in her knotty-pine kitchen, and gently giving her husband the business. The boys were never inconvenienced or embarrassed by their parents, let alone consumed with self-hatred or rage.

  See, for example, the “Road Race” episode, which aired on January 8, 1958, shortly after Thornhill bought the wagon: Ricky’s pal pulls into the Nelson driveway in a hot rod he’s built with the help of specialty shops “downtown,” prompting Ozzie to ruminate on how kids of his day needed no such help—they could put together a car with “just a hammer and a pair of pliers.” Ricky offers a counterargument in the form of a question: “Well, don’t you think the modern cars are better, Pop?” Ozzie replies that he supposes so, as “everything improves,” but adds that “under certain conditions, I’m not sure the old cars couldn’t hold their own with the modern hot rod.”

  The exchange leads to an inevitable showdown—a race pitting youngsters in the hot rod against Ozzie and Harriet, piloting an open clunker from the twenties that Ozzie has restored to running shape in a scant few hours, without special tools or getting himself mussed. The race ends with no losers—it’s a dead heat—and with everyone having learned something or other and sharing a good laugh.

  At best, this rendering of fifties America was incomplete; at worst, it came across as a cruel joke. Just on the ride home from the dealership, Thornhill and his grandson passed drugstores, restaurants, and movie houses where blacks could not sit with whites, and buses whose black riders had to yield their seats on demand, and schools that the races did not share. They drove among century-old wooden tenements, some without indoor plumbing, occupied almost exclusively by blacks. They traveled a divided city, no different from most cities in America, north or south. Little Rock, Arkansas, was in turmoil over school integration just then; President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne into the city days before Leave It to Beaver premiered.

  Real life didn’t much resemble the TV fantasy for most whites in Portsmouth, either, the Thornhills among them. Nicholas wasn’t much for lounging around the house in a necktie. Newtown wasn’t an antiseptic subdivision of neat lawns and modern ranchers; its simple, worn cottages looked onto a grid of straight, narrow streets in the shade of the yard’s massive cranes and the haze-gray masts of ships in the ways.

  Real life was messy. Real life was complicated and heartbreaking and loud. Nothing on TV or in the picture-perfect suburbia of advertising spoke to Thornhill’s experiences. His second child, Jack, struggled with a speech impediment and learning disabilities, and lived with Thornhill for all of the older man’s life. And there was the family’s central tragedy: Not long after arriving in Portsmouth, a year behind Nicholas, Alma learned that he’d been carrying on with a woman who lived a few streets over. The Portsmouth Star of February 7, 1933, reported what happened next:

  Police were called to her residence around 3:30 yesterday morning, about which time police believe she shot herself in a second-floor bedroom.

  E. T. Glover, city coroner, following an examination declared the case unquestionably a suicide. He said Mrs. Thornhill was suffering from a nervous disorder and committed the act while in an extremely high-strung frame of mind.

  At thirty-five, Thornhill found himself the sole parent of three confused and angry children. They blamed him for their mother’s death, felt lost in a big city they didn’t yet know, struggled with a sense of isolation that persisted for years. Beaver’s problems were small, indeed.

  Seventeen years after Alma’s death, long after the kids were grown, Thornhill did remarry, his bride a two-time widow from Windsor, North Carolina, named Mary Drew Early. She, too, lived in Newtown, a short stroll from the Thornhill place. He and Jack moved into her house.

  But the TV ideal again made itself scarce: One of Mary’s brothers lived in the house and she had four children, besides, and the marriage suffered, Thornhill’s daughter would later conclude, from “too much family on both sides.” Mary abandoned the household two years in. Thornhill and Jack moved into anoth
er house in Newtown, then to a cottage out on Portsmouth’s western edge, just shy of where the city gave way to truck farms. He wasn’t yet divorced, but Thornhill had not shared a home with Mary for more than five years when he decided to buy a new car.

  IF THE THORNHILLS fell short of the cultural ideal, the Arneys, crowded into their tiny shotgun shack three miles away in Norfolk, shredded it. When Tommy was six or seven, Fred Arney returned from a sea voyage to find that his wife had invited another man to move in with her and the kids—one Robert Larry Strickland, five years her junior, whom she’d met, per habit, at a nearby bar. Fred recognized that the long-running charade was over. The couple divorced.

  The new man of the house made a pittance as a laborer for a tent company, though he was unreliable about showing up for work; most months, the family subsisted on Fred Arney’s child support checks. Alcohol figured prominently in its nightly rituals. Arguments were loud and often violent, and Strickland settled many with his fists. In one of their disagreements, Fern suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and spent a month in a coma. Strickland told the authorities that she’d suffered a fall. Tommy told them that Strickland had slammed her head against a radiator in the bathroom. Whatever the case, Fern was a different person when she regained consciousness—jittery, forever chewing her nails, easily exhausted. Still, the fighting continued. She and Strickland each had the other arrested on a regular basis.

  Against this backdrop of discord and neglect, Tommy ran wild. At his most innocent, he and his kid brother, Billy, trespassed onto the neighbors’ boat piers to cannonball into a shallow, foul-smelling branch of Norfolk’s Lafayette River, or stole empty Coke and Pepsi bottles from back porches to trade for pocket change at a drugstore down the block. As they grew older—Tommy being eight or nine—they took to sneaking into the garage of a motorhead neighbor to steal his tools. They’d wait a bit, then knock on his front door and sell the tools back to him for a buck or two. The neighbor played along, even when they ripped him off several times a day.

  Some of Tommy’s antics weren’t so innocent. Consumed with hatred for Strickland and rage over his mother’s refusal to leave the man, her willingness to forgive the beatings she took from him, and worse, her willingness to forgive the abuse he meted out to her children, Tommy sought relief, and briefly found it, by assaulting kids in the neighborhood. His blossoming penchant for violence saw him expelled from the fourth and fifth grades and forced to repeat both. At twelve he had a rap sheet.

  In time a Norfolk judge, weary of seeing his mother and Strickland before the bench, suggested they both faced jail if they didn’t clear out of town. They listened. Leaving behind Tommy’s three older siblings—brothers Johnny and Mike and sister Freda—Fern, Strickland, and the household’s three remaining children packed up and drove south. They turned up at Strickland’s mother’s place in Tarboro, North Carolina, in the wee hours, hung around for a few days, then pushed on to nearby Rocky Mount. And there Tommy’s life, already hard by any fair measure, got worse.

  The five moved into a dilapidated frame shack lacking hot water and scattered with a few pieces of battered furniture and a rented TV. It stood, paint peeling, roof drooping, in the shadow of Rocky Mount’s bus station, where Tommy hit up traveling servicemen for spare change. He and Billy roamed the streets late on school nights. They were caught trying to extort money from a classmate by threatening to tell his mother they’d seen him smoke. They showed up to class filthy and half dressed.

  And the change of setting had no effect on the violence between the home’s adults. “One day [Strickland] was choking her against the kitchen door, and I couldn’t stop him,” Arney tells me. “I ran out into the back yard where there was a ’55 Ford that wasn’t running, and I grabbed a lug wrench out of it and ran back inside and swung that lug wrench just as hard as I could into his right knee. He screamed and let go of my mom, and I could tell from his scream that I’d hurt him bad.”

  It was Tommy’s introduction to the value of good tools.

  TOMMY RAN. HE lived under an overpass for three days, during which Billy and his twin, Debbie, stole out of the house to sneak him food and sit with him. Eventually, a classmate of Tommy’s came by the hiding place with his father, brother, and uncle; they took him home with them, and petitioned the court for temporary custody of the boy. Tommy liked the family, felt safe in his new surroundings, and even the situation at home promised to improve: In April 1969, a month after Tommy turned thirteen, county officials opened a child neglect case against his parents.

  But the intervention failed to save him. At school, another classmate “would pick on this one girl every day,” he tells me. “Before the teacher would come into the classroom in the morning, he would pick at her and make everybody in the class laugh at her.” As he remembers it, he called the kid into the coatroom and told him to stop. The kid laughed, said, Don’t worry about it. Tommy replied: I am going to worry about it.

  The kid didn’t know that his challenger had been fighting a grown man at home for years. He took a swing, missed, and Tommy hit him hard. He did it again. Again. At about that point, a few punches into the fight, he lost track of where he was, what he was doing, entered a sort of trance; conscious thought ceased. Then he heard his name being called, looked over his shoulder, and his teacher was standing there along with the principal and both were screaming for him to stop.

  The school expelled him. Principal Corinne Pitt described the assault as “without any provocation” on a form documenting his dismissal, adding: “At the time his facial expression was one of blankness and unawareness of what he was doing to the child. He was quite unconcerned about injuring the child and seemed unable to realize the danger of what he had done.” His behavior was “so very unpredictable,” she wrote, “that I do not believe it is safe for us to keep him any longer.”

  Then, in a letter to a judge weighing the boy’s fate, Pitt added a remarkable plea on his behalf: “Tom Arney presents a pathetic picture—a child torn from within with self doubts and a great deal of insecurity—a child unable to understand the realities of his everyday life in any manner which will help him cope with his many overwhelming problems. He is the result of an environmental background which has seemed to give him a feeling of defeat and defiance.

  “He needs professional help more desperately than any child I have ever worked with,” she wrote. “I do not believe he will be able to maintain any balance of normal life unless such help can be secured for him—a special type of help which is not too easily available.

  “With the right kind of help, I believe Tom can overcome many aberrations of personality and behavior he now exhibits. Without help Tom’s life will be far more pathetic, meaningless, and unstable than it is now.

  “At the present time,” she warned, “Tom is a child without a chance.”

  4

  NICHOLAS THORNHILL, FRUMPY boilermaker, was an unwitting trendsetter as he drove his new wagon across Portsmouth to his modest cottage. Behind the wheel, he looked the embodiment of the suburban lifestyle that had, in large part, eluded him.

  Witness a TV ad for the ’57 Chevy wagon: Dad, mom, and three kids of the ideal suburban family race around a tidy and well-appointed home, amassing a pile of suitcases as they ready for a trip. “But where on earth do you suppose they’ll put all that luggage?” a cheerful male narrator asks over an orchestral rendition of the Chevy theme song—“See the USA in Your Chevrolet,” a jingle so catchy that in the fifties it became singer Dinah Shore’s signature number. The camera cuts to the driveway. “Ah, here’s the answer—a new Chevrolet family-engineered station wagon!”

  We close in on a Bel Air wagon, rear hatch opened to reveal the car’s cavernous cargo hold. “Just look at the room for luggage, even with all the seats in use!” the voice-over cries, as bag after bag materializes in the space—suitcases, makeup case, hatbox, eleven pieces in all. Cut to three adorable white children sleeping side by side. “With the backseat folded down, there’s even more ro
om,” the narrator says, “with a special family convenience for long trips—or even the drive-in.”

  The baby boom was on: 4.3 million Americans were born in 1957; the country’s women each bore a lifetime average of 3.7 children. Station wagons were a boon to suddenly mushrooming families. In 1953 they’d represented only 5 percent of total U.S. car production; four years later, they accounted for 13 percent. As Popular Science observed: “Where the perambulator rolleth and the power mower hummeth, the station wagon cometh.” Only Cadillac, Lincoln, Imperial, and Nash-Hudson didn’t include wagons in their lines.

  Of all the Chevy styles, the company’s station wagons were among the most coveted. The descendants of taxicabs especially designed for transporting luggage-laden travelers to and from railroad depots—hence their name—they were status symbols, the SUVs of their day, priced substantially higher than identically equipped sedans and the subject of admiring press attention. And they sold not only to suburban households but to urban apartment dwellers who aspired to the got-it-made lifestyle they advertised. “It could be,” BusinessWeek guessed, “that the wagons, in addition to their great utility, now appeal strongly to style-conscious buyers.” Popular Science compared them to mink stoles as “a symbol of opulence,” explaining: “As a sop to man’s vanity, the wagon is unsurpassed. Parked at the country club or the supermarket, it lends social status to the owner.”