news-record.com

"Bye, bye, Miss American Pie; drove my Camry to the levee, but the levee was dry ..."(Apologies to Don McLean).

That doesn't sound right, does it? "Camry" doesn't rhyme with "levee." It doesn't fit in with Americana like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.

But is Chevy about to be driven off the levee? Along with Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac, Saturn and GMC trucks?

Chevy's parent company, General Motors Corp., is in the drink right now and yelling for a life preserver to save it from bankruptcy. Chrysler and Ford, which once shared the "Big Three" pedestal with it, are on the levee's slippery slope. Not everybody is enthusiastic about bailing them out.

It brings to mind the immortal misquotation of Charles "Engine Charlie" Wilson, the GM president who became secretary of defense in the Ike administration: "What's good for General Motors is good for the country."

That was in the heady postwar years when General Motors, like the country that birthed it, was at the top of the heap. GM and its Detroit compatriots were the biceps of the American manufacturing muscle, guarantors of our industrial supremacy. No one could possibly imagine GM going belly up. Ford was a lusty competitor, though no threat to GM's supremacy. Chrysler was a solid third, and if you didn't like one of the Big Three you could pick from among a variety of American brands: Studebaker, Nash, Hudson, Packard, Willys and the newly minted Kaiser-Frazer.

The Germans were marketing an ugly little rear-engined, air-cooled four-banger that got pretty good gas mileage but couldn't hold cruising speed on a long hill. The French were bringing out a wimpish rear-engined air-cooled car called the Renault, which would soon have its owners muttering "pardon my French" as they called the repair shop. The Japanese were tooling up a couple of entries called the Toyopet and the Datsun Fair Lady, neither of which had much impact on the American market. Honda was an obscure Japanese manufacturer of motorcycles.

And here was GM, dusting off its chrome-plated beauties with their wrap-around windshields and big-bore V-8s that got 15 or 16 miles to the gallon on the road, but got it NOW. I remember the time someone taunted my Uncle Bud by telling him his big ol' Buick was a gas hog. He replied: "Well, when the tank gets empty, I'll just fill it up again." At 30 cents a gallon, he could afford it, even on blue-collar wages. I remember my Uncle Floyd, who drove an Olds 88, explaining how he maximized his fuel economy: "I drove it slow for a while, but figured that the gas couldn't possibly go through the fuel line any faster than it was, so now I just drive as fast as I can, get there as quick as I can, then turn it off."

Back then, driving the American automobile was like taking your parlor on the road. Those magnificent land yachts were so big that the hood ornament was in one county, the rear bumper was in another, and there was plenty of room for the whole family in between. Those were the days when the whole family was generally going to the same place. The American family sedan rode like a Greyhound bus and generally cornered like one.

The American automobile became a part of our culture and a part of our vocabulary. Until it came along, the economy never got into high gear, schemes never backfired, and enterprises never ran out of gas. Anything that made the bells and whistles go off was a "doozy," possibly a play on Duesenberg, a great American car of the '30s. Athletes could never have been the sparkplugs of their teams without automobiles that were fired by sparkplugs.

The American car became part of our musical heritage, too. "Come away with me, Lucille, in my merry Oldsmobile," went the 1905 lyric. Depression-era swains sang, "Just give me a date and a Ford V-8 with a rumble seat for two and let me wahoo!"

The '50s gave us songs about road racing: "The Hot Rod Race" between a Ford and a Mercury; Chuck Berry's "Maybelline," about a race between a Ford V-8 hot rod and a Cadillac Coupe de Ville; and "Beep Beep," about a "little Nash Rambler" that pulled neck and neck with a Cadillac at 110 mph while the Rambler driver lowered his window and yelled, "Say buddy, how do you get this thing out of second gear."

Then came the Beach Boys' tribute to the Pontiac muscle car of the '60s: "turn it on, wind it up, blow it out -- GTO!" They also bowed toward the Ford Thunderbid: "She'll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes her T-bird away." Mack Rice gave us "Mustang Sally, guess you better slow your Mustang down." Cole Porter referred to the classic Chevy/Ford rivalry in a lyric that went, "The Ford is chasing the Chevy, but nobody's chasing me."

When I was a kid, schoolyard arguments usually centered on three questions: Can Gene Autry whip Roy Rogers? Can Superman whip Captain Marvel? Can a Chevrolet outrun a Ford?

I can't imagine American youngsters arguing over whether a Honda could outrun a Toyota, or even whether an Infiniti could outrun a Beemer. And would anyone write a song called "Nissan Nancy, slow your Nissan down"?

I doubt it.

Now the foreign competition may take our T-Bird away, along with our Impala, our Taurus, and our Charger; our Suburban, our Explorer, our Durango.

I don't care who's at fault (to a large extent it's the American public). I hope when we drive our Chevy to the levee, it will be to savor the stream of history of which the American automobile is so deeply a part. And not to drive the Chevy and its cousins over the edge and into the deep.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.