Down the Road

When my father was seventeen, he bought a used 1951 Chevrolet Styleline Deluxe, a three-speed coupe that was four years older than him. He paid a junkyard $35, which he earned over three days baling hay. I thought of my dad and his car — with a dashboard clock that he had to wind manually — as I fell into the pages of Thaddeus Holownia’s Headlighting: 1974–1978, a new collection of remarkable old photographs of automobiles and their owners.

“The Chevy was a bit of an education, something to tinker on,” Dad told me recently. “If I screwed something up, it was no big loss.” With his bushy sideburns and inevitably greasy blue jeans, my teenage father could have easily stepped into one of Holownia’s frames, just like the dozens of his contemporaries who did from the city streets in Wichita, Kansas, to the country roads outside Middle Sackville, New Brunswick...