THEY DO LOVE THEIR CARS - Oliver Niemi
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Oliver Niemi
Walter Paajanen had a Ford; he modified that and everybody in town talked about it. It was the fastest Model T around. It would do better than sixty on the highway and at the time you were lucky if you could get forty out of those things. Old Duke Johnson was sitting by the window in his store one day. Walter came in and then somebody else came in and started talking about automobiles. Walter said, “Come take a drive in mine.” So as Duke looked out the window again, he said he could see the two old bucks going off with their tires squealing. Nowadays some Finn kids have powerful automobiles. The bigger the engines, the more power: that's what they’re interested in. They pitch the cams to give everything more compression. You can still see evidence once in awhile; they’ve left half of their tires on the road. I don’t know how they do it with front-wheel drive: they brake and spin it around. With rear-end drive, there’s only one drive wheel. But if you brake it and put plenty of horsepower on, one wheel will keep on spinning because the other one keeps the car in a stationary position. That’s how they get their “doughnut.” ‘Course, some of the cars in earlier days were pretty powerful and I used to leave rubber on the road, too. A ‘39 Mercury. I don’t think there were too many that could keep up with that. It could easily do a hundred. Later, during war rationing, I was living in Fitchburg and working in a defense factory. I needed tires and decided to go to Peterborough to find some. There was a dealership there and a tire salesman right on the main drag, across from the Peterborough Savings Bank. From Fitchburg, I drove over and the guy didn’t even ask any questions. I was able to buy a couple of tires,but they were very poor quality. I drove to Natick, Massachusetts, to see a friend of mine. He said, “Well, hey, Ollie, can I borrow your car? I want to pick up a friend of mine.” And he was a fast driver. When I left to come back home, I could hear this flop flop flop. The whole cap had come off; the entire top of the tire. They were brand new. No guarantees in those days.
I didn't know my uncle was interested in fast cars. 1939 was the first yr of the V8 Merc. He also had a 49 V8 Merc. I had a 54 V8 Merc which I drove too fast and received speeding tickets. I never knew my father to speed, so I must have inherited my uncle's 'Merc" gene'. However, I never left rubber on the road, tires were expensive.