I've got the sweetest set of wheels in town

I had an hour for lunch. I stopped first at the Shell station across the street, run by a man who operated juke boxes and sold his old 45s for a nickel apiece. Then a block down Neil Street to the Chuck Wagon diner, one of Col. Harland Sanders' first franchised restaurants, before he started concentrating on his own stores. I met him the day they started serving his chicken, and he asked me how I liked his spices. At six, I was given a penny by Mr. J. C. Penny, so now I had met two giants of marketing.

In between the gas station and the diner was Maxey Motors, a Studebaker-Packard dealer. I didn't pay it much heed. All I knew about Studebakers was that kids joked about how they looked like they were going in both directions at once. Many years later I discovered that Raymond Loewy's design for the 1953 Starliner was proclaimed a work of art by the Museum of Modern Art

But enough about Starliners. One autumn day as I walked bent into a chill wind, something caught the corner of my eye in the window of Maxey Motors. I turned and stood transfixed. It was the new 1957 Golden Hawk. I forgot the rain. I forgot the chicken. I wanted that car. I walked inside and slowly circled its perfection. Before that day, cars were ordinary things like my dad's boxy '50 Plymouth or my mom's '55 Olds, designed along the lines that made a loaf of bread seem inevitable. Here was a Hawk! that sprang from a lofty crag and circled the firmament with fierce beauty. And it was turbocharged and had a grill that breathed hungry gulps of air.

The next year I got my driver's license, and was able to buy a 1954 Ford for $400. I was not faithful to it. In my heart, I lusted for the Golden Hawk. I became expert at sketching it from memory. In profile, the graceful dip to the headlights, The windshield raked back in harmonious counterbalance. Then the slant of the roof, leading to the uprising of the bold fins. Musical.

When I was 40, and had a little change in my pocket, my thoughts turned back to the 1957 Golden Hawk. One day I was in Los Angeles and paging through Hemmings Motor News, and found an ad for a '57 Hawk being restored in Santa Monica. I went out to look at it, and the deal was sealed. Two months later it was dropped off six blocks from my home by an auto carrier. It was gold with white fins and its engine sounded mighty. Driving it home, my left elbow casually on the window sill, I was aware that every male I passed gave it a second look. Not so much the women. Evolution tells us they are looking for a good provider in a man, not an aesthete. A Volvo, not a Hawk.

What pleasure that car gave me. I kept it at the summer house in Michigan. The nearby Red Arrow Highway, the old route to Detroit, was retro. It even had a Frank Lloyd Wright lookalike motel. I drove the Hawk around Harbor Country and, reader, I was envied. I frequented Mikey's in Bridgeman because they had car hops and I could roll down the window to balance a tray with a burger and shake.

Searching my old reviews for the word Studebaker, I found these words from my forgotten review of "Heavy Petting" on Sept 22. 1989:

There are a lot of adults around today who will tell you that their peak early sexual experiences took place in cars, and that beds will never be as exciting. Not long ago, for example, I took a woman in her 40s for a drive in my 1957 Studebaker, and after sliding across the vinyl upholstery, inhaling the aroma of gasoline and oil, listening to the tires spinning on the gravel, and waiting for the radio tubes to warm up, she reported that all of these physical associations made her feel exactly as if someone was going to try to take off her bra.

That was the autumn I met Chaz. The following summer, we participated in the annual Ride of LaPorte, Indiana. In its simplicity, this is an auto event superior to any other in Indiana, including the Indy 500. What you do is, you park your pre1960 car in a lot at the county fairgrounds, have coffee and hot dogs, and walk around looking at the other cars. My Golden Hawk was parked next to an immaculate Hudson of the sort Miss Daisy was driven in. Now there was a car. You could raise a family in the back seat. It had the Step-Down Design, which allowed it to wipe out every Ford and Chevy in the stock car races. It had less horsepower, but such a low center of gravity it could cream them on the turns.

At 1 p.m., "The Stars and Stripes Forever" blared from the loudspeakers, and we pulled into line and paraded out of the fairgrounds. A state cop with a whistle was directing traffic onto the street. As we passed her she said, "Sharp car!"

"Did you hear that?" I asked Chaz.

"Yeah. Sharp car."

"Sharp car!" I said. "She called it a sharp car!"

"Sharp car, all right," Chaz said. She later told this story about a hundred times, apparently because it meant something special to her.

In the LaPorte Ride, what you do is, you drive up and down the streets of LaPorte and people sit in lawn chairs and look at you. No floats. No marching bands. No Sheriff Sid on his horse. Just beautiful cars. Mostly the citizens of LaPorte sat and nodded pleasantly, waved a little, and poured their iced tea. The Golden Hawk was greeted with applause.

There was a sentimental connection. The Studebaker was manufactured in South Bend, 30 miles away. Some of these people or their relatives may have worked there. One weekend we took the car on a pilgrimage to South Bend, where I expected to see, I dunno, Studebakers lining the streets and backed up at traffic lights, like a Twilight Zone episode. No luck. WE drove down by the St. Joseph river, turned right, and there before us was the Studebaker National Museum. We pulled the Hawk into a parking space marked, "Staff Only." Who seeing the Studebaker would question us? The license plate read FAUCON, French for hawk.

The Museum had one been the largest Studebaker dealership in the world. It was across the street from the original Studebaker plant, now standing forlorn. Inside was a visual sea of vehicles. Cars, fire engines, school buses, troop transports, armored cars. The station wagon whose roof slid back so you could bring home a totem pole standing upright. Classic Packards. Conestoga wagons, because Studebaker was the only wagon-maker that made the transition to cars, The wagons floated down the river to St. Louis, and then were pulled overland into John Wayne movies. The carriage built by Studebaker in which Abraham Lincoln drove to Ford's Theater and did not drive home. The last Packard ever made, a show car for the year Packard died. And Studebakers. And medallions, postcards, books, scarves, hats, jackets, signs, models, mugs, jigsaw puzzles. I discovered the National Studebaker Drivers' Club is the largest car-owners' club in America. If there was one place in the nation that understood the Studebaker, it was South Bend, Indiana. They have a university there, too.

Our guests loved to drive to Mikey's and get the super-thick shakes. One summer our good friends Gillian and Peter Catto and children visited from London. He drove a Bentley. "Now this is something like it," he said from the back seat. I would startle them by flooring the accelerator.

"Now tell the story," Chaz would say,

"When these cars were new," I said. "They weremuch faster that Corvettes or T-Birds. The salesmen would put a client on the back seat, put a $100 bill on the front seat, and say the client could keep the money if he could overcome the force of gravity, or whatever you call it, and lean forward while the Hawk was doing the quarter-mile."

I treasured the Golden Hawk. But I could not give it the care it deserved. I knew nothing about auto mechanics. I found it a good home with Dan Jedlicka, the automobile editor of the Sun-Times, who confessed that he had driven every car in history and the '57 Hawk was the only one he wanted to own.

We have come to the end of our story. If Studebaker died in 1966, its legacy lived on in the Avanti, also designed by Raymond Loewy, the century's greatest industrial designer, who also designed (are you sitting down?) the Coke bottle. Andy Granatelli designed the Avanti engine, and, Wikipedia says, set or broke 34 U.S. land speed records. So timeless was this sports car, its manufacture was continued until four year ago, and even now plans have been announced to resume production in Cancun.

All of that is sequel. The past is prologue. I fell in love with the Golden Hawk in 1966, I bought one in 1988, and now all I have is a model car on my desk. I want to own that car. It may be you love another car in your dreams. If you have turned 40, and have some spare change in your pocket, buy it. If your love is true, that car was like Benjamin Button, and has been growing younger every year.

Jamie Foxx ties a yellow ribbon 'round his Golden Hawk.