While growing up, just about everyone needs an older person who makes them feel special. For me that person was an elderly relative named Aunt Blanche who loved to talk about, fuss over, and do numerous things for her relatives.

Aunt Blanche must have been in her late 70s before I was a teenager, and now that I’m approaching that age myself, I enjoy recalling why she was one of my all-time favorite persons. One very important reason (at least for a young guy) was that she owned a classic late ‘40s vintage Packard touring car, and would readily take us youngsters anywhere we wanted to go in the fascinating city of Wichita, Kansas.

In addition, Aunt Blanche was exceptionally generous with her time and limited finances. As a niece or nephew, we only had to vocalize a need for something (which we frequently contrived), and Aunt Blanche would almost immediately set about trying to get it for us. All the while, she would be chattering about numerous trivialities, apparently as much to herself as to those around her.

Thus an embarrassing pause in conversation never existed with her around. And we youngsters could be certain that whatever she said was gospel because she said (multiple times) that she had gained incalculable knowledge while working in the tax assessor’s office in Liberal, Kansas, for over 20 years.

Aunt Blanche was the sister of my paternal grandmother, and she was colorful in more ways than one. For instance her hair often tended to glow with a purplish hue in the sun – not because of her love of bright colors, but because of the numerous dyes and rinses that she had previously tried out at the beauty parlor. I’m sure that any frazzled beautician involved in trying to please her received voluminous, albeit contradictory, instructions concerning her desired tinting results.

My father passed away when I was eight, leaving behind a family composed of my mother, her semi-invalid father, her blind sister, my older sister, my younger brother, and yours truly. Mother made a living for all of us by teaching private piano lessons from dawn to dusk, six days a week. One of the things our family particularly enjoyed once or twice a year was making the trip of 200 plus miles from Hugoton, Kansas, to Wichita in our 1950 “plain Jane” Chevy, named Lizzy, to visit Aunt Blanche and her husband, Uncle Ott.

Lizzy had an automatic transmission called a “Powerglide.” We instead found it to be more of a power(less)glide because the car was almost completely devoid of any “getup-and-go.” But “Ol’ reliable Lizzy” would get us wherever we were going, provided we didn’t need to pass any other car, unless it was headed downhill and we had at least five miles to build up speed.

Accelerating in Lizzy necessarily induced a great deal of sputtering and coughing on her part, causing we kids to make exaggerated paddling motions with our arms to assist her in gaining speed. Mother, however as our driver, had become quite philosophical concerning Lizzy’s lack of performance, and endured all sarcastic remarks from the peanut gallery in good nature.

Thus during Lizzy’s exceedingly gentle and protracted acceleration, her passengers’ experience could hardly be described as “being thrown back in their seats” or “thrilling.” On the positive side, at times, Lizzy’s lack of power could be, shall we say, “healthful” as well as embarrassing. Once while on a family vacation trip to Colorado with six passengers on board, we were forced to offload everyone but the driver and stretch passengers’ legs by pushing Lizzy up one steep grade, because she couldn’t make it alone, even in her lowest gear.

But Mother often merely joked cheerfully that the problem was because we didn’t have one of the four best cars of the time – which all began their spellings with the letter “P.” They were in alphabetic order, “Packard, Pierce Arrow, Pontiac, or Puick.” And incidentally, the fact that Aunt Blanche just happened to own a very large and stately (also very dated) Packard touring car clearly made it “one of the best of the best.”