Goodbye to the Shade Tree Mechanic

As a police officer and driving instructor, interviewed for the story, says, “I don’t see kids who know what’s under the hood anymore. A lot of them don’t even know how to open the hood.”

The Post article attempts to explain why this should be so, and the explanation comes down, as it so often does these days, to Facebook:

An old friend of mine, now dead, spent nearly six years in North Vietnamese prison camps after his A-4 was hit by a missile over Haiphong. He was tortured and locked in solitary, and when I got to know him, it was still painful for him to talk about that part of his ordeal. But in the late stages of his captivity, the brutality slacked off and he had cellmates. He didn’t mind so much telling me about that part of the experience. In some ways, in fact, he relished it.

The big challenge, he told me, was coping with the boredom, and one way of doing that was for a man who had some sort of expertise to share it. There were “classes” in all sorts of things. Men taught each other foreign languages, history, even such exotics as opera, cooking, and wine tasting.

The class my friend remembered and wanted to tell me about was in auto-mechanics.

One of his cellmates was a gearhead before he became a fighter jock, and he knew everything you needed to know about cars and pickups and how to fix them and get them running right when something went wrong. There was nothing about an internal combustion engine that intimidated him.

So my friend asked if he could study and learn under him and have the mysteries revealed. He dreamed, he said, of how when he was, at last, back in the United States, he would buy an old step-sider pickup and take it completely apart, rebuild it, and then keep it running like a sewing machine, using hand tools and his own know-how.

The man who knew cars drew diagrams and schematics—as close as he could get, anyway—on the floor of the cell and set out to identify the components of the sort of engine that is now extinct. The kind, that is, that had a carburetor and distributor. He identified each part and explained its function and how to fix it when it was broken. My friend made mental notes and invented rhyme schemes to help him remember what he needed to know. There was a lot to remember, but then they had plenty of time.

Eventually, the Paris Peace Accords were signed and the POWs came home and my friend went out and found the step-sider he had been dreaming of. He bought it and had it delivered to a garage he had rented. And there, he went to work.

“I took it all the way down to the bare block,” he told me. “One slow step at a time. And when I had all the parts laid out on canvas, on the garage floor, I inspected them to see which ones I’d need to replace. And when I got them, I started cleaning everything up and then putting the engine back together.”

When he got stuck, he would call his former cellmate, who would talk him through the steps.

“It was easier than I thought it would be,” he said. “I suppose I didn’t realize how much I’d actually learned in the Hanoi Hilton.”

After a few months he had his rebuilt truck ready for the road.

“Best drive of my life,” he said.

The rebuilding of that truck had, I suppose, been therapeutic for him, though I doubt he would have used the word. The way he explained it, he had been reaching back to a time when he was young, in high school, and while boys he knew were learning about cars, he had been playing sports.

“I always felt like I was missing something fundamental. Like there was a serious gap in my education.”

Knowing cars—at least the fundamentals—was once commonplace among a certain kind of American, mostly men and mostly rural or small-town types. It was considered a virtue to be “capable” or “handy” and know how to use tools and your own skills and ingenuity to keep a truck or car running. It was the equivalent, perhaps, of the ability to hit something at long range with a rifle, back in the frontier days. Like my aviator friend, you felt slightly inadequate if you couldn’t do a brake job on your own car and had to take it to the garage and pay someone else to do it.

The cars back then were user-friendly in this regard. They needed a certain amount of maintenance and TLC to keep them running, but once you had the basics, you could do it yourself. It was as nothing to slide under the engine, find the drain plug, and set about changing the oil and the filter. 

That was the most basic sort of maintenance. From there, you graduated to the stuff that went on under the hood. You learned how to pull the air filter off and then use a screwdriver to adjust the carburetor. You got to where you could hit the sweet spot by the sound the engine made. The mysteries of how to gap a spark plug were revealed to you by a father or uncle or older brother. And then you could use a timing light to adjust the ignition so it was firing in perfect sequence. The sound of a properly tuned engine was like orchestra music, all the instruments playing perfectly together.

There was a culture not just of cars but of car repair and maintenance. Also an economy: There were salvage yards where you could go and find the parts you needed on what was left of some vehicle that had been totaled. The ones that had been rear-ended or T-boned were best, because the engine might not be damaged at all. What you couldn’t find on the scrap heap could be bought from stores or mail-order catalogues. And this economy made for opportunity. It was possible to rise from amateur auto mechanic to professional without going off to a school somewhere for years of expensive training. You could learn on your own, or apprentice by getting a job in a garage where you started out doing the fetch and dump jobs and learned by holding tools, watching, and asking questions.

In any town worth the name there would be at least one mechanic who could “fix any car known to man.” People traded his name like they recommend dentists today. And even if he had risen from his own side yard to a one- or two-bay garage, he would still be called a “shade tree mechanic.”

So there was a large and well-defined segment of the economy organized around the aging automobile and the things—both material and human—that it took to keep it on the road. And there was a culture of automobile repair and mechanics that was complete with a kind of status hierarchy. The kid in North Carolina who tinkered with engines would imagine himself at Daytona one day, working under the hood of a car driven by, say, Lee Petty. Why not, after all, dream big?

NASCAR, it should be remembered, began as “stock car racing.” In the very early days, those stock cars might double as the actual family car. The people who worked on them and tuned them to turn the absolute maximum rpms were, often as not, self-taught, and Lord did they know cars.

This culture even produced, in its waning years, a cult that grew up around a radio show that aired from Boston, one of the least car-friendly environments in the United States. After starting out on local FM, Car Talk was ultimately broadcast on National Public Radio, of all things. The team of Tom and Ray Magliozzi, aka “Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers,” would take calls from people who were baffled by some trouble they were having with a car, usually an older model. They would make jokes around the car and then, in a wonderfully self-deprecating fashion, go on to diagnose the problem and prescribe the repair. Most of their callers were clueless about automobile mechanics. A few were as knowledgeable as the brothers. The show ran from 1977 until 2012 and you can still listen to reruns. For some of us, listening to one of those broadcasts is far more satisfying than watching any Apple rollout.

While Car Talk is in reruns and the young, these days, may not even bother to get a driver’s license, much less buy a car, there are still automobiles out there. Millions of them. And a lot of them are old. The average age of the vehicles out on the American highway is 11 and a half years. Do the required maintenance, such as oil changes, and replace the parts that wear out, like brake pads and water pumps, and you can drive a car or pickup for 200,000 miles. As millions, obviously, do.

But they don’t necessarily do those oil changes themselves. And the days of doing your own carburetor adjustments and using a timing light to get the ignition sequence right .  .  . well, that went away with fuel injection and electronic ignition, which became pretty much standard by the ’90s. If you wanted to experience some kind of connection with your car, you could still change the oil yourself. If, that is, you could get yourself underneath the thing and then get a wrench on the drain plug and a filter wrench around the old filter. On most models nowadays, these things are located in such tight spaces that you will almost inevitably skin your knuckles, a sort of honorable wound among mechanics and one which inclines the amateur to say, “Once is enough,” and head for Jiffy Lube.

And now, on some models, my friend (and mechanic) Kevin told me not long ago, “you need software to make an oil change.” It has something to do, he explained, with sensors. He might, or might not, have the software. The owner of the car almost certainly would not.

Kevin is one of the breed. He grew up fooling around with engines. He got some training but mostly taught—and teaches—himself. He and his wife Julie own their own business and the two-bay garage where he practices his craft. He keeps people, like me, who drive their vehicles for 200,000 miles on the road and happy. He isn’t worried about the looming extinction of the shade tree mechanic. Not as long as people hold on to their cars.

The government, of course, attempted to “disincentivize” this a few years back with something called the “Cash for Clunkers” program. The idea was to jumpstart new car sales by giving cash bonuses to people who brought in old cars and replaced them with a new model, thus generously discounted. But it was not a traditional trade-in. The old car was not put out on the lot for sale. Instead, the crank case was drained of oil, which was replaced with sodium silicate. The engine was started and after a few minutes of idling, every moving part permanently seized up and the vehicle was beyond salvage. Perfectly serviceable cars, that could have been reliable transportation for people who couldn’t afford something brand new, were purposely rendered worthless. And a lot of work for people like Kevin was lost when those engines seized up. But, then, unintended consequences of big government programs are not a new story. And in this case the consequences were intended: Washington was concerned about Detroit and the union jobs there, not so much about the small, entrepreneurial shade tree mechanic out in the country.

Kevin survived cash for clunkers and, judging by the lot in front of his garage, he is doing just fine. People who are driving those 11-and-a-half-year-old vehicles bring them in to him.

As long as people drive cars for 200,000 miles, he says, “I’ll be okay. And I’ve got some coming in here that have 300,000. Even have one that has gone half a mil. People don’t want to go out and spend the money on a new car. There are some who don’t like all the digital stuff. They don’t understand it and it makes them nervous.”

But in the very long run .  .  .

The most ominous development is occurring in farm machinery, where some companies, including John Deere, are trying to make it illegal for unlicensed people to work on their own tractors. A recent article in Wired brings this news:

Kevin has heard the stories and knows of one farmer who changed one of the fluids in his new tractor and could not restart it since he was not “authorized” to service the machine. “He had to have it towed in to the dealer. He paid for the tow job on top of the service to get the tractor running again. It was all about the software.”

And soon, maybe, in a brave new world, that will be the rule on new cars. You won’t be allowed to work on them yourself, even if you know how. Shade tree car repair will be the equivalent of hacking. The glorious end, we’re told, toward which all this is headed is the hands-free car. Not only are you not allowed to work on it; you are not allowed to drive it.

A utopian vehicular world to some, maybe, but others of us see this as a bleak world of soulless machines and their docile subjects. The technology is supposed to be “liberating,” but from what?

A man I know was recently made a gift of a 1954 Ford pickup truck. It had been sitting in a garage in Las Vegas for years. The man lives in North Carolina so he made plans to fly out, with his wife, take possession of the truck, and drive it back across the country, traveling some of the backroads and taking in the pleasures of the American heartland. Ribs in Memphis. Bourbon in Kentucky.

The truck lacked all the amenities, to include air-conditioning. My friend drained all the fluids and replaced them, installed new belts and hoses, put in new plugs, and did the standard tune-up.

“Fun to use a timing light again,” he told me. “Hadn’t done that for years.”

When he had done all this, he and his wife pointed the truck east and started out. The only thing lacking was a banner with the word “Excelsior.”

His wife said she couldn’t remember ever seeing a man any happier. And his morale did not suffer, one hundred miles or so down the road, when there was a problem. Strange noises came from the engine, which seemed to be starved for fuel.

They made it into the nearest town and found, with ease, a local mechanic.

“We pulled into his lot,” she said, “and when the mechanic came out, he spent five minutes just looking at the truck and talking about how long it had been since he’d seen one like it and what a great truck it was and how they didn’t make them like that any more. I believe we could have sold it to him and gotten a good price.

“But we finally got around to talking about the problem and he said, ‘Well, let’s open her up and take a look.’ The hood went up and they looked in and started talking about how much room there was. How much easier it was to work on something with all that room than it was on the junk they were building today.

“I don’t know where he came from, but after a couple of minutes, there was another man, looking under the hood at that engine. And then another. Pretty soon there were five men, looking down at that engine and talking about all that space you had for working on it.”

They did the usual dialogue.

“Getting fire?”

“Getting fuel?”

Eventually they got the truck running and back on the highway. But there were other, similar stops for repairs, and the man’s wife was struck by how, every time, when the hood went up, interested men gathered and looked down at the engine and started talking about how much space there was in there and then trying to figure out how to fix the problem.

“It happened every time,” she said.

They didn’t make it all the way back to North Carolina. The old engine had been sitting idle for too long, and on a long stretch of empty highway, it threw a rod.

When they got it towed into town, the mechanic admired it and said the usual things about how much room there was under the hood. Then he made them a generous offer.

My friend thanked him and turned him down and said he would get the truck shipped back to North Carolina, where he would put in a new engine.

“He raised the offer, but no way I was getting rid of that truck.”

He didn’t say it, but the truck is what he has instead of Facebook. And the mechanic understood completely.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.