Our SUV (that term was not coined until much later. Anyone know when?) was a Chevy four door station wagon. It had bench seats, and a new one added looking backwards. You could easily crawl over the backs of the seats, because they didn’t have head rests. Head rests were that. Whoever thought about using them to protect your body from a rear end collision?
Once our Chevy broke down. Pretty rare occurrence back then. We only had the one car, so the dealer loaned dad a used metro. It was very rare because it was a convertible, four-seater with two doors and power windows. We had never seen power windows, and playing with them, it only took us a day to burn up the motor. The windows stayed in the down position, which was really tough as we were in Alaska and it was winter. Luckily, Dad had not let us put down the top on the metro, as we wanted, because it was also motorized. What an invention!
Never mind though that we were tough. Our other car had been a sedan. That was really neat, because you would lay up in the back window ledge, and hope Dad had to slam on the brakes. You could get a really wonderful ride immediately to the front seat. We were tough though, because the dash was all metal. No sissy padded dash board.
Course, there were no seat belts either. Our seat belt was Mom throwing her arm across your chest at such a high rate of speed, that it knocked the wind out of your chest. Somehow, I just knew that Moms arm would stop us from being thrown through the windshield in a high rate speed car crash. (Actually, of course, I never thought about it!)
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