Today, on Father's Day, I’m going to make fun of fathers. I'd like to think I'm qualified to do this because I'm a father myself, using the same logic that I can ridicule Alabama because I grew up in Alabama. But before I get started, let me state for the record that I have a wonderful father.
When I think of my father, I think of the fall of 1978, when I was 10 years old. That year, I was intensely interested in automobiles. We lived in a small town with only two Little League teams, the Pintos and the Vegas, named after two of the more disappointing car models in American history.
But wearing a jersey emblazoned with the name of a Ford hatchback that would burst into flames when rear-ended motivated me to become a student of cool cars. My father wasn't really a car guy, but as he used to say, he was interested in anything I was interested in. So that fall, we spent Saturdays visiting car dealerships.
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It was football season, and we'd go to nearby Auburn on game day, which was a ghost town. Everybody would either be packed into the massive stadium or flopped on their couches at home, so we'd have the dealership to ourselves, not to mention the full attention of the salesmen. We'd stroll the lot and examine everything and let the salesmen tell us all about it.
Was there anything more beautiful than a gold 1978 Pontiac Firebird? No. Will there ever be a two-door sedan bigger than the 1978 Ford Thunderbird? No again. My finest hour that fall came whe.
