Skip to main content

More On The Model T

March 2023
1min read

In our household, where my mother and father kept a drugstore open from 7:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. seven days a week, the women handled transportation.

Aunt Gallic bought a Ford touring car about 1916. On cold mornings she would get up early to see if the car would start. If it did not start, she would send me back in the house to get a hot-water bottle, which she tenderly placed under the hood. Whatever had broken since yesterday could be fixed, usually with a wire hairpin, adhesive tape, or a clothespin.

Many a morning I’d handle the correct maneuver of spark and gas to start the car while Aunt Gallic cranked. My other aunts and my grandmother learned to drive the car, but only Aunt Gallic could change a tire. After she married and moved to New York, 1 was elected to be the tire changer.

By 1921 we had an enclosed Model T. On one 210-mile, twelve-hour trip to San Antonio we “enjoyed” five flats. It was twilight and still more than a hundred degrees when I was tightening the fasteners on the last tire. The first gentleman to stop to help us that day rushed up and exclaimed, “Little girl, you can’t do that!” My grandmother was shocked when I replied, “Like hell I can’t!”

However, when the grandmother and schoolteaching aunts departed on vacation, I became the family chauffeur at age eleven. It was a magic rug to travel far and wide.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April 1990"

Authored by: John McDonough

It is to the U.S. Air Force what Normandy is to the U.S. Army. The monuments are harder to find, but if you’re willing to leave the main roads, you will discover a countryside still eloquent of one of the greatest military efforts in history.

Authored by: The Editors

Women Who Opened the West

Authored by: Lawrence Block

A novelist turned compulsive traveler tracks a peculiar quarry all across America

Authored by: Walter Karp

When Pierre S. du Pont bought the deteriorated Longwood Gardens in 1906, he thought that owning property was a sign of mental derangement. Still, he worked hard to create a stupendous fantasy garden, a place, he said, “where I can entertain my friends.”

Authored by: Bill Merrell

The author leads a search for hidden treasure in the amazingly complete documentary history of a California ghost town

Authored by: Thomas Fleming

A novelist and historian takes us on a tour of the Academy at Annapolis, where American history encompasses the history of the world.

Featured Articles

The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. 

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.