THE RECESSION was over by the mid-1950s. My father had weathered those hard times by acquiring a job as a machinist in a major city. He traveled far to the job. He’d driven hundreds of miles to stay for a full week at a time in that distant place.

 Dad drove to work each Sunday afternoon, one way, in an old four door. He wore the flathead engine down with mileage accrued. The car began to smoke each time it came to a stop. Then, with some 40W oil gotten from a gas station by the shop where he worked, Dad would fill up the crankcase and head back home on Friday afternoon.

 But as times got better, in the spring of ‘56, Dad did the unthinkable for his thrifty soul. He bought a new car.

 “Come and see”, my father said of his first new car. A brand new car sat lingering at the curb of our house. He drove Mom home from the Olds dealer with all the windows rolled

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down in the new automotive marvel. Marvelous it was. The car had an AM radio! Proudly, my father said it had a four barrel carburetor that sat astride a big V-8. Dad touted to Mom.., “Now I can keep up with traffic on the Roosevelt Boulevard.”

  Times were indeed getting better. That same year saw our family move into a new house. Our new home had been built by my uncle and my father, and was being finished inside.

Extravagant with its three bedrooms, the house had a real driveway where the new car could be parked in front of its own garage door.

 “Come and see!” I yelled back then to my younger sister… for I’d been exploring the tiny, spring-fed stream that flowed alongside the new house. I‘d watched something tiny skinny under a rock. With my sister peering around my hip in suspense, I flipped the rock over. Revealed beneath was a

Come and See!

Sometimes how you see a thing depends on where you stand.

A marquee’ no longer made, my father’s four-door ‘56 Olds was the first stepping stone to several marvelous family sedans of later vintage.