Sounds of my youth

Driving home from work tonight, I was thinking about all of the sounds I hear coming from my Subaru WRX. Gear whine, turbo spooling, recirculation valve chirping and more. It made me think back to my youth and how my fascination with automobiles led me to tune in to, and later recall, particular sounds.

I have been working on my own cars for years, from fixing my junkers to now putting "mods" on my new cars. Since I have diagnosed and fixed many maladies over the years, I have become very in tune with various noises and exactly what sort of malady or normal operations cause those sounds. This is a useful skill when riding in others' cars, I can tell them what to have fixed just by listening to the squeaks and clunks that these untrained people tune out. On the other hand I can drive my fiancée nuts when I turn down the radio trying to hear all the whirring and whooshing going on.

There was a time I can recall hearing various automotive sounds though I didn't know what any of these sounds were, from age 5 to about...well I am still learning more every day. Now I have the knowledge to realize what it was I was hearing. Took me about 30 years to put it all together:

Whirring of the transmission pump and torque converter in my Dad's 1976 Chrysler Cordoba

Clunking of differential gears when my aunt shifted her Oldsmobile into reverse

Studded snow tires on pavement

A moaning bad wheel bearing in my Grandmother's Gran Torino

Whining straight-cut reverse gears

Screeching fan belts

The sweet, sweet exhaust sound of a 1987 Buick Grand National

I think I was tuned in from a young age due to my curiosity about automobiles, something that I have carried forward to today. I doubt my sister remembers any of those sounds, or ever gave them a second thought.