Memories of Enterprise: ‘Perfect’ car never needed gasoline

By Ricky Adams
Ledger Correspondent

Published: September 25, 2008

It was the “perfect” car decades before the current gas spike that’s hamstrung many of us accustomed to driving places we don’t have to be.
No, this ain’t about “The Blue Goose,” Burns Whittaker’s “Minnie Heartaches,” Joe Bynum’s “Leapin’ Lena,” Jim Reese’s Beige Rage,” Larry Howell’s “Plum Bum,” or “The Raven,” one of the 1960s vintage automobiles owned by the late Jordan Rowe.
A decade before two coats of “Richard Petty Blue” were sprayed on the 1960 Dodge Seneca 2-door sedan, with the 225-cubic inch, 6-cylinder engine in 1966, the price of gas wasn’t a “perfect” car issue.
It didn’t matter J.O. “Jr.” Counts’ Southern Oil Co., two doors from our Dothan Road house, and other
independent stations like Save-Way on Park Avenue and Enterprise Oil Well between Southside Curb Market and the Terry Motel, sold several gallons of regular gas for $1.
Perspective is
everything when comparing past and present.
The “Blue Goose” cost $275 and came with four pretty good tires on the ground and two spares in the trunk. It took most of one summer to burn the 30 gallons of gas won
during grand-opening
ceremonies of Cliff Goodson’s Amoco Station across Park Avenue from City Auto Sales, the Dodge garage.
Typically, when not using “free” gas, this Baby Boomer boy bought $2 worth of petrol at the time, but unlike the cars previously mentioned, which mostly weren’t gas-guzzlers, the “perfect” car came closer to making gas than using it; more on that shortly.
Recent reports from fellows owning those jacked-up pickups with big tires have it that they’re spending well above $275 a MONTH to roll around town perched high above those around them.
A newscast two weeks ago said consumers won’t buy brand-new Hummers for $25,000.
Used car magnate Curtis Edwards, at The Lot, said gas-guzzlers can’t be given away at some of the auction venues he frequents.
Several vacant lots hereabouts serve as temporary homes to some of these vehicles with “For Sale” signs pasted on them.
Soon, it won’t be surprising to either see a knock-off of T. Boone Pickens’ Amarillo, Texas “Cadillac Ranch” on Rucker Boulevard or “Abandoned Lots” where “Lemon Lots” now live.
You won’t find one of the “perfect” cars at any such places, and no gas station attendant - remember them? - ever pumped gas into the tank of the one Daddy and Preston Richburg brought to the House of Adams one afternoon in the late 1950s, solely for the riding pleasure of the future owner of the “Blue Goose.”
The “perfect” car, a forerunner of today’s SUV, traveled the highways and byways of this country several years before President Eisenhower’s vision, the Interstate highway system, was paved.
Mountains, valleys, long highways along the Eastern Seaboard and other oceans, bays and gulfs, and “the Mother Road,” Route 66, et al provided pavement aplenty for the 2-door’s many tours.
The “perfect” car went to Alaska, Niagara Falls, Yankee Stadium, Chicago, San Antonio and all the amusement and national parks Boomer youngsters dreamed of visiting one day.
The car was a late-1940s Crosley station wagon that burned absolutely NO gas!
It wasn’t powered by solar or steam power.
In its second life in the late-1950s, in our yard, it didn’t have an engine.
Imaginatively speaking, it didn’t need one.