Ss

I was suffering a bout of nostalgia this afternoon, and I thought I’d go car shopping for an Impala SS.

I briefly owned one, back in the day.

But it occurred to me, how messed up was it to call a car an “SS.”

That was shorthand for Super Sport, but a mere fifteen years after the WW2 it was also shorthand for something else in the ears of the public, something rather more sinister.

The Super Sport badging became a staple of the Chevrolet brand from the early sixties on. Your SS was supposedly super sporty.

No car maker today would label one of their models an “SS.”

On my internet car-shopping spree, I turned up a few of the later SS Impalas, like this one.

Hard to believe that car is twenty-five years old now – it is an “antique!”

The Hollywood guy Tim Allen had one of those at one time. Spent like an extra hundred thousand to put the Corvette motor in it. I could never figure out why you’d bother.

Besides, the Impala SS I had was already antique by the time those nineties versions came along. I had a ’67 Impala SS, with a 327 and Powerglide.

I’d let Kipling borrow it one night, when I was working second shift at the GE plant in Guelph. The car was back safe and sound when I got off work in the morning.

Then a couple days later, I was heading down the 24 Highway towards Hespeler. There was a young woman thumbing a ride by the side of the road.

I pulled over.

She couldn’t get the door open.

I got out and walked around, and was shocked to discover that the passenger door was caved in.

Seems the idiots I’d lent the car to had been up to some shenanigans.

But back to that “SS” business. The Chevrolet Motor Division of General Motors stuck those letters on everything from Novas to Monte-Carlos to pick-ups back in the day. If I’m not mistaken you can still get an SS package on a new Camaro.

Today, GM builds their cars and trucks in Mexico as much as they can, but they still expect us to pay top dollar. NAFTA was a magic wand that made it legal to turn $30/hr jobs in Windsor and Detroit into $2/hr jobs in Mexico.

And I’ve long since got past wanting to drive anything that had SS in its name.