A look back at the nostalgic wood-paneled road trips of the 1980s
The wood panel was not real wood. It never was. The Ford LTD Country Squire, the Buick Estate Wagon, the Chevrolet Caprice Classic; all of them wore contact-paper-thin vinyl appliqué over steel, a design choice that somehow made every family in America feel like they were driving a log cabin. Nobody cared. The station wagon was the vehicle of the American family road trip, and the wood panel was its flag.
The cars
The Ford Country Squire ran from 1950 to 1991. The wood-grain appliqué was genuine wood on early models and vinyl thereafter; Ford switched to all-steel bodies in 1952 to reduce production costs. The Country Squire was 19 feet long, powered by V8 engines, and sold hundreds of thousands per year at its peak. The Dodge Caravan didn’t arrive until 1984 and the station wagon people treated it with suspicion for at least three years.
The seating arrangements
The front seat belonged to the parents. The middle seat belonged to whoever called it first. The rear-facing back seat (what children called the wayback) was the prize. Nobody wore seatbelts in any consistent way. Kids slid around on vinyl on highway curves. Parents did not consider this remarkable.
The navigation
There was a paper map in the glove compartment that had never been successfully refolded since 1977. The father was responsible for reading it while also driving. No GPS, no apps, no way to check. Arguments about whether they had missed the exit happened approximately every forty-five minutes on summer weekends.
The entertainment situation
A cassette player if they were lucky. A built-in AM/FM radio if they weren’t. The license plate game. Counting cows. Fighting over the invisible line dividing the back seat. Arriving at the destination having memorized every lyric of whatever cassette had been in the player since Ohio.
The food
A cooler containing sandwiches in wax paper, a bag of chips, approximately twelve juice boxes. Gas station food was a negotiation. Howard Johnson’s was a destination. McDonald’s was a reward for not fighting about the invisible line for two consecutive hours.
What killed it
The Dodge Caravan arrived in 1984. Sliding doors. Cupholders. Room. The Ford Country Squire ran until 1991. By 1990 most driveways had made the switch.
The bottom line
The station wagon road trip was not comfortable by any standard that would apply today. The seats were hot, the sightlines were bad, and the back of the car smelled like whatever had spilled in 1982. People who grew up in the back of a wood-paneled wagon are unreasonably nostalgic about this, and the nostalgia is not really about the car.
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