Image by R Indra Gunawan on Vecteezy

• Share

PRINT

I can still hear her upstate New York accent all these years later.

“Robbit,” she said, “I just went and bought it.”

“It” was a car. But not just any car. In her 83rd year, my aunt had gone and purchased a brand-new Cadillac.

She knew every one of its virtues — power steering, power seats, air conditioning — that made Florida tolerable for the hottest half of the year.

But the chief virtue to my aunt, who had lived through the Great Depression, was this: She had finally, showboatingly revealed her membership in the upper reaches of consumer society.

At her condominium near Miami, the parking lot was a study in tail fins — a few Buicks here, a gaggle of Oldsmobiles there. But the dominant brand, in the early 1980s, was the one that Detroit had turned into an immutable status symbol.

If you owned a Caddy, you had made it, pal.

Please, no whining about gas mileage or the environment. Please, don’t point out that an 8-cylinder engine wasn’t needed to go 15 miles an hour to the supermarket.

None of that was the point. To own a Caddy was not to keep up with the Joneses. It was to surpass them.

Along with a substantial bank balance, my aunt had a substantial sense of humor. She loved to aim it at herself.

She would call me every month, like clockwork, and tell me the same joke. Did I know what the state bird of Florida was? It was a Cadillac, puttering down the street, with its left-turn directional signal blinking endlessly.

Then she would laugh uproariously before reporting — yes, again — that she had been guilty of not cancelling her left-turn signal that morning.

But my aunt — and many in her age group — never joked about owning Cadillacs. They were the gold standard, proof positive that the owner had not only survived the 1930s, but had prospered.

In my aunt’s case, her comfortable late-in-life ride was the result of her choice in husbands. My uncle-by-marriage was a successful businessman, but a major-league tightwad. He reused paper towels. He shopped endlessly for bargain Band-Aids.

His choice of cars? Fords. Boring Fords. Utterly mainstream. Relatively cheap.

But now that he was long dead, my aunt could blow big bucks on a Cadillac. Which she did. And did again. And did every two years as long as she lived.

Why?

“Because I can, Robbit,” she would say.

Young, idealistic upstart that I was in those days, I would challenge her. “Aunt,” I would say, “if owning a Cadillac makes you different, why does General Motors churn out thousands of them every year, in the same color as yours?”

“Well,” she would say, “at least my neighbors are impressed.”

But now, two generations later, Cadillac is no longer a shining buggy on a hill. It is but one of several luxury brands, and it is losing market share by the week.

Today, Mercedes and Porsche are the head-turners in driveways. Tesla is surging. BMWs bolt away from red lights like jackrabbits.

And Caddy? Amazingly, the full-size sedan is now no longer than a mid-size Chevrolet. The trunk, once monstrous, is now cramped and pinched, like a Toyota’s.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Cadillac now offers a hybrid model. Drive a Caddy and save the planet! Wonders never cease.

So, what did all my aunt’s money really buy? I can answer that from experience.

About 45 years ago, a friend called me with a proposition. He had a business acquaintance who was a super-rich executive in a Middle Eastern country. The friend had just bought 10 Cadillac Fleetwoods, one for each member of his household.

The cars somehow had to get from Northern Virginia, where they had been sold, to the port of Wilmington, Delaware, where they would be shipped. Was I interested in making 50 bucks by driving a pearl-white beauty two hours up the road?

I jumped at the chance. I had never driven a Caddy before, and never have since. But the way that baby accelerated effortlessly, the way it braked silently, the way the radio pulled in stations from as far away as Ohio…well, maybe my aunt was on to something after all.

Oldsmobiles no longer get made. Neither do Pontiacs. General Motors is leading the charge into electric vehicles. One day soon, I expect to read that Cadillac has been mothballed, too.

But until that happens, I will always think of my aunt, behind the wheel of her soft pink Eldorado, holding the wheel at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock, thumbing her nose at prudence once again.