Taillights...

Driving into work this morning, I noticed a car that passed me because its taillights were a distinctly different shade of red.  A few minutes later, I pulled alongside that same car in traffic, and I saw that it was a 50-something Chevy – over a half-century old.  Somehow this triggered a cascade of memories...

Taillights used to be different, and somehow this happened so gradually that I never noticed it before. 

These days as you travel down the freeway at night, you'll see red taillights into the distance, all of virtually the same color (the LED lights are subtly different, but it's a tiny little difference).  Every once in a while you'll see the flashing amber of turn signals – and even they are of a perfectly uniform color.

This was not so when I was a kid.  I remember in the '50s and '60s that the taillights stretching out in front of you at night would be of many shades of red, and of very variable intensity.  It was common to see cars with taillights so dim you could hardly see them.  Some of the reds were almost purplish; others bordered on orange.  Amber turn signals were quite rare – nearly all cars used a single lamp for both brake light (steady) and turn signal (flashing).

It also used to be more common to see broken taillight lenses, as it was much harder to get replacments for cars more than a few years old.  Parts stores were relatively uncommon, and quite often couldn't get obscure parts like taillight lenses for cars more than a few years old.  Junkyards were your main resource, and even they were iffy – you had to find a junkyard that happened to remember having a car like yours.  There were no computers, no web sites to search across many junkyards, etc.

Technology changes many little things in our lives...