Week 69: 1963 Studebaker Champ

This week's tiny car introduces the first Studebaker to my lineup, kicking off 2012 off with a welcome addition to my collection of little hip aquamarine vehicles.

The Studebaker Champ, produced between 1960 and 1964, was never offered with power steering, and while I have never driven one, I imagine parking a Champ might have been like driving one of those gigantic car-shaped shopping carts at the grocery store. Car carts also do not have power steering, and I suspect they need them more than the Studebakers did.

If you have never had the treat of pushing one of these monstrosities down a canned food aisle at a store, or of having been forced to hug the Chunky (soup) in the same aisle to let one of these extra-wide carts pass, bless your heart.

The idea is a kind of pimp-my-ride modified shopping cart designed to allow two children to sit side by side and presumably be so enthralled by the idea of a cart that looks like a car they forget they are doing grocery shopping. Silly? Absolutely, but for some reason it works. My two youngest love the car cart.

I snapped this picture right before I took out all of Aisle 3.

While I've taken the kids shopping before, I've always trumped up an excuse to not take the car cart, but a recent shopping visit with my wife caught me off guard, and before I could toss out an artfully constructed fabrication of why we couldn't possibly take it out for a spin, she had already bribed the kids with a promise of riding in this muscle car of a cart. By muscle car, I mean it takes muscle to maneuver this bulky thing, and I am not exaggerating when I say that at least once I had to pick up the front end of the cart to get it unstuck from the side of a shelf against which we had scraped.

For real. I got a shopping cart stuck.

I don't know if this is a guy thing or just one of my quirks, but pushing this cart embarrasses me, making me feel like I'm attending a social event with a cold sore on my face and a coffee spill on my crotch. In other words, this car causes me to feel self-conscious and awkward. Maybe it is because I understand that no matter how polite I try to be, I know I'm destined to inconvenience at least seven other shoppers and knock over at least one display.

Making things worse, the cart we grabbed had some type of wheel imbalance causing it to rumble like an industrial lumber cart at a home improvement store.  A few people actually turned around to look at the approaching noise, and given Ohio recently had an earthquake, I'm fairly certain the noise caused someone in the store to drop, cover his head, and duck down between his knees.

Pushing one of these carts, at least in our narrow aisle local grocery store, is like driving over a bridge on a one-lane road. You go forward, see someone else approach, pull back, wait for them to go by, shrug and smile, and repeat. This might go on for fifteen, sixteen times. There was one aisle we couldn't fit down at all due to the obstruction of some type of metal pole no matter how many times we rammed into it.

Luckily, however, the car cart is bright red molded plastic, I'm sure done for safety's sake so that any hearing impaired shoppers, unable to hear the roll of thunder of its wobbly wheels (although I bet even a deaf person could feel the vibrations put out by this thing), will be able to see it barreling down the cereal aisle, unable to stop due to the momentum built up by its weight. I'm sure that bright red color has saved a few lives.

Of course ultimately the car cart is for the kids, and if you're lucky, they'll be acting cute. This, however, is not likely, as very few siblings will stay cute when smushed together in a small seat and then strapped in so that at least one elbow is permanently angled into the other siblings face.

For the most part, my kids did great, with only a few of those car-alarm shrieks two-year-olds do to show displeasure, but there was one cringe-worthy moment.

My youngest was making a type of pyoo pyoo pyoo noise, an adorable little sing song, that caught the attention of an older shopper, who began to comment about his cuteness. That was until she realized, at approximately the same time as my wife, that the little pyoo pyoo was actually some type of laser, designed to blast her to smithereens. Her smile kind of faded away in a type of oh, I see, look.

In fairness, the laser wasn't being shot at her, but at the imaginary bad guys attacking.

Seriously, though, what the heck. Why would a store equip a shopping cart with lasers?

I should talk to the manager.

Photo of Hot Wheels Studebaker Champ courtesy of photographer Phil Pekarcik. 


Picture of Racer A, Baby G and car cart snapped on my phone by me. I'm hopping Hot Wheels makes a diecast of that cart.