Soul, spirit, character. Call it what you want. We all know a car is not alive so it cannot literally have a soul. It can't have "a soul" but it sure as hell can have "soul". Cars have personality and charecter all their own and it doesn't make a bit of difference who owns it or who built it. I had a car once, I won't mention the make model or year because it really doesn't matter, that had a personality all it's own. It had an automatic transmission with a console shifter. To get the transmission into drive you actually had to pull the shifter back past "D" a little and then slide it up into place. Like someone else already posted, you had to pump the gas exactly three times when starting it cold and it would fire right up. When it was warm, you only had to put your foot on the throttle just the right amount to get it to fire right up. All the little things you feel it is necessary to tell someone about before you let them take your car for a spin.....thats the soul, the spirit and the character. If you don't get it, you don't get it. I feel bad for the people that don't get it because when you DO get it, its just soooo gooood.
Back on page 5 it was said that an old car makes you think about stuff. Alot of old things do. Something that is mechanical that you can see working makes some people think about stuff. I think about alot of stuff while driving in my car. Everytime the small chunk that is missing in my steering wheels p*** over my fingers I wonder how it got there. When I focus on the scratch on the windshield, I wonder how much snow they got the night before when a previous owner s****ed the windshield. Back seats can provoke all sorts of thoughts. I was watching an auction the other day when a car crossed the blocks and it was noted that some important guy in the past had gave the car to his mistress. The guy noted, "if that back seat could talk". Is that soul? Who cares and why does anyone else really care what someone else thinks?
I am having a blast reading all the arguments and stories listed here. I agree that inanimate objects don't have soul like humans, but we do imprint a little of ourselves on everything we touch as we travel through life. I know sailors definitely believe their ships have soul/personality. I have 19 years in the Navy(Seabees) and have friends who serve on ships who talk about "their" ship like they do their girl friends or wives. Sometimes they gripe about her and sometimes they praise her. They tell stories about how "she" did this or that all the time knowing that the ship is an inanimate object that simply reflect all the lives who have touched it. You never met anyone more supers***ious than one of these guys. I have a 1958 Apache SWB sitting in the garage at home that was given to my son by the original owner. We have completely rebuilt it to suit us and I like to think that Hugh and Jenny would be pleased to see what we have done. The truck originally was Aztec Gold which prompted Jenny to name the truck "Goldie". The truck has been '75 Chevy Corvette yellow since 1999 but we still call it "Goldie" for some reason and every once in a while I get a whiff of Hugh's cigar when I get in the truck. Both Hugh and Jenny are gone now but Jeffrey remembers them very well even though he hasn't seen either of them in 10 years. When we started cleaning out the mice nests I found two road maps undamaged in the glove box. Hugh and Jenny drove the truck from Oklahoma to California in the fall of '58 and Jenny drew the route in red pencil on the maps and wrote a diary of the trip along route 66 there and back. I saved the maps and we used to put them in the open glove box at car shows until I caught a guy trying to "lift" them one day. He claimed he just wanted to look at the maps... right.
The Jalopy Journal
