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Even though the LaSalle was a very good car, “The Good Old Days” were rarely as good as people think they were.
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My grandmother’s opinion of “the good old days” was that the whole world smelled of horse manure.
What I’ve noticed in recent years is how few cars belch burned oil exhaust compared to twenty or even ten years ago. And it seems the few which do are more often than not pimped out econoboxes tuned to produce lots of backfires, driven aggressively by teens.
The flip side is running into increasing numbers of jacked up behemoth diesel pick-ups with obnoxious drivers who seem to enjoy deliberately “rolling coal” at every opportunity.
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It was much more subtle, but several years after PCV valves were mandated, it became much less common to smell crankcase blow-by fumes while sitting at traffic lights.
Many years ago, on my first visit to France, I was part of a group of Americans traveling from Calais to Paris on one of those huge Dutch-built tour buses. Because we had all had to be up at the crack of dawn earlier that day for the drive from London to Dover, everyone fell asleep shortly after boarding the bus.
A couple of hours later, I woke up and was assailed by the strongest odor of cow manure that I had ever smelled. The reason was that we were passing through a farming region, and apparently it had been freshly “fertilized”. It was actually fairly amusing to watch the other folks on the bus waking up–one by one–and seeing their immediate reactions to the intense… aroma… permeating the bus.
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A few weeks ago, I watched (and heard…) one of these morons rev it way up, drop the clutch, fish tail around, then blow the tire when he nicked it against a guardrail while fishtailing. Not going to lie I was laughing as I gave the guy the 1 finger salute as I drove past him
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As a kid I remember talking with my Great Uncle who lived in NYC his whole life. He and his brothers started their law-firm in Brooklyn. At the time there were still farms in Brooklyn. He remembers every time he went to Manhattan he always saw a dead horse being dragged away. Horse manure was everywhere. Even with the million+ vehicles in Manhattan it’s still far cleaner then it was back during WWI.
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We went to Mackinac Island a few years ago. No cars, horses only. Quaint, but everywhere we went stunk. Lots of puddles, even though it hadn’t rained in a while…
LOL It took me a moment to catch on to your fix. Good edit! 
Driving in the mountains of N. Georgia a semi hauling hogs was going the opposite direction, that smell made our sewage plant smell like Chanel Number 5.
My understanding one of the reasons Henry Ford wanted to manufacture cars, and later tractors, he hated taking care of horses.
Years ago I was driving cross country with my cat in the car with me as I moved from NJ back to OK. Somewhere in IN a stock truck hauling hogs overtook me on the interstate (easy to do as I was driving a 1973 Corolla with a 4-hamster engine.) The stench woke up my cat who immediately began yowling protest at the smell. I slowed down to drop far back from that.
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Have you ever been in a town that has a paper mill?
When I was a kid, we were touring upstate NY in our trusty Plymouth, and the stench–similar to rotting cabbage–from a paper mill was so powerful that we opted to NOT tour Fort Ticonderoga.
My father and I were real history buffs, and we had taken a major detour in order to see Fort Ticonderoga, so for us to leave w/o seeing that historic site gives you an idea of just how powerful the stench really was. This was in the '60s, and for the sake of the locals in that area, I really hope that they no longer have to deal with the stench.
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During college in OK a pair of friends from NYC were with me one day on a drive outside town into the countryside. They suddenly wrinkled their noses, wondering what the strange unpleasant odor was and what those strange big rocker arms going up and down were in the field we were passing. I told them they were looking at money. They’d never before seen a working oil field or smelled the distinctive odor of crude petroleum.
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As far as bad smell’s go while driving down the road how about a sugar cane farm when they burn the cane field’s prior to harvest?
Oh yes, I was on TDY to Tyndall AFB, near Panama City FL, in the 70s, just east of the base was a pulp mill. Know the odor quite well.
BITD of good-paying union jobs at paper mills in Wisconsin’s Fox Valley, people called it “the smell of money.” One mill in particular was, ahem, filthy rich.
When the Toyota Tacoma first came out, locals weren’t too sure why their town name was chosen, since the local industry was known to cause “the aroma of Tacoma”…
There was a wonderful book published in the 1970’s by Otto Bettman called “The good old days they were terrible”. It’s a great little read.
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Across the freeway and about 1/2 mile away are farms. Up until a few years ago, a couple times a year they would spread the hog droppings on the field. With a west wind it was very very ripe all over the neighborhood for a couple days. Nothing worse than hogs.
Most of the buses now are made in Turkey. At least the Mercedes buses.