Remembering Tom Murray
By David Murray

My dad wrote about cars and memories. And most of my memories of my dad have to do with cars.

I’m five, and we’re washing the motor home and spraying each other with the hose. I’m six, in Dad’s Versa Van, driving to some obscure hobby shop to pick up some New York Central Pullman cars to go with my new cast iron Hudson engine. I’m seven, shivering with anticipation in the black 1975 Cadillac Seville, on the way to the “auto train,” which will take the family and the family car from Louisville to Orlando and Disney World. I’m eight, we’re lost on the way to some airplane museum and Dad swears in front of me for the first time –“shithouse mouse!” – and I laugh at him for the first time.

I’m nine, and Dad talks Mom into the preposterous idea of buying a 1941 Buick convertible, just like the ’40 his dad had. He has checked the car out thoroughly and it’s mechanically sound, just needs a little prettying up. Over the next two years, the concept of Dad’s fallibility is introduced to me as restorers discover the car is more Bondo than metal (and some of the metal is scrap), and the restoration bill mounts.

I’m 10, and we’re heading to a Kaiser-Frazer show in Bucyrus, Ohio, in the 1946 Frazer Manhattan Dad bought to help him wait out the Buick restoration. Dad is regurgitating the K-F history book he has devoured, The Last Onslaught on Detroit. (On a later car trip, to New England, we made a side trip to Moultonborough, N.H. to meet the author, Richard Langworth, a name that resides unabashedly between Ernest Hemingway and William Shakespeare on my Tom Murray-organized intellectual bookshelf.)

I’m 11, and Dad takes me out of school at noon on a fall Friday. That’s an uncharacteristic move, but it’s a long drive to the Promised Land, in Hershey, Pa.

I’m 12, and a peaceful Sunday night dinner turns into chaos as 60 Minutes airs a report on Jeeps and rollover accidents. My mom, who has for the last two years happily driven a yellow CJ-7 she had talked Dad into buying for her, his own loathing of Jeeps began in WWII, declares her immediate intention to sell the death trap. Dad shakes his head and in exchange for avoiding saying, “I told you so,” barely manages to avoid being accosted with, “Well, if you knew it was dangerous why did you buy it for me?”

I’m 16, and Dad is talking to a neighbor about the hand-me-down, wood-paneled 1982 Chrysler Town & Country station wagon that was my oh-so-sexy first car. The neighbor asks about the performance of the underpowered K-car. Dad opens his mouth to defend the car that saved Chrysler and I blurt out, “The needle bounces at 85.”

I’m 20, and I enjoy the extreme pleasure of watching my dignified dad clamber over the side of my rusty, slouching $50 1978 International Harvester Scout (the closed doors were integral to the structure). I have no insurance, the license plates are borrowed and gas is leaking onto our asphalt driveway, but Dad can’t keep from chuckling as he shakes his head, “You are a tramp.”

I’m 29, driving my dad to the airport after a visit in my new hometown, Chicago. He asks me how long I plan to hold onto my aging Isuzu Rodeo, and I remark that he’d be a lot richer now if he hadn’t bought a new car almost every year between about 1955 and 1985. “I know!” he confesses, now beyond his wife-convincing years. “You’re absolutely right!”

I’m 34 and I’ve got my 80-year-old dad in the roofless, seatbelt-free ’64 Scout, bought in the thrall of my own fit of vehicular nostalgia. We’re roaring down an onramp to merge into pell-mell traffic on the Dan Ryan and I hear him mutter under his breath, “I can’t believe we’re gonna do this.” As I shift into third, over the vibrating motor I suggest that maybe he, of all people, should have seen this day coming.

I’m 38 – Dad will be gone in less than two years, but he’s still happy and healthy at 84 – and a sister (a sister!) tells me that he has sold his yellow Thunderbird convertible and bought a Lincoln Town Car. I call him up and give him a real going over, reminding him, as if I have to, that in our family, we talk over purchases of vehicles – especially purchases of unprecedented vehicles, like Lincoln Town Cars. He laughs sheepishly, but in his last months he will declare his only automobile-related regret: That he hadn’t bought that sweet Town Car a couple of years earlier, so he might have enjoyed it that much longer.

For my dad, who expressed his love for life and for people and for beauty itself through his memories of cars, there was never enough time and there were never enough cars.

And for me, there will never be enough Dad.