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 M
y family had a station wagon for a couple of years in the early 1970s. But
I was only three or four at the time so I can barely remember it. It was
yellow, I think, or maybe it was cream colored. Was it a Chevy? What
I do know is that one afternoon my mother put my brother in the back seat after a
doctor’s appointment and the car started rolling backward in the parking lot. À la
Angie Dickinson in Police Woman she had to jump into the front seat and pull the
emergency brake. This was reason enough for my father to trade in the station wagon
for an Impala sedan soon after. And just like that, the one thing that made us like
TV’s Brady family—and who were more all-American than the Bradys?—was gone.
For a few decades, from the midfifties to the mideighties, station wagons like
the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, the Chrysler Town and Country, and the Ford Coun-
try Squire were as central to the American Dream as the white picket fence and the
basketball hoop in the driveway. These were the quintessential family cars. (FYI,
the Bradys had at least two different station wagons, both of them Plymouth Sat-
ellites.) And the bigger the wagon, the cooler the family. By the 1970s the Ford
Country Squire was a nearly nineteen-foot-long behemoth and got a whopping
eight to ten miles to the gallon. You could cram four or five kids into the back seat,
but that’s not where I wanted to be.
Anytime I was lucky enough to ride in one (and I’m sure I befriended some
kids because their families had station wagons) I headed straight for the way back.
With the seats folded down. The freedom. The danger! I loved being thrown against
the side when the car turned, all the better when other kids were back there, all of
us ricocheting off each other after a pizza party at Shakey’s. Riding in the way back

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gave me the same out-of-control thrill I got from roller coasters. Related: I used to
fantasize about climbing into the dryer so I could just spin and spin. It’s probably a
good thing I didn’t figure out how to turn the dryer on from the inside.
What gave these cars an extra flair was the vinyl appliqué wood-grain paneling.
It made it feel like a house on wheels. The paneling was a throwback to the earliest
station wagons, which were made mostly of wood. These wagons were DIY affairs.
The customer would buy the chassis of, say, a Model T, then order the wood body
from a coachbuilder or hire a carpenter to make it and bolt it on. “It was just much
lighter and easier to build the body out of wood,” says my friend Matt Anderson,
curator of transportation at the Henry Ford Museum. “The technology just didn’t
exist at that time to build a large body out of steel.” By the 1930s these vehicles—and
many were beauties—were known as “Woodies.”
The earliest station wagons were used on farms or as delivery vehicles, and to
transport passengers between railroad stations and hotels. That’s how the vehicle
got the name “station wagon.” (This is the kind of factoid I love.) By the time the
baby boom hit, the station wagon had caught on with families. “The first real mod-
ern station wagon is the 1949 Plymouth Suburban,” says Matt. “It’s got an all-steel
body. The name itself tells you how that vehicle was marketed. The rise of the sub-
urbs was a big factor in the adoption of the station wagon.”
Now, it’s true that station wagons were an absolute nightmare for any teenager
learning to parallel park. They were larger than the standard parking space, the
sight lines were miserable, and I’m pretty sure that rear defrosters hadn’t been in-
vented yet. And of course they were dangerous. The way back was a death chamber.
(For the more safety-conscious there was a rear-facing fold-up seat, introduced by
Chrysler in 1957. It had seat belts, not that you could ever find them. It also had the
benefit that someone sitting back there could call out whenever luggage strapped to
the roof rack came free and tumbled out onto the highway.)
By the early 1980s the family station wagon was already beginning to acquire
value as kitsch. We know this for a fact because in 1983 Warner Bros. released

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 death of a leviathan

Harold Ramis’s National Lampoon’s Vacation. The true star of that movie is not the
bumbling Chevy Chase but the “Wagon Queen Family Truckster,” an enormous
hearse-like vehicle that is gradually gutted over the course of the film due to a com-
bination of vandalism and incompetent driving.
But as Vacation was “celebrating” the station wagon, its demise was looming.
There were warning signs. The oil crisis of 1973 made fuel efficiency a priority for
consumers. The ingenuity of Japanese engineering was making it harder and harder
to stay loyal to American cars that handled poorly and seemed in constant need
of repair. Then came what car journalist Amos Kwon has called “the testosterone-​
robbing minivan,” which Lee Iacocca introduced at Chrysler in 1983. With better
fuel economy, more headroom, and, best of all, a sliding side door, the minivan was
a hit among practical-minded carpooling soccer moms. Mandatory car seats rang
the death knell of the “way back.”
The station wagon belonged to the Golden Age of the highway, the new sys-
tem of interstates built by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Up through the eighties, that
highway system represented nothing less than freedom itself, flight from dreary
routines of city and suburb, access to all our nation’s great beauty and natural at-
tractions. But then, with traffic and suburban sprawl getting worse and worse, those
endless highways were no longer our means of escape. They became another part of
what we needed to escape from.
And so after the minivan, we fell in love with the four-wheel-drive SUV, the
kind that—at least in the commercials—could drive right over a guardrail, plow
through a rocky riverbed, and scale a craggy mountain at forty-five degrees. Maybe
it was the renewed nuclear fears of the eighties, or just a vague sense of loom-
ing catastrophe, but suddenly we all needed military-grade vehicles of our own—
something that could get traction on a glacier and stand up to machine-gun fire if
needed. When the next blizzard, hurricane, or wildfire hit, local and state authori-
ties weren’t going to save us.
In 2011 Volvo announced that it would stop selling station wagons in the

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United States. Sales had dropped from 40,000 in 1999 to 480 in 2010. Auto buffs
immediately began to mourn its passing. But the truth is that by 2011 the station
wagon was already long dead. The Volvo wagon of the nineties was no more a real
station wagon than a barn swallow is a real dinosaur. At best, it was a stunted de-
scendant of the magnificent monsters that roamed American highways during the
Late Cretaceous period of American automotive history.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of auto safety. But boy, if someone gave me the
keys to a 1979 Ford Country Squire, I’d be sorely tempted to take a week off and ride
that beast to the Grand Canyon.

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