For those who don't know about cars, 1974 was probably the worst model year of its era because it was the first year pollution controls became mandatory. To suggest that simply adding pollution controls to a car that was not designed for them was a bad idea would be giving far too much credit to the team at Dodge. It wasn't a bad solution. It wasn't any kind of solution at all. This was, by any measure, an awful car.
Why, you may ask. And why then does it keep showing up in Frank's old pictures? Well, the greatest failure of that particular car was its inability to deliver an appropriate mix of fuel and air to the engine. Again, if you haven't seen the Magic School Bus episode about how an engine works, this is perhaps the core function of an engine. The result of this inability was typically silence. As in the engine would just shut off. Fortunately, this only happened at times when you really needed to accelerate quickly, like if you were making a left turn when a car was coming in the other direction. Nothing dangerous here.
I should interject here that nothing I'm saying here is exaggerated even in the slightest. I shudder to think of the number of times that car stalled out when I was trying to make a left turn onto our road. It's amazing it never led to an accident. It also made it a challenge to negotiate hills, like that on our driveway, when the pavement was slippery. It was so bad that we called it, though not without some affection, the Fart.
It also had sticky vinyl bench seats and was in no way a comfortable place to sit. But it did feature the famed Dodge Slant 6 engine, which was renowned for its durability. Hence its ubiquity. It served the family for a good dozen years. I drove that car across the country twice. On the second time across, I had a head-on collision in Washington near Mount Rainier (not in any way my or the car's fault and nobody was injured) that bashed in the front end and bent the steering column. After some on-the-spot metal bending by the tow truck driver, I was still able to drive it south to California and then back to New York. Of course, if I turned the steering wheel all the way to the left it would just stay there and drive in circles, but that was the kind of thing you could adjust to when you were 20.
After I'd had it for a few years, it got passed along to my (younger) brother, who drove it out to Colorado, where he eventually wrecked it, twice I believe, and had it towed to the parking lot of his apartment building. A few weeks of heavy snow and a busy parking lot led his landlord to have the snowplow deposit all the snow where the car was parked, completely covering it as far as we knew.
A couple of months later, I was sitting in my Dad's office when he got a phone call. It was the Authorities. The policeman informed my dad that the Dart had been involved in an armed robbery in Brooklyn. My father said, no, the Dart is buried under 8 feet of snow in a suburb of Denver. But when it thawed out, sure enough, the plates had been stolen.
Sadly, that was the last I heard of the Fart. But it still conjures up fond memories for me to see it in these pictures.
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