In Second Chance, a short story first published in 1957, science fiction author Jack Finney explores the concept of old cars as time machines. Finney loved to write about time travel, which most often happened to his characters "accidentally." This story fits the general Finney time-travel pattern.
The protagonist and narrator, an unnamed college senior in the small and ficticious town of Hylesburg, Illinois, is restoring a 1923 Jordan Playboy — one of the 600-plus marques that emerged in the early years of the auto industry, and didn't survive the Depression. The Jordan was an ordinary car, most notable for having established the trend of selling a lifestyle rather than a vehicle.
In 1923, Jordan published a famous advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post, headlined "Somewhere West of Laramie" and featuring an illustration of a beautiful woman on a horse, chasing a train. The ad copy read: "Somewhere west of Laramie there's a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I'm talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony that's a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he's going high, wide and handsome. The truth is — The Playboy was built for her."
In the short story, having just finished restoration work on his 1923 Jordan Playboy, the narrator takes his car out for an early-evening drive.
I was wearing stained dungarees and my dad's navy blue, high-necked old sweater. I didn't have any money with me; you lose it out of your pockets, working on a car. I was even out of cigarettes. But I couldn't wait, I had to drive that car, and I just washed up at the old sink in the barn, then started down the cinder driveway in that beautiful car, feeling wonderful.
He drives around town, but everyone ignores his beautiful machine. He goes to pick up his date, and she's not interested in cruising around in an old car. So he heads out into the country, on an old back road that leads from nowhere to nowhere. Not paying much attention to anything, he finds his mind drifting back to the Twenties. He has a mental image of Jack Dempsey, and thinks "Dempsey beat Gibbons last night!" Then he begins to pay more attention to what's happening:
Picture a car's headlights coming toward you; they're two sharp beams slicing ahead into the darkness, an intense blue-white in color, their edges as defined as a ruler's. But these headlights — two more sets of them were approaching me now — were different. They were entirely orange in color, the red-orange of the hot filaments that produced them; and they were hardly even beams, but just twin circles of wide, diffused orange light, and they wavered in intensity, illuminating the road only dimly.
The nearer lights were almost upon me, and I half rose from my seat, leaning forward over the hood of the Jordan, staring at the car as it passed me. It was a Moon; a cream-colored nineteen twenty-two Moon roadster.
The next car, those two orange circles of wavering light, approached, then passed, as I stared and turned to look after it. It looked something like mine; wire wheels, but with the spare on a side mount, and with a step plate instead of running boards. It knew what it was; a Hayes Speedster, and the man at the wheel wore a cloth cap, and the girl beside him wore a large pink hat, coming down well over her head, and with a wide brim all around it.
More old cars pass him, all looking very new and normal. He realizes that he is actually back in the year 1923, and begins to ask himself how he and his Jordan Playboy could have slipped back into the past:
You can't drive into the past in a 1957 Buick because there are no 1957 Buicks in 1923, so how could you be there in one? You can't drive into 1923 in a Jordan Playboy, along a four-lane superhighway; there are no superhighways in 1923. You couldn't even, I'm certain, drive with a pack of modern filter-tip cigarettes in your pocket — into a night when no such thing existed. Or with so much as a coin bearing a modern date, or wearing a charcoal-gray and pink shirt on your back. All those things, small and large, are chains keeping you out of a time when they could not exist.
But my car and I — the way I felt about it, anyway — were almost rejected that night, by the time I lived in. And so there in my Jordan, just as it was the year it was new, with nothing about me from another time, the old '23 tags on my car, and moving along a highway whose very oil spots belonged to that year — well, I think that for a few moments, all the chains hanging slack, we were free on the surface of Time. And that moving along that old highway through the summer evening, we simply drifted — into the time my Jordan belonged in.
I won't spoil the whole story by telling the complete plot, but it has a nice twist at the end. Back in 1923-era Hylesburg, someone drives off in his Jordan Playboy. He walks around town all night, and when dawn breaks he's back in 1957, without a car. Eventually, he finds another 1923 Jordan to restore, and some interesting history attached to it.
You can read the whole story, and 11 other entertaining time-travel short stories by Jack Finney, by purchasing the book About Time, published by Simon & Schuster, and available from Amazon.com for $9.60 plus tax and shipping.
Meanwhile, what lesson might we draw from this story? Simply this: if you want to travel in time, restore your old car authentically.