Welcome!

Twisted from the Sprue is my little corner of the internet. This site started as a simple web presence for the Three Rivers IPMS model club - as in middle-aged guys who never quite out-grew gluing together miniature cars and planes (and not a club of really good looking people who have their pictures taken for underwear ads and the like). The club now has a real web-site, and this blog is a place for me to post stuff I find interesting or just want to ramble on about.

Its reassuring to know you're not the only guy with an obsession for trivia - if you happen across something interesting here, or have a question or something to contribute, please leave a comment or drop me an email at dnschmtz@gmail.com

Don
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Thursday, March 5, 2015

The Day the Music Died - part 3 of A Muscle Car History

Don McClean released the album American Pie in 1971, his anthem to the rock-n-roll of the just ended 1960s. The title song runs for over 8 minutes and takes up most of the first side of the vinyl LP, but it still managed to be a big hit. The lyrics are cryptic in the way of early Bob Dylan, but while exactly what it all means is up for debate (McClean once said "It means I don't ever have to work again if I don't want to!") the names and events mentioned clearly refer to the songs, singers and musicians of the decade. It starts with a verse about the day in 1959 that early rock-n-roll legends Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash - "the day the music died" - but its just as easy to imagine he was singing about the end of the hot-rod and muscle car era.

The evolution and popularity of fast cars largely paralleled that of rock-n-roll (and a lot of early rock-n-roll featured hot-rods and muscle-cars, including songs like Hot Rod Lincoln, Mustang Sally, Little GTO, Dead Man's Curve, and every song the Beach Boys put out before 1966). But by the late 1960s music had gone in a new direction - much like the rest of pop culture - thanks largely to the Beatles and the war in Vietnam.


Its hard to read about the events that led the US into Vietnam and not think: "Did Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, and Westmoreland all sleep through history class? What were they thinking?!" There were eerie parallels to the American Revolution, except the US was playing the part of the British, and if you remember, they didn't win either.  Thanks largely to politicians who didn't want to look "soft on communism" the US got itself entangled in a revolutionary war that had grown into a civil war, in a third rate country half way around the world, of no strategic or economic value - and stayed at it long after it stopped making sense.

For those of you too young to have picked this up in the newspapers, modern Vietnam started out as a colony of France. It was occupied by the Japanese during WWII, when France was busy being occupied by the Germans. Following the war the native Vietnamese decided it was time for independence, and set about having their own Revolution to kick out the French. It was your typical grimy little war of a colony against a weakened and preoccupied home country halfway around the world, and after nearly 10 years of fighting the French washed their hands of the place.

Which should have been the end of it. Colonies were very much out of style, and many gained their independence following WWII when the last colonial powers (England and France) were busy trying to put their cities and economies back together. Except most of the Vietnamese revolutionaries were nominally communist (communism probably sounded like a really good idea in a country where the national industry was subsistence farming), and "communist" was a very dirty word in US politics in 1954.

So the US pulled some strings at the United Nations and managed to take over propping up the remains of France's puppet government in Saigon.  For the next 10 years the nominally communist Vietnamese (who mostly lived in the northern part of Vietnam), fought the nominally democratic Vietnamese in the south in a grimy little civil war. The communists had the numbers while the democratic government had US military aid, but that just delayed the inevitable: by the mid 1960s the Vietnamese government was about to collapse.  Which led to 200,000 American troops shipping out to Vietnam in 1965, a number that would grow to over 500,000 by 1968.

As the number of US troops deployed grew in 1965 and 66, public sentiment quickly turned against what was seen as (depending on your point of view) a pointless, immoral and/or un-winnable war. While teenagers facing the draft were the ones protesting in the streets, the war was equally unpopular with their families, religious leaders, celebrities, military veterans and just about everyone else except the defense contractors.

In 1967 Arlo Guthrie released his first album - Alice's Restaurant - another LP with one whole side dedicated to the title song - actually more a comedy monologue than a song - encouraging young men to protest the war and the draft. This wasn't the first anti-war protest song, but it was the first really popular  one, and it came just as US casualties jumped from in-the-noise to levels not seen since the Korean war. Alice's Restaurant would set the mood for pop music and American culture for the rest of the war. Hit songs would soon have titles like Fortunate Son, Street-Fightin-Man, Revolution, and War.

Despite public opposition to the war and some really good protest songs, presidents Johnson and then Nixon both tried hard to "win" the war, believing it would be political suicide to withdraw and accept the stigma of being Commander in Chief of the first ever American military defeat. As a result, the war in Vietnam dragged on for yet another bloody decade.

But I've drifted way off topic - I was talking about the end of the Muscle Car era.

Look at the sales figures for any of the popular muscle cars of the 60s and you'll see a big drop in the 1970 model year, even though total sales (across all models of cars) were about the same as in 1969. Mustang sales dropped by about 30% even though the 1970 model was visibly little different than the '69, and with the new 351 Cleveland engine was probably the best of the first generation Mustangs. GTO sales were similarly down over 40% in a single year, as were sales of the Chevy Camaro.  And sales would keep falling for the 1971 model year.

There are a lot of theories as to why.

In the 1960s people started worrying about leaded gasoline. When it burned, the lead ended up in the air and people breathed it. Even though the concentration was low, the exposure was constant everywhere there were roads, and there was increasing evidence it was causing health problems, especially in little kids. Other kinds of pollution - un-burned hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen - were causing smog in cities like Los Angeles where the geography tended to trap exhaust fumes. In 1970, the newly created Environmental Protection Agency passed a law phasing out leaded gasoline and setting limits on tail-pipe emissions. Even though the law didn't kick in for several years, in anticipation automakers started lowering the compression ratios of their engines, which meant lower horsepower. But the compression drop didn't happen until the 1971 model year, and the pollution control systems were phased in gradually throughout the '70s, well after muscle car sales had fallen off a cliff.

OPEC - the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries - basically Saudi Arabia and a handful of smaller middle-eastern countries - figured out they could cut production and drive up oil prices and so make more money selling less oil. This was bad news for muscle cars that gulped gas at 10mpg (or less!)  but again the artificial shortage and price hikes didn't happen until 1973. In 1969 and 70 gasoline was as cheap and plentiful as it had been throughout the decade.

Auto insurance companies started raising their rates on muscle cars, presumably because the kind of people who bought them did foolish things in them that caused more accidents than more normal cars (or maybe they just figured out that the people buying new muscle cars had more disposable income and could be squeezed a little harder than most). Its hard to figure out exactly when this happened, but it seems to have been well before 1970. As early as 1967 car makers were under-rating the horsepower of their most powerful muscle car engines (for example the Chevy L88 and Ford "Cobra Jet" engines) to placate insurance companies who thought muscle cars were already too fast. Again, insurance rates were no doubt hurting muscle car sales, but that didn't suddenly change in 1970.

What did happen in the run-up to 1970 was a little more subtle.

First there was inflation. After a decade of stable prices, in 1966 inflation started edging up - not a lot, but a little, and a little more every year. Flash back to the beginning of this ramble: inflation was up because the government was printing money to pay and equip thousands of newly drafted soldiers (and NASA engineers, but that's another story). The government was trying to buy guns and butter, hiding the true cost of the war in the hidden tax that is inflation while hoping to keep the economy cranking away so hard that no one would notice. Unfortunately the government was buying a lot of guns and the bill was coming due.

At the same time the Baby Boomers were just starting to enter the work force, delivering wave after wave of new high school and college graduates faster than the economy could absorb them.  1970 would see unemployment edge up for the first time in over 10 years.

Neither of these economic factors were big (yet), but they nibbled away at disposable income and consumer confidence. Muscle cars are the kind of guilty pleasures you buy when you've already paid for the important things and still have money left over, and there just wasn't as much left over as there used to be.

Then there was safety. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s Congress would hold investigations into automotive safety, partly because automakers tended to cover up safety problems (for obvious reasons), and partly because (extremely biased personal opinion) the auto industry was a juicy target. The investigations at least gave the impression that Congress was looking out for everyday drivers/voters, while creating lots of opportunities for politicians to curry favor with rich auto manufacturers. Basically business as usual for Washington, but it helped sow the seeds of American Industry as evil capitalists who would sell their own grandmother for a fast buck.

One of the government flacks at a few of those investigations was a wet-behind-the-ears Harvard Law School graduate named Ralph Nader. Young Ralph had quickly traded relatively honest work as a lawyer and history professor for a government job. In his spare time he wrote a book called Unsafe at Any Speed chronicling the evils of General Motors, including an especially damning profile of the handling problems with Chevy's first generation Corvair.

Nader's book demonstrated a poor understanding of engineering and business and a willingness to twist the facts to support his arguments, but he came a little too close to the truth on the industry's indifference to safety. At the time American cars and roads were the safest in the world; Detroit's sin was in thinking that was good enough and so putting money into the styling and performance that sold cars instead of making them safer still. As Nixon would discover a decade later, the real damage in any scandal is in the attempt to cover it up: GM would hire private investigators to dig into Nader's personal life, harass him and even try to entrap him with eager young ladies. Nader would sue GM for an invasion of privacy and win a little over $400,000 (which was real money in 1965); he would use the money to lobby for automotive safety regulations.

Nader's efforts are often credited with the creation of the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration in 1970, which finally provided some much needed oversight of the auto industry, but as a side effect the auto makers became increasingly skittish about building performance cars. When muscle car sales sagged, the automakers would abandon that part of their lineup without a fight.

But perhaps the biggest impact on the muscle car came through a curious bit of serendipity.

On June 22nd, 1969 the Cuyahoga River would catch fire. That seems ludicrous today - and even in 1969 it was the source of a lot of late-night TV punchlines. Truth be told the Cuyahoga was no more polluted than other US rivers (like Pittsburgh's Monongahela) but it was a winding and slow-moving river running through northern Ohio and past Cleveland on its way to Lake Erie. There was a lot of heavy industry on the river and no one worried if a bit of solvent or lubricant was spilled and made its way into the water, and then all you needed was a spark or open flame. The fire wasn't especially big compared to those in the past: it did only minor damage and was pretty much out before anyone showed up to photograph it.

But then on July 18th, 1969  Senator Ted Kennedy would drive off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, resulting in the death of a young woman.  And just two days later, Neil Armstrong would walk on the moon, bumping the Kennedy story off the front pages. But if you were up late watching Armstrong and Aldrin take their historic first steps, you know the TV camera they had with them wasn't very good. America would have to wait a week for actual film to make the trip back to see clear color images of Neil and Buzz.

So it was that TIME magazine would put Kennedy on the cover the following week, along with a special feature on the moon landing, and purely by chance, tucked in the back a one-page story on the Cuyahoga fire (they would dig up some photos from an earlier and more dramatic fire in 1952 - the last time the river had burned). Millions bought the magazine for the moon photos, got all the sordid details on Kennedy as a bonus, and eventually got around to reading about the somewhat inconsequential river fire.

Those two stories - Chappaquiddick and Cuyahoga - would further erode America's confidence in government and industry and kick off a grass-roots effort to clean up the environment. As the 1960s ended, it was like the end of one of those seemingly endless grade-school summer vacations, and suddenly America was ready to deal with more important things. Against this background of public opinion, muscle cars had become a symbol of wretched excess. The times had changed, and the automobile had moved on, at least for a little while.

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