I imagine some of the younger members do not know the windshield wipers were all vacuum powered back then. Hit the bottom of a good hill and they pretty well died unless you let up on the gas. Also the length of the actual windshield wipers were a joke in comparison to what came later. Nine inch blades where quite common.

I still have vacuum wipers on my thirty nine buick. Some of the better cars added a vacuum holder tank to the system to help moderate the intermitent operational tendency. Trico supplied a majority of those vacuum motors for most brands of cars for a long period.

Some of the linkages to drive the wipers even incorporated cords. This was the high tech upside to earlier periods where you had a little hand crank coming through the window frame to clear the glass by hand with.

Car heaters were still an option on many brands during this period. So there were a lot of cars sold in the south without them. Of course those cars had no defrosting capacity either so you mounted a little six volt fan to the window frame to help out. Even with some heater setups that had limited defrost capacity.

Before the heated coolant heaters the set up was to scavange hot air from around the exhaust manifold and introduce it to the cabin. Prior to that heated bricks on a stove wrapped in covers for your feet was about it.

You have not realy lived until taking a trip of a couple of hundred miles in really cold weather without any form of car heater working. I would preffer never to do it again.

Cars of this period could not accumulate the total milages that todays vehicles do but in general stayed on the road for more years than what our daily drivers in general do today.