What is it about a 1957 Chevrolet?

dfLike The New York Times offering on its store page a “1957 Bel Air 50th Anniversary Edition $99.95. Numbered, limited edition of 1,957.”

Before you order, let me tell you about the North Carolina connection to the car. Make that “connections,” as there are more than one.

First, a 1957 Chevy station wagon graces the cover of a recent memoir by a prominent North Carolinian, Smedes York. His record of public service and success makes us envious: basketball player at N.C. State, mayor of Raleigh, and leader of his family’s real estate, construction and development businesses. He modestly discusses these successes in his book, Growing Up With Raleigh, written with John Sharpe.

growingupraleighYork’s life parallels the transformation of his Raleigh hometown from a sleepy, southern, segregated, state capitol town to a dynamic, hi-tech, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan city. York and his family rode with these changes, in some cases drove them, and almost always found ways to adjust and benefit from them. Those who seek to understand the transformation of the South since 1950 could find help in York’s recollections.

So what about that ’57 Chevy on the book’s cover? The book’s first chapter recounts the six-week cross country adventure of 16-year-old York with his brother and five friends in the new station wagon topped with a special luggage rack to carry their golf clubs. The seven youths called themselves “The Shamrocks,” and they set out to play some of the best golf courses in the country. The friendships forged on that trip still bind them together almost 60 years later.

Auto BiographyGiven York’s business and local political success, I wondered why he never sought state-wide political office. When I asked him why he never ran for governor, he explained, “I love my own city too much. I like Charlotte and the other cities, but they are Raleigh’s rivals, and my focus would be on Raleigh.”

The second North Carolina connected book is Auto Biography: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream, by former Virginian-Pilot writer Earl Swift. It follows another ’57 Chevy station wagon through 13 different owners. The book’s jacket explains that in 2010, then in the possession of its 13th owner, it is “in wretched shape: Its surviving paint is sun-bleached, salt-pocked and cracked like a dry lakebed. Its engine hasn’t been turned over in years. Slumped among hundreds of other rusting hulks on a windswept patch of eastern North Carolina, the Chevy evokes none of the Jet Age optimism that made it the most beloved and instantly recognizable car to ever roll off an assembly line.”

This car’s owner. Tommy Arney, also owned Moyock Muscle, “a scrubby five acres crowded with roughly four hundred old cars,” a few of which, including the ’57 Chevy, were being restored. The town of Moyock in Currituck County is just below the Virginia line, not far from Norfolk, Va., where Arney, a North Carolina native, has become famous, or infamous, as the confrontational owner of strip clubs and promoter of edgy real estate deals.

Swift’s account of Arney and the 12 previous owners of the station wagon, like York’s book, takes us through the transformation of our region during the car’s lifetime. But Arney’s is a different story. Nobody will ever ask him, like I asked York, why he did not run for governor. In fact he is headed for federal prison for his role in a bank fraud scam.

Both Growing Up With Raleigh and Auto Biography give readers a compelling look at our recent history.

Some of them, especially old car lovers, will get so excited about the ’57 Chevy they will rush to order The New York Times’ 1957 Bel Air 50th Anniversary Edition.