Concert Hall Oldsmobile

Yeah, my youngest son Dave lived with us for a while. He was out of work for a long time, and it was good to have him back at home for a while. But this small town was giving him cabin-fever, and he needed a car to go back to L.A. to look for work.

Small towns are neat for finding some things. Used cars are one of them. At some ancient gas station, we found this mint green Oldsmobile for sale. It was ancient too – 1986. It was also BIG! GM’s biggest station wagon. But, everything on it was new. New tires, new parts on the engine. Immaculate interior, with three rows of seats. A few dings outside, and the inevitable rust on the roof under the roof rack, but otherwise, pretty decent. Something like this in Los Angeles would have cost my son a couple of grand, at least.

Of course, here, it was only $300. (My money, of course – Dave was broke.) Besides, it was a one-owner car. The guy came over when the gas station attendant called him. We met him. Gave him the cash, and got the pink slip. All done. He was a chemist at the nearby town of Trona, twenty miles away. He drove it to work everyday. Even had a log of maintenance for the car.

Turns out, that with all the miles the old guy had piled on the car, he really had replaced everything on the car. Everything, that is, except the rear axle. Guess what we had to replace on Dave’s new used car a week later? Yep. $450 to put on a new used one-of-a-kind rear end on this one-of-a-kind used Oldsmobile Station Wagon! (My money, of course – you know the drill.)

Even so, Dave and I thought ourselves fortunate to find such a deal for a reliable car for him to drive while he was looking for work, and that was the plan – for HIM to drive the Oldsmobile to Los Angles to look for work, while staying with friends.

Then we took the car to the cheapest gas station in town to fill it up.

Of course, an old, used Oldsmobile, with the biggest engine General Motors ever made, uses gas. LOTS of gas. Gas was now getting really expensive. It took $50 bucks just to fill it. You can see where all this is going, right?

Dave now has my new used little economy car – MY 1995 Hyundai Accent, and is living down in Los Angeles, commuting to work thirty miles one way to his brand new job. He has a good one, making good money, so I do not expect to be without my little car for very much longer. (AHEM! Right, Dave?)

Me? I’m driving the Oldsmobile.

Face it, he would have run the wheels off of it by now commuting in LaLaLand traffic. He never could have afforded the weekly gas bill on it anyway.

My driving needs are few, in this little town we live in. My wife has the good car – our ’98 Nissan Altima – a good, solid, reliable, and paid-for car, for her to commute in for her THREE MILES to work every day. I am on permanent disability, so I drive here and there to shop for groceries and stuff once or twice a week, and that’s about it. That $50 tank of gas will last me a month or more, easy.

Besides, this arrangement makes good sense. My Hyundai has no air-conditioning, and the Oldsmobile does. Now I have an air-conditioned car to drive around in this hot, hot desert. Parking here is not a problem. Ridgecrest is a small town, with LOTS of parking spaces everywhere, even at Walmart. Yeah. It’s good sense that my son has MY new used car, and I’m driving his old new used car – all 23 feet of it!

But the thing is, I discovered something very special about this old used one-owner Oldsmobile recently. It has a really amazing radio!

Our Nissan Altima has a top-of-the-line digital stereo Radio complete with digital tuning, 28 station pre-sets, and a built-in CD player. The car has eight speakers, and the sound is ‘pretty good.’ It should be ‘pretty good.’ It cost me an arm and a leg as an ‘extra cost’ option!

Even my little new used Hyundai has ‘pretty good’ stereo with its run-of-the-mill basic radio which came with the car.

However, living out here in the high desert, there are no radio stations to listen to, or at least I didn’t think there were. Neither my Altima nor my Hyundai got very many stations. Five or six at the most, and two of them were weak static-y signals.

But my son’s old used Oldsmobile has an ancient digital radio – one of the very first, I’m sure. It came with the car as original factory equipment. I know, because it says ‘Delco’ on the black face of the radio. Part of the display is not working, and it shows only the vertical parts of the numbers. There is the traditional big knob for the radio volume control, and another big knob on the other side for tuning. Between these, it has six fat buttons to select a preset radio station. None of these buttons seem to work, however.

I didn’t even think the radio worked at first. Nothing but static when I turned it on. From the driver’s seat, I looked over across the hood and saw the stub of an antenna, on the far side, so I didn’t think anything more about it.

Later, when I was washing the wagon, I noticed that the antenna wasn’t busted at all. It was just recessed into the fender. I looked inside the car for some switch to elevate it, but never found one. So I fished the antenna out of the socket with a pair of needle nosed pliers and elevated it, perhaps for the very first time ever.

Then I turned the radio on. Suddenly an AMAZING SOUND came out of this old, new used Oldsmobile! It was like being in a concert hall!

I guess because all the seats were down in the back, and because frankly, the car is the size of a concert hall inside, the sound was simply awesome. I heard notes I had forgotten about. There was clarity and brightness that I had not heard in music in a very long time!

What was up with this old technology? Why couldn’t I get such sound from either of my new car’s radios? Why did this old car radio sound so much better than even my expensive surround sound stereo system in my den?

The speakers up front were in the dash, and not too big – four inchers, really. The speakers in the back were on each side of the massive rear door, and they were upright, facing the front of the car. They were also big! They looked like six by nine inch speakers. I checked. There are just four speakers. What gives here?

But the sound and the speakers were only part of the surprise. I couldn’t change stations with the dead buttons, but turning the tuning knob just a click made the radio search for the next station. Did I say before that there were only a few stations that could be picked up here
in this desert town? I must have found thirty or more clear stations on that dumb old radio! All of them were clear and static free., even if a station was hundreds of miles away. Amazing!

How is it that we have lost this technology today?

Why are our modern, expensive and digital radios so wimpy compared to this old 1986 Oldsmobile radio? Why is the sound so much better on the old rig? Why can I get so many more stations with the old radio, that I can’t even find on the new ones?

There has been some serious changes in Radioland here folks, and all of us are the losers because of it. Makes me want to kick my Altima!

Oh, you can believe that my wife and I take advantage of this!

Weekends, we travel in our Oldsmobile. Forget about the cost of gas. Living is cheap here in the desert anyway. We travel to the sweet sounds of Dvorak, Mozart and the Eagles. We listen to Sarah Brightman, Bond, and Jefferson Starship. Maybe a few Travis Tritt and Shania Twain pieces too. Radioland is a new frontier to us, and one that’s fun to explore.

We travel in style, my friends! The Olsmobile ride is smooth and easy. The seats are soft and roomy. The A/C works just fine. The music is divine! Heck, we can even camp out overnight in the back if we want to.

Who knew the old stuff could be such fun?