Singleminded and Singlehanded

When I was a small boy, my father liked to thrill me with an adventurous game. Coming home from the Little League field or an errand to the hardware store, he’d let me ride in the trunk of his black Corvair, challenging me to guess when we were home by reckoning the pattern of turns I could feel. He’d throw in a detour or two to make the game harder, as we called back and forth to one another through the dashboard panel: this being a Corvair, with its rear engine, the trunk I was riding in -- the trunk my father, a physician, felt comfortable stowing me in -- was in the front.

Can we say that Americans in 1965 were a tad less safety-minded, automotively, than they are today?

The end of my father’s and my heedless little game, and of his owning that car, was already in sight. For that year – in fact, fifty years ago today -- a brash young Connecticut lawyer named Ralph Nader published a muckraking broadside, Unsafe at Any Speed, that skewered General Motors, and the Corvair in particular, for its appalling safety record. When the dust settled, Nader had forged a role for government in automobile safety and all but singlehandedly fashioned the concept of public-interest activism.

Add a new comment