John Grisham's book, The Rainmaker, is set in Tennessee. I always thought the movie was one of those rare efforts that allowed it to be better than the book. But books still give you the chance to dwell on details, and for some reason I dwelled on the husband Buddy Black, who came back from Korea with some hardware in his head and who does a good deal of anti-social drinking in the Ford Fairlane parked in the yard. At one point in the book, I think the wife Dot refers to her husband as the "nut in the Fairlane" parked out back. Something like that. The line still makes me laugh because it is so succinctly put.
In the 1950s we had tenants in our two-family house in Flushing, NY who had a Ford Fairlane. Since we didn't have a car ourselves, my father let them park it in the driveway. It was a '57 Fairlane, I believe, big, and black and white. Huge whitewall tires. Especially big to someone who only walked around them and wasn't yet 10.
The tenents didn't use the car much, so it didn't come and go. It remained in one spot for a good deal of time They didn't however drink in it.
Fairlanes were popular and were everywhere. I never associated them strongly with Tennessee until I read an obituary in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Stephen Miller tells the story of a legendary moonshiner, Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton, who rather than start serving a Federal prison sentence on Friday for moonshining, apparently asphyxiated himself with carbon monoxide poisoning in his green Ford Fairlane. A car, his wife said, he called "his three-jug car," because he gave three jugs of liquor for it. In Tennessee.
In my world, Fairlanes: Tennessee 2, New York 1.
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