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I cruised in my Dad's 1969 Rambler. I got a lot of abuse for it. I would love to have that car today. Then I bought my first ride, a 1984 Chevette 4-door. It spontaneously combusted one night while cruisin' (thank GOD).
After that, I owned a 1984 Shelby Charger. That car got a lot of attention in the day. Then a 1987 Ford Ranger that I had painted and lowered. It was also an attention-getter. The last car that I cruised in was a 1987 Mazda RX7. I loved that car.
My 1st wife told me that she was going to start driving the RX7 and I could have her POS Beretta so I traded the RX7 on a truck to keep her from getting it.
Buddy, I FEEL YOUR PAIN crusing in a 1969 Rambler American.
My first car was an straight 6 AMC Gremlin. Not even a V8. "The trunkless wonder". A chic magnet, it was not. What made it worse is, I had a rabid desire for a 1967 Mustang and my father still made me buy an AMC Gremline
WITH MY OWN MONEY! It is not like he bought it for me.
Lord I hated that car. Is still suffer PTSD anytime I see one in a movie. I can't even watch "Gremlins".
I guess it could have worse. Could have been an AMC Pacer. Six one way, half dozen the other.
I did sell the Gremlin a year later, and bought a 1968 Ford Mustang California Special with a Holley double pumper carb and a radical cam. Now THAT was a great car for cruising. I felt like a million bucks in that red Mustang and I could not have cared less about the rich guys with Porsches and Vettes.
Car culture is pretty much dead, so I would expect cruising would be as well.
We had a lot more room to cruise back in the day. We also were bored. Young adults have way more to do to occupy their time these days. Cars are also really expensive. You could cruise some very cool cars for relatively cheap back in the 1970s.
Meanwhile, street takeovers by criminal hooligans running amok are growing by leaps and bounds, if that is any consolation?
That and street driven ATVs.
It must be a location thing. Here in the metro Detroit area it's alive and well.
In the summer months:
Monday: Cruise in at a local shopping center, usually 100-150 cars
Tuesday: Mopar gathering at the Donut Cutter on Woodward
Wednesday: Downtown Mt. Clemens
Thursday: Sick Pizza Oxford
Friday: Continental Lanes, Gratiot Ave.
Saturday: Cars and coffee Pastiener's Woodward Ave.(usually 150 cars plus) , and M1 Concourse (500 cars plus)
These are just the ones local to me, there are others on these nights as well.
Not much on Sunday's. If one heads to Woodward there are usually people cruising around, or in many of the local small towns there are people cruising.
I was born in 1987 and I simply don't get it. What was "cruisin' " actually for - was it to meet new people? Or simply to meet your existing friends when you have no way to contact each other over the phone to agree on a time and place? Or it was like an informal carpool meeting location to start a shopping/social trip? Or something else?
In my generation, if you want to meet new people, you go to bars, clubs, or group events, and to meet friends, you pre-agree on a time and a place. If you have buddies in the car, that is "carpooling". "Cruisin' " is not even part of our vocabulary as Millennials.
I guess the closest my generation gets to this is picking up one friend in the car, then having that person call/text all the others to coordinate plans while you're driving, potentially to pick up another friend or two. But that doesn't sound similar to what you all are talking about.
The Purpose for Cruising
Cruising in cars up and down the main drag downtown in your city was done to fight teenage weekend boredom, the way kids in the 1980s would just hang out in shopping malls. It was a pointless endeavor to feel like you were doing something and pretend you were socializing.
Cruising started in Detroit Michgan, the Mecca for car nuts during an ancient age when American car makers were gods and still dominated the globe. If Detroit did it, it HAD to be cool, and we HAD to do it.
As a guy, we always hoped to pick up chicks but never did, unless you were a rich older guy or a real stud muffin. Most of us bombed. If you were 27 years old driving a new Corvette or Trans Am, then the entire harem of 18 year old girls was at your disposal.
If you had a great car, you went cruising to show it off and everybody would honk at you and girls would say "cute car". Maybe you would get a phone number. You blasted your rock and roll music as loud as possible, especially when trying to drown out the country western music blaring from a passing cowboy in his lifted Chevy Blazer.
If you went cruising every weekend, people actually got to know you because they would see you regularly. You would never see them other than cruising, but you would honk and say "hey Camaro girl! Looking good baby!" You would never learn her name. She would always and everywhere remain "Camaro girl".
You were elated if she gave you a big "Whoooooo!", in response as she passed by. You were SOMEBODY.
I don't know what girls got out of cruising. It is not like "hooking up" was a thing back then. I think it was their 1970s version of snap chat or Tik Tok. The hot girls got a ton of attention so they went crusing for the strokes. They got a lot of "likes" out cruising, but it was cat calls and wolf whistles instead of emojis.
Collecting cat calls from hot guys and blowing off the rest of us was an ego feeder, I am sure. The plain girls -- well, they didn't get cat calls or wolf whistles. They were just cannon fodder like us.
The serious men could set up street races with other serious men who they challenged while cruising. Nobody raced while crusing in my neck of the woods. They would leave and race somewhere or wait until after cruising was over.
Cruising was just something lame to do to every Friday night to fight boredom and feel like you were doing something because by God YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING SOMTHING.
Crusing safely in your own car, you were not actually forced to interact with girls and embarass yourself like if you went out dancing and just got turned down by all the girls because you weren't one of the tall guys. You could pull over if a girl responded, or you could get out of dodge really fast when you blew it and put your foot in your mouth, leaving you with egg all over your face.
After you went home, you bathed in the glow of satisfaction that you had been out on the town and had been "doing something".
Last edited by Igor Blevin; 03-27-2024 at 07:39 AM..
Cruising started in Detroit Michgan, the era Mecca for car nuts, so it HAD to be cool, and we HAD to do it.
well the historians blamed it on so-cal, the mexicans, the 'short chort' (lowrider) right after WW2 when car ownership became mainstream by returning GIs.
Cruising in cars up and down the main drag downtown in your city was done to fight teenage weekend boredom, the way kids in the 1980s would just hang out in shopping malls. It was a pointless endeavor to feel like you were doing something and pretend you were socializing.
Cruising started in Detroit Michgan, the Mecca for car nuts during an ancient age when American car makers were gods and still dominated the globe. If Detroit did it, it HAD to be cool, and we HAD to do it.
As a guy, we always hoped to pick up chicks but never did, unless you were a rich older guy or a real stud muffin. Most of us bombed. If you were 27 years old driving a new Corvette or Trans Am, then the entire harem of 18 year old girls was at your disposal.
If you had a great car, you went cruising to show it off and everybody would honk at you and girls would say "cute car". Maybe you would get a phone number. You blasted your rock and roll music as loud as possible, especially when trying to drown out the country western music blaring from a passing cowboy in his lifted Chevy Blazer.
If you went cruising every weekend, people actually got to know you because they would see you regularly. You would never see them other than cruising, but you would honk and say "hey Camaro girl! Looking good baby!" You would never learn her name. She would always and everywhere remain "Camaro girl".
You were elated if she gave you a big "Whoooooo!", in response as she passed by. You were SOMEBODY.
I don't know what girls got out of cruising. It is not like "hooking up" was a thing back then. I think it was their 1970s version of snap chat or Tik Tok. The hot girls got a ton of attention so they went crusing for the strokes. They got a lot of "likes" out cruising, but it was cat calls and wolf whistles instead of emojis.
Collecting cat calls from hot guys and blowing off the rest of us was an ego feeder, I am sure. The plain girls -- well, they didn't get cat calls or wolf whistles. They were just cannon fodder like us.
The serious men could set up street races with other serious men who they challenged while cruising. Nobody raced while crusing in my neck of the woods. They would leave and race somewhere or wait until after cruising was over.
Cruising was just something lame to do to every Friday night to fight boredom and feel like you were doing something because by God YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING SOMTHING.
Crusing safely in your own car, you were not actually forced to interact with girls and embarass yourself like if you went out dancing and just got turned down by all the girls because you weren't one of the tall guys. You could pull over if a girl responded, or you could get out of dodge really fast when you blew it and put your foot in your mouth, leaving you with egg all over your face.
After you went home, you bathed in the glow of satisfaction that you had been out on the town and had been "doing something".
Exactly this. Sure there were the "street light to street light" guys that might run for a gear maybe two, but I don't consider that street racing.
Here in my area, the serious guys would meet up at a place called Race Rock Cafe (gone), Eddie's Drive Inn, the nearby A&W, or Pampa Lanes (gone). Walk the lot , lock in a race, then meet up later and get it done at a spot that a quarter mile could be run.
49, 50 Olds were the first OHV V8's and the fastest cars a hi school kid could afford. I graduated in 61. 55 chevys were too new and expensive but a couple of kids had them. At Burbank Hi in front of the school before school started was a drag racing show.
well the historians blamed it on so-cal, the mexicans, the 'short chort' (lowrider) right after WW2 when car ownership became mainstream by returning GIs.
even some songs about it.
Yeah, it didn't start in Detroit and definitely didn't start in the '70s.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Quote:
Originally Posted by V8 Vega
49, 50 Olds were the first OHV V8's and the fastest cars a hi school kid could afford. I graduated in 61. 55 chevys were too new and expensive but a couple of kids had them. At Burbank Hi in front of the school before school started was a drag racing show.
We were in the Bay Area, and my brother had a '55 Olds, I had a '58 Chrysler Windsor. Both were ugly but fast, and in those days we didn't have to be in a good-looking car to cruise. The guys loved mine because we could fit 6-7 people in it with the two big bench seats and no gear shift with the push-button torque-flight.
You'd be quite surprised if you went to the drag strip today. The outlaw classes, pro mod, RVW, LDR , grudge racers, etc, all have people tuning by laptop. Some paid tuners sit at home and tune cars remotely across the world. There's inputs from all kinds of sensors, front body shock travel, rear shock travel, driveshaft speed, vehicle speed, timing (each cylinder), boost, etc....all checked and tuned every pass. Not to mention external inputs as well, air, wind , track temp, track adhesion.
With out all this technology, we'd never be seeing twin turbo cars making 4500 hp, getting down the 1/8th mile in 3.5 seconds at over 200mph on a 315 drag radial.
Drag racing technology, and racing overall, has become deeper but narrower. The specialists and the committed amateurs are achieving remarkable results, and doing so scientifically and systematically. But the slapdash contingent, the test-and-tune once-a-year amateurs, are becoming infrequent. Affinity for cars overall, in the broader culture, is waning.
A compelling analogy is that of horses. Surely even today, there are committed horse-fanciers, competitive riders of various sort. There's a more scientific approach to the husbandry of horses, their training and breeding and so on. But the average person has little contact with horses. Even a rare summertime treat, riding a horse around the perimeter of an arena or a trail, is something that the vast majority of the population has never done, nor particularly cares to do. Horses have become a historical curiosity, even if among specialists, they remain a vibrant hobby or even a way to earn a living.
Last edited by ohio_peasant; 03-27-2024 at 02:25 PM..
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