Terry Dalton’s shed is very large. It’s as wide as a small English cathedral but not quite as long. It has a distinctly ecclesiastical feel, with its multiplicity of long and very deep laminated-ply beams arching across the considerable width of the building, high above the smooth concrete floor. Light shines through the bottles in front of the high clerestory windows as if through stained glass. Like an ancient cathedral, the barn has begun to attract groups of supplicants. However, they do not make their pilgrimages to view religious relics such as nails or weeping statues; they come to see collections of objects of desire – things we would all like to own.
These pilgrims do not arrive on foot or on the back of an ass; they roar in on powerful American motorcycles or drive hot rods or classic Ford or Chevrolet sedans. The pilgrims do not venerate a person or a thing, nor a god, idol, or building, but a time and a place. The United States of America is the place, and the 30 or so years after the end of World War II, from 1946 to the mid ’70s, is the time.
The best of times
In Terry’s view, those were the best years ever and the world was at its best. The Canterbury pilgrims visiting Terry’s shed are not alone in having a deep affection for this period of the US’s history. Both George Lucas’s motion picture American Graffiti, with its advertising tag line “Where were you in ’62?”, and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show pay homage to the era and were very successful. Happy Days, the television series set in the ’50s and ’60s, with Henry Winkler playing The Fonz, was outstandingly popular, running for an impressive 255 episodes.
When Michael J Fox time-travels in the DeLorean in , he goes to 1955. When Kathleen Turner magically revisits her past in the fabulous , she goes back 25 years and fetches up in 1960, her senior year in high school. The scene where her father proudly shows off his new car and Peggy Sue says, “Oh Dad, you were always doing stuff like this! It’s funny! It’s really funny! You bought
