Safety Last

Looking back, it's a wonder we survived. Driving in the 1960s, I mean. Well, riding, actually--in 1968, I was only seven and my brother and two sisters were even younger, so my parents did all the driving, unless it was my Uncle Jim scaring me to death by gunning his new Chrysler to 110 mph so I'd make it to summer camp in time for a lesson in canoe safety. Viewed through the enlightening prism of experience, though, even sedate car rides back then seem packed with peril. Passenger safety? In the 1960s that meant, "Do not touch the cigarette lighter to your Major Matt Mason action figure or you'll produce stinky cabin fumes that'll make your head feel funny."

All this was on my mind recently as I loaded my four-year-old daughter, Juliette, into the back of MT's long-term Land Rover LR3 for a weekend drive to the beach. Childproof door locks set: check. Rear power windows deactivated: check. Contoured safety seat properly tethered to federally mandated LATCH-system anchors: check. Daughter correctly configured in seat with lap and shoulder restraints tightly buckled: check. By this point, Juliette faintly resembled John Glenn about to launch in Friendship 7. But we'd only dipped into the LR3's myriad safety systems: side-curtain airbags, crumple zones, steel door beams, ABS, Dynamic Stability Control, and more. We even had orbiting guidance satellites watching over us on our 15-minute Saturday jaunt into the wilds of Santa Monica.

Compare this with 1968, when my mom's entire predrive checklist consisted of: "Get in." And that was even when our "jaunt" was a 500-mile summer slog from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to see cousins in our previous hometown of Washington D.C. Into our 1964 VW Squareback we'd pile: mom, four kids, grandmother, and lots of Schweppes tonic water to soothe my brother's stomach after he inevitably threw up as we rocketed through the mountains of Pennsylvania. My father, being a law professor at the University of Michigan, was always conveniently busy during these trips with "a highly important casebook revision"--he'd take the plane.

Seatbelts? Oh, they were in there somewhere--buried under the back seat with ossified French fries and dehydrated Schweppes. Not that it would've mattered to my brother and youngest sister, who were unwillingly conducting zero-g experiments in the tiny cargo area over the rear swing axles. Safety seats? The VW's aft cabin sported a stark, black bench with all the suppleness of a manhole cover. Worse, it had an oddly convex shape, which tended to keep me and my younger sister perpetually spring-loaded, ready at the slightest chuckhole to perform a two-and-a-half gainer into the front seats (degree of difficulty: 2.3). Other on-board safety gear included thin vinyl trim backed by finely hardened German steel, exposed rivets and screw heads, and plenty of convenient ashtrays.

Our VW had no air-conditioning, of course. In order to breathe, one had to aim the front fly windows backward and crack open the big, forward-hinged side panes. This would create a venturi effect, in which the 75-mph Interstate breeze (my mother drove like A.J. Foyt) would instantaneously rise to an in-cabin airspeed of roughly 150 mph--making our faces look like Colonel John Stapp's on the rocket sled and effectively treating us to nine straight hours of explosive decompression.

Somehow, we all made it through to today's crumple-zoned, airbagged security. Well, not Major Matt Mason. Somewhere on the road to Washington, he hit the ejection handle.