STERLING, Va. – Chuck Mecca plops his lawn chair down in the parking lot of the Chick-fil-A at the Dulles Town Crossing shopping center, smack behind his lipstick-red 1956 Ford F-100 pickup, primped and polished for its turn under the Friday night lights.
Mecca, his beard long since gone white, is a regular at the Cruise-In, a weekly gathering of guys whose enduring love is a set of wheels that delivers them back to the time when customizing and showing off your car was the ultimate expression of self.
Now 72, Mecca was 18 when he worked the biggest newspaper delivery route in McLean, Virginia, to amass the cash to buy his first car, a ’53 Ford that didn’t have a working second gear. He pumped gas to pay for wheels to cruise over the bridge to Washington, D.C., or impress the girls at a local drive-in.
Back then, he could name the make and model of anything that zipped by. Even now, cars speak for him: “When my wife beat ovarian cancer,” he says, “I bought her her dream car,” a ’56 Chevy Nomad station wagon.
On Friday evenings at the Cruise-In, Mecca and his buddies cluster behind the ’72 Dodge Challenger and the electric-blue ’65 Corvette. They check under the hoods and trade stories about cars and women and where the years have gone.
For nearly all of the first century of automobile travel, getting your license meant liberation from parental control, a passport to the open road. Today, only half of millennials bother to get their driver’s licenses by age 18. Car culture, the 20th-century engine of the American Dream, is an old guy’s game.
“The automobile just isn’t that important to people’s lives anymore,” says Mike Berger, a historian who studies the social effect of the car. “The automobile provided the means for teenagers to live their own lives. Social media blows any limits out of the water. You don’t need the car to go find friends,” Berger said.
Much of the emotional meaning of the car, especially to young adults, has transferred to the smartphone, says Mark Lizewskie, executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
“Instead of Ford versus Chevy, it’s Apple versus Android, and instead of customizing their ride, they customize their phones with covers and apps,” he says. “You express yourself through your phone, whereas lately, cars have become more like appliances, with 100,000-mile warranties.”
At the Cruise-In, 30 miles outside Washington, Mecca and a cluster of other collectors, all men past the half-century mark, trade laments – for the days when cars had more fanciful designs, for what they fear will be the loss of the Washington Redskins’ team name, for their children’s lack of interest in cars.
“The world’s changing too fast for me,” Mecca says. “I’d like to be back in the ’50s.” The old guys’ conversation turns to blemishes – not on the sparkling cars before them but on their own, less painstakingly preserved bodies. “It’s benign, thank the Lord,” Mecca says of the spot on his scalp.
“This is what we talk about,” says Gary Fanning, 58. He tried to give his son his ’65 pickup. Gift declined; not interested.
Across the parking lot, though, a few much younger men take a stand for their generation. Kevin Kurdziolek, 26, and his friend Conner Walsh, 25, match their elders in passion.
Their Mustangs – Kevin’s ’03 SVT Cobra and Conner’s ’04 Mach 1 – are buffed to a showroom gleam. They, too, have dewy memories of how their love of cars began. Walsh grew up collecting Hot Wheels, and Kurdziolek’s father was into drag racing. They, too, know how to rebuild the suspension.
They, too, believe a cool car is a fast track to a woman’s heart.
