Rolls-Royce Dreams, poem by Ginger Andrews

ROLLS-ROYCE DREAMS
by Ginger Andrews

Using salal leaves for money,
my youngest sister and I
paid an older sister
to taxi an abandoned car
in our backyard. Our sister
knew how to shift gears,
turn smoothly with a hand signal,
and make perfect screeching stop sounds.

We drove to the beach,
to the market, to Sunday School,
past our would-be boyfriends’ houses,
to any town, anywhere.
We shopped for expensive clothes everywhere.
Our sister would open our doors
and say, Meter’s runnin’ ladies,
but take your time.

We rode all over in that ugly green Hudson
with its broken front windshield, springs poking
through its back seat, blackberry vines growing
through rusted floorboards;
with no wheels, no tires, taillights busted,
headlights missing, and gas gauge on empty.

“Rolls-Royce Dreams” appears in Ginger Andrews‘ collection An Honest Answer (Story Line Press, 1999), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ginger Andrews, born in North Bend, Oregon, in 1956, won the 1999 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize with her volume, An Honest Answer. She has lived most of her life in Oregon, where she cleans houses for a living with her sisters. She is also a janitor and Sunday School teacher at her church. Her poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Poetry, River Sedge, The American Voice, and in several anthologies, including Good Poems edited by Garrison Keillor. Keillor has read poems from An Honest Answer more than ten times on The Writer’s Almanac.

Photo: “1935 Oldsmobile” by Rich K, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Driving with Scott, Zelda, and Scottie Fitzgerald

Photo: F. Scott Fitzgerald with wife Zelda and daughter Scottie, 1923, in the sports coupé the author purchased a few years earlier after selling his first novel, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE.

“When I was a boy, I dreamed that I sat always at the wheel of a magnificent Stutz, a Stutz as low as a snake and as red as an Indiana barn.”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

According to an insightful 1993 article entitled “The Automobile as a Central Symbol in F. Scott Fitzgerald” by Luis Girón Echevarría:

“The cars in Fitzgerald’s life provide a rough gauge by which to measure the discrepancy between the dream and reality of his life, as well as his waning fortunes, and his journey from careless, irresponsible youth to cautious, worried middle-age…

His first car, purchased in 1920 after the publication of his best-selling first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a three-year-oíd sports coupé; during the next two decades he would own a used Rolls-Royce, an oíd Buick, [a] Stutz, a nine-year-old Packard, an oíd 1934 Ford coupé, and, finally, a second-hand 1937 Ford convertible…

It was Fitzgerald’s destiny to begin life dreaming of a magnificent red Stutz Bearcat and to end up driving a second-hand Ford. But during the interval he wrote of America’s dreams and of America’s enduring love affair with the automobile.”

Read more of this fascinating article here.

Good Wives Don’t Drive, poem by Joan Jobe Smith

GOOD WIVES DON’T DRIVE
by Joan Jobe Smith

My father refused to teach my mother
how to drive his car, he said it
wasn’t ladylike in 1949, a woman driver

was no better than a streetwalker she was
to take the bus and be a good wife like
his mother was so my mother took secret

driving lessons, the instructor man
coming every day in his grey sedan
to show her how to let out the clutch

just right so the car wouldn’t jerk, how
to work the choke and the radio, make
turn signals, arm bent up for right

straight out for left, down for slow
me in the backseat watching as we drove
the L.A. streets: Firestone. Rosemead

Sunset Boulevard, Pico, La Brea and
Santa Fe and the day she got her drivers
license she bought her self a green 1939

Ford coupe and waited in the front seat
in the driveway for my father to come home
honked the horn at him when he arrived

and said Hey handsome, need a ride?

Photo: 1939 Ford coupe (a green one!)

Folktale, poem by Bruce Weigl

FOLKTALE
Poem by Bruce Weigl

Nineteen fifty-seven: you
            remember the fins,
don’t you,
            on the baby-
blue-and-white Bel Air?
            Beyond the pigeon coop of ghosts,
beyond the
            many-colored rabbits
penned for the evening
            by the tap-tap
 
of the old man’s cane, you can see
            another man
through the muslin iof time
            throw his baby
high into the air. Women
 
            scream from the porch, laughing.
Oh, the night is thick with blossoms
            from the blue plum tree,
and this man is full of liquor
            and of his own young life,
 
so he throws his baby boy
            high into the sky
as it is taken by evening
            Irrevocably away from them
so that it seemed
            that I would not come down. 

NOTE: “Folktales” appears in The Unraveling Strangeness (2002), a poetry collection by Bruce Weigl. (Available at Amazon.com.) Critic Denise Levertov called Weigl “one of the best poets now writing in America.”

Rolls-Royce Dreams, poem by Ginger Andrews

ROLLS-ROYCE DREAMS
by Ginger Andrews

Using salal leaves for money,
my youngest sister and I
paid an older sister
to taxi an abandoned car
in our backyard. Our sister
knew how to shift gears,
turn smoothly with a hand signal,
and make perfect screeching stop sounds.

We drove to the beach,
to the market, to Sunday School,
past our would-be boyfriends’ houses,
to any town, anywhere.
We shopped for expensive clothes everywhere.
Our sister would open our doors
and say, Meter’s runnin’ ladies,
but take your time.

We rode all over in that ugly green Hudson
with its broken front windshield, springs poking
through its back seat, blackberry vines growing
through rusted floorboards;
with no wheels, no tires, taillights busted,
headlights missing, and gas gauge on empty.

“Rolls-Royce Dreams” appears in Ginger Andrews‘ collection An Honest Answer (Story Line Press, 1999), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ginger Andrews, born in North Bend, Oregon, in 1956, won the 1999 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize with her volume, An Honest Answer. She has lived most of her life in Oregon, where she cleans houses for a living with her sisters. She is also a janitor and Sunday School teacher at her church. Her poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Poetry, River Sedge, The American Voice, and in several anthologies, including Good Poems edited by Garrison Keillor. Keillor has read poems from An Honest Answer more than ten times on The Writer’s Almanac.

Photo: “1935 Oldsmobile” by Rich K, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The Great Gatsby Driving Miss Daisy Buchanan, DVD release

On May 17, 2013, around the time The Great Gatsby was released, we created a post entitled “What Type of Car Did Gatsby Drive?” (reposted below).  Since that time, the post has averaged about 50 hits per day — or about 5,000 hits so far. I find this high number of hits (for us, anyway) astonishing — are that many people interested in Gatsby’s car? Or are students visiting our site for info they can use in their Great Gatsby term papers? (Then again, school just started.)

Over three months later, The Great Gatsby has come and gone from the big screens in L.A. and I didn’t find a good time to catch the film. The next best thing is the 2-disc set issued on August 27th and available on Amazon.com for $17.99.

Post from May 17, 2013: What Type of Car Did Gatsby Drive? 

Photo: Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) rides with Jay Gatsby(Leonardo DiCaprio) in the 2013 film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby.

Here’s how Nick Carraway describes Gatsby’s car in Fitzgerald’s novel:

It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town..”

While Nick describes Gatsby’s car as “cream colored,” other characters in the book describe it as “yellow” — which, as most of us learned in high school, symbolizes Gatsby’s pursuit of the gold, of the American Dream.

Photo: Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) drives with Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford) in the 1974 film version of Fitzgerald‘s novel.

But what make and model of car did Gatsby drive — in the novel and the various film versions? A recent article in the New York Times by Jerry Garrett offers some interesting answers. Since the information gets a bit convoluted, I’m going to resort to bullet points — and, in movie parlance, cut to the chase.

• 1925 novel: Fitzgerald writes, “On weekends, his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight …” According to Garrett’s New York Times article (May 10, 2013), “The Rolls most likely would have been a 1922 Silver Ghost…”
• 1974 movie (starring Robert Redford): Redford drives a 1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom  – for a story set in 1922.
• 2013 movie (starring Leonardo DiCaprio): DiCaprio drives a 1929 Duesenberg Model J — again, for a story set in 1922.

Photo: Cars featured in the 1949 film version of The Great Gatsbystarring Alan Ladd.

I also checked out Jerry Garrett’s blog, where he adds another interesting fact…

• 1949 movie (starring Alan Ladd): In this film version, as in the 2013 offering, Gatsby drives a Duesenberg (though I don’t know year or model). According to vintage car expert Jerry Garrett,“The point of having Gatsby owning a Rolls-Royce in the book, and having a closet full of clothes from England, was to help sell his fantasy girl Daisy Buchanan on his lie of having gone to school at Oxford. The original Duesenberg was made in Indiana. Would Daisy, a society belle from Louisville, Kentucky, have been impressed with a Hoosier?”

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Love Affair with Cars

Photo: F. Scott Fitzgerald with wife Zelda and daughter Scottie, 1923, in the sports coupé the author purchased a few years earlier after selling his first novel, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE.

“When I was a boy, I dreamed that I sat always at the wheel of a magnificent Stutz, a Stutz as low as a snake and as red as an Indiana barn.”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

According to an insightful 1993 article entitled “The Automobile as a Central Symbol in F. Scott Fitzgerald” by Luis Girón Echevarría:

“The cars in Fitzgerald’s life provide a rough gauge by which to measure the discrepancy between the dream and reality of his life, as well as his waning fortunes, and his journey from careless, irresponsible youth to cautious, worried middle-age…

His first car, purchased in 1920 after the publication of his best-selling first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a three-year-oíd sports coupé; during the next two decades he would own a used Rolls-Royce, an oíd Buick, [a] Stutz, a nine-year-old Packard, an oíd 1934 Ford coupé, and, finally, a second-hand 1937 Ford convertible…

It was Fitzgerald’s destiny to begin life dreaming of a magnificent red Stutz Bearcat and to end up driving a second-hand Ford. But during the interval he wrote of America’s dreams and of America’s enduring love affair with the automobile.”

Read more of this fascinating article here.

What Type of Car Did Gatsby Drive?

Photo: Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) rides with Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the 2013 film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby.

Here’s how Nick Carraway describes Gatsby’s car in Fitzgerald’s novel:

It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town..”

While Nick describes Gatsby’s car as “cream colored,” other characters in the book describe it as “yellow” — which, as most of us learned in high school, symbolizes Gatsby’s pursuit of the gold, of the American Dream.

Photo: Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) drives with Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford) in the 1974 film version of Fitzgerald‘s novel.

But what make and model of car did Gatsby drive — in the novel and the various film versions? A recent article in the New York Times by Jerry Garrett offers some interesting answers. Since the information gets a bit convoluted, I’m going to resort to bullet points — and, in movie parlance, cut to the chase.

• 1925 novel: Fitzgerald writes, “On weekends, his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight …” According to Garrett’s New York Times article (May 10, 2013), “The Rolls most likely would have been a 1922 Silver Ghost…”
• 1974 movie (starring Robert Redford): Redford drives a 1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom  — for a story set in 1922.
• 2013 movie (starring Leonardo DiCaprio): DiCaprio drives a 1929 Duesenberg Model J — again, for a story set in 1922.

Photo: Cars featured in the 1949 film version of The Great Gatsby starring Alan Ladd.

I also checked out Jerry Garrett’s blog, where he adds another interesting fact…

• 1949 movie (starring Alan Ladd): In this film version, as in the 2013 offering, Gatsby drives a Duesenberg (though I don’t know year or model). According to vintage car expert Jerry Garrett, “The point of having Gatsby owning a Rolls-Royce in the book, and having a closet full of clothes from England, was to help sell his fantasy girl Daisy Buchanan on his lie of having gone to school at Oxford. The original Duesenberg was made in Indiana. Would Daisy, a society belle from Louisville, Kentucky, have been impressed with a Hoosier?”

Joan Jobe Smith Poetry on City Lights Blog

On May 7th, poetry by Joan Jobe Smith — author of the Silver Birch Press release CHARLES BUKOWSKI EPIC GLOTTIS: His Art, His Women (& me) — was featured on the City Lights Blog. Congratulations to Joan!

Since Joan’s poem tells the story of a unique mother/daughter adventure, it’s great that we can feature it on Mother’s Day.

GOOD WIVES DON’T DRIVE

by Joan Jobe Smith

My father refused to teach my mother
how to drive his car, he said it
wasn’t ladylike in 1949, a woman driver

was no better than a streetwalker she was
to take the bus and be a good wife like
his mother was so my mother took secret

driving lessons, the instructor man
coming every day in his grey sedan
to show her how to let out the clutch

just right so the car wouldn’t jerk, how
to work the choke and the radio, make
turn signals, arm bent up for right

straight out for left, down for slow
me in the backseat watching as we drove
the L.A. streets: Firestone. Rosemead

Sunset Boulevard, Pico, La Brea and
Santa Fe and the day she got her drivers
license she bought her self a green 1939

Ford coupe and waited in the front seat
in the driveway for my father to come home
honked the horn at him when he arrived

and said Hey handsome, need a ride?

Photo: 1939 Ford coupe (a green one!)

Redwoods, Fairlanes, and Steinbeck

“The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.” Excerpt from Travels with Charley: In Search of America, memoir by JOHN STEINBECK

Photo: Northern California, late 1950s, driving through giant redwood in Ford Fairlane.