Careful what you wish for

1936 General Motors Parade of Progress "Futurliners"

I can imagine myself being introduced to my executioner -- not knowing, of course, the vital role he was to play in my life (or end thereof) -- and feeling that he was a splendid person, lots of ideas, and someone I hoped would be my friend for years to come. 

I would be an idiot, but then I came from a town full of idiots.

Earlier today, I recalled the time -- I think I was a sophomore in high school -- when General Motors came to town.  I'm serious.  It was like a circus or a carnival.  General Motors vehicles pulled into a large empty lot next to the post office and began setting up their show.

I know now that this event was called the "General Motors Parade of Progress," a traveling extravaganza that had been wowing the yokels since the mid 1930s.  It arrived in town in a fleet of vehicles called "Futurliners," some of which are still floating around in private hands.  In fact, if you try to find out much online about the Parade of Progress, you mainly read about Futurliners, their care, maintenance, ownership, and sales opportunities. 

But I've learned online all I need to know.

No one realized it at the time, but when the Parade arrived during my high school days, it was pretty much the last year that GM was to put on its show.  The competition from television discouraged folks from leaving the cozy darkness of their living room sofa to wander around a field looking at exhibits.

The Parade apparently arrived in twelve Futurliners, each with a separate theme.  But the only Futurliner so impressive that I still remember it to this day was Futurliner No. 2, entitled "Our American Crossroads."  The exhibit folded out from the side of the bus (I mean Futurliner), to display a model of a small American town.  Sort of like an elaborate electric train layout, without (GM executives shudder) the trains.  As I recall, the town had several narrow streets, with a main road passing through its center.  Various small businesses lined the streets.  Imagine how a town of a couple of thousand souls somewhere in the mid-West prairie probably looked shortly after World War I.  Imagine the set for Thornton Wilder's Our Town. 

You watched a show, maybe 20 or 30 minutes long, with a recorded narration.  The plot was simple -- the automobile was bringing modernity to Hicksville.  With each change, an old building or a narrow street rolled over and was replaced by something New and Modern.  As time passed, these changes went through several iterations.  By the end, we had reached the late post-World War II era, the era we now look back on as the Golden Age.

Throughout the narration, the voice of an old codger kept breaking in to complain about all these damn fool changes, to lament the end of the old ways, to predict things wouldn't work out well in the future.  He was intentionally annoying -- the voice of the past -- and we teenagers naturally scorned him. 

Not all Cassandras are female.

The show was fascinating.  I visited the Parade of Progress at least three times during the week or so it was in town.  Once alone, once with my family, and once with one of the high school groups that arrived in waves on school buses to stare with awe at how General Motors was remaking our world.

And as GM's president, Charlie Wilson, reminded us, in so many words: What's good for General Motors is good for America.  Maybe he was right, but the goodness was not unalloyed, not experienced equally by everyone .

My town was already well into the transformations shown in the exhibit, and within five or ten more years we were "thoroughly modern."  Our streets had been wide and straight from the town's origin, but the little picturesquely dingy, locally-owned stores were increasingly being replaced by larger, standardized buildings of boring concrete construction -- frequently no longer locally owned, and increasingly part of national or regional chains.

It became rarer for my family to know the proprietor of the stores we shopped in.  Shopping became more impersonal.  Competing stores which had once been fun to shop in because of their peculiarities of merchandise increasingly all carried the same national brands.  No longer could you enter a family grocery, as we often did, and see a washboard for sale, hanging from the ceiling, or a dusty toy train set in a corner waiting year after year for someone to buy it.

What happened next wasn't discussed by the Parade of Progress.  Maybe GM's foresight didn't extend that far.  Or maybe it did.  A developer built a shopping mall just outside of town -- plenty of free parking for all your Chevys and Buicks -- and suddenly no one was interested in the little concrete shops on Main Street.  And then the progress in highway construction that General Motors promised for the future kicked into gear, and the trip to our nearest large city (Portland) was suddenly a breeze.  Why buy shoes from the limited stock of a local merchant, when it was nearly as easy, and much more rewarding, to shop from unlimited stocks in Portland's big, beautiful department stores?

So when GM comes to town, promising a brilliant future, don't forget to ask "brilliant for whom?"  Ask not for whom the bell tolls, and all of that. Right?

My home town's commercial district isn't much to look at now.  Not a place you'd want to go shopping.  Main Street is dead.  Even that "new" shopping mall outside town is moribund. 

To be fair, I suppose that General Motors didn't really cause all the changes -- their Parade of Progress just predicted, in a limited way, what, like it or not, was coming down the highway.  So to speak.

Resistance was futile.

But anyway, for a teenager, at least, in a boring small town, it was a darn good show.