Lesson of the day: Dad is always right

“But Dad! It looks SO cool!” my teenaged sons kept insisting. And I tried. I really did. But no matter how many times I tried to see it from their perspective, that 1975 Chevrolet Monza still looked like something best left forgotten from the history of American automobile production.

“Son,” I said, “those things were pieces of junk they day they rolled off the assembly line and they didn’t get better with age. A wheezy 305 V8 that put out less horsepower than that Dodge Neon we had awhile back. Yuck!”

But it was a lost cause. Both my teenage boys think the car is pretty “cool.” Of course, my No. 2 son (currently the oldest in the house) also thinks his four-cylinder Ford Probe is the greatest car in the Wasilla High School parking lot. And if I let him (I won’t) he’d run out and buy a 1980s Camaro. You know, the Camaro that had all the design panache of a pancake, usually seen in primer and driven by guys with mullets, wearing wife-beater T-shirts. No way. Not in my driveway.

“But Dad! That’s when Camaros looked the coolest!”

Oh, how I shuddered when he said that. No, little one. It is not.

But it’s not just the cars. My boys also listen to all the music from the ’80s, too.

“Dad, you’re so lucky! You got to grow up in the ’70s and ’80s, back when music was really cool! Now all we have is this Justin Bieber junk, Rihanna, stuff like that!”

Well, I wasn’t about to dispute them on the quality of this excrement we call music nowadays. But what really did they know about what they were talking about?

“You guys ever actually seen the people who did this music you’re talking about?” I asked. They hadn’t. The look on their faces when I brought up videos of David Lee Roth jumping around in skin-tight Spandex. Rock stars wearing more makeup than the women and with bigger hair. The ’70s stars that make it look like there was a national shortage of shampoo, soap and barbershops.

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “grandma and grandpa certainly thought these people were pretty legit, too.”

“Oh my gosh, Dad! Did you run around looking like that?” asked my boys.

“No, grandpa and grandma would never have had it. Besides, even if we were listening to their music, we were kinda making fun of the way they looked — at least where I grew up,” was the reply. I chose to leave out the parts about my too-tall flattop haircut, denim jacket and Polo shirt with the collars flipped up.

I wonder if it’s always that way? Do we idolize previous generations based on what not-quite-accurate image we have thanks to music or movies about the time? I grew up predominantly with my mom and step-dad. He was older than Mom; he graduated high school in ’61. I can recall him shaking his head at the “nonsense” of the image put out by Hollywood about the 1950s.

“Nobody ran around in jackets like that, hair like that and all that garbage,” he told me on more than one occasion. Most guys had buzz cuts. Some had a DA (stood for “duck a**”) where you grew the sides long and combed it in the back in such a way that, well, it resembled a duck’s posterior.

“And we definitely weren’t rolling around in cars that at the time were only a couple years old,” he’d say. “We couldn’t afford that. Most of us drove Model As, maybe cars from the ’40s. Heck, at one time I had one of the newest cars in the parking lot and it was a ’40 Ford!”

When I went through my brief period of thinking that the coolest cars in the world were produced in the 1950s, Dad would just shake his head. In his mind, they were still the “new” cars that were all junk. Terrible styling. Fat and heavy. I guess that’s why, despite all the cars we had growing up (and we had a lot), most of the older “toy” cars were from the ’30s and ’40s (he still got newer stuff for he and Mom to use as their practical, daily drivers).

But his influence definitely rubbed off. While I may not have been driving cars from the ’30s and ’40s to school, it was noticed that what I thought was “cool” was definitely not the norm. Amidst a parking lot full of ’70s and ’80s Malibus, Darts and El Caminos with chrome wheels was my old black ’68 VW Fastback with bright red rims. Dumped in the front of course in “vintage street rod style” (my kids still don’t understand that) — big tires in the rear, smaller skinny ones up front. I went through a lot of cars in high school and all of them would be done up that way. Sometimes I would paint the rims to match the car and apply a shiny set of beauty rings (I had to show my kids what beauty rings were … sheesh). And while I had a modern cassette deck in the dash, more often than not I would be listening to Buddy Holly, Del Shannon or Bill Haley and the Comets. It’s what Dad always had playing in the garage, after all.

So the next time Justin or Austin comes home with a tale about a cool Maverick for sale and are try to convince me how marvelous it is, perhaps I’ll stop and reflect on my own past and how I viewed the style from previous generations. And then I’ll hold my ground and tell them that they’re wrong. Because I’m Dad and I’m always right.

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist. Contact him at bcompton1971@yahoo.com.