Trivial Knowledge: Station Wagons

-- by Micheal

Okay, I know that compared to a global economic slowdown, leftover word trivia from childhood is pretty, well, trivial. But still, I found myself dancing around with glee (metaphorically speaking) like the old woman in the Bible who found her lost penny when I found my answer.

Did you ever have one of those nagging little questions as a kid, which no one ever answered? I don't mean big stuff like why is man here on the earth. I mean trivial stuff, like my friend Randy and I used to argue about in the back seat. "Is glass clear or is it really 'white' because it passes all colors?" Proof that a little bit of 3rd grade science is a dangerous thing.

One of my naggy little questions was: Why do they call square-backed cars "station wagons"? A related question was why was woodgrain somehow associated with them such that they'd bother to put wood-grain printed metal trim on them, or wood-grain printed vinyl wallpaper on their doors? It made no sense to me. No one I asked seemed to know why. They just accepted it and moved on.

The other day, quite by random, I remembered my childhood question so set about researching it. The answer turned out to be rather easy to find, once I started looking.

Station Wagons: These predate the automobile, actually. They were wagons with several bench seats and a space behind for luggage that ferried passengers from the train station to their hotels. The courtesy vans at today's airports are doing the exact same job. Hence the name station wagons. Train-station wagons.

In the early days of the automobile, station wagons also went horseless. Automobiles in that day had bodies made mostly of wood, in the carriage-making tradition. On consumer-grade automobiles, sheet metal was overlayed and painted to protect the wood. As bare-bone utility vehicles, they left off the shmancy metal. They had just the bare wood.

People with the time and money to be railroad passengers and hotel guests tended to be more upscale, understandably. They thought the bare-bones utility cars used by the train stations were quaint and started buying them to do the grunt work around their vacation homes. Thus began the association of wood bodied cars with rich folks, hence the snob appeal of the wooden trimmed cars in the suburbs.

After WWII, real wood bodies were impractical to build. Factories could make steel bodies much more efficiently. Still, the need to "look" like wood was still there. So wood printed steel trim was applied. The association of wood trim with upscale station wagons persisted until well into the 1980s at least.

Well, there you have it. Another of life's trivial mysteries solved. No need to thank me. It's my job, ma'am.