A lot of things go from everyday use to the scrap heap, sometimes overnight. Usually there is a good reason: slide rules, for example, became all but useless with the advent of the calculator; it was probably poetic justice for the slide rule, since it had probably been responsible for the demise of the abacus. DVD players have replaced VCRs which replaced watching re-runs. And the SUV seems to have replaced the station wagon (and added DVD players, sometimes with screen so large that the driver in the car behind them can watch the movie that's being played.)
But I'm not sure the station wagon needs to be tossed on the scrap heap, any more than I think that a Mom car-pooling the kids to school needs 4-wheel drive. Well, 4-wheel drive might come in handy in a place like Minnesota, where they have snow like we have humidity. But around here, where the mention of snow in the seven-day forecast can lead to school shut-downs and massive shortages of bread and milk, soccer moms should be able to get by with just a big car, and not an all-terrain urban assault vehicle.
My mom didn't surrender her station wagon until her car-pooling days were decades in the past. In the early years, she needed a big car. They didn't call her The Totin' Turtle for nothing. She had kids to tote to and from school, kids and water toys to tote to the lake, and groceries to feed the kids once we hit those glorious years where caloric intake simply cannot keep up with metabolism. A smaller car would not have been enough. (And back then, the price of a gallon of gas was measured in cents, not dollars… and not very many cents, at that.)
Mom's station wagons came in a variety of models, a smaller variety of shapes, and almost no variety of color. She wanted a white car, so she got a white car, every time... almost. As it turned out, one of the cars-- I believe it was a Ford LTD-- was actually a very pale blue color. Very pale; had it been any more blue, it probably wouldn't have stayed in the family very long, but it was such a light blue that my mom could convincingly argue that she thought it was white, no matter what the rest of us thought.
Mom could be excused for rushing her choice of cars that time; she hadn't really been planning to get a new car, but it became a priority after a particular lake trip. We had stopped at Stuckey's like we always did, and I had eaten a foot-long chili dog, which I usually did, and followed it with a chocolate milkshake, which I sometimes did. And then, after we had climbed back into the car, I threw up, which I almost never did. Oh, carsickness was no stranger to me, but I usually had enough self-control to wait until the car was safely parked on the side of the road. Not this time, though, and the chilidog-and-milkshake carsickness was a particularly bad one to have in the car. Add in the heat of a Lake Martin summer day, and, well, you can probably understand the need for a new car…. even one that wasn't white.
She also had a white station wagon with wood-paneled sides, so that's sort of not white. But the panels only looked like wood; in reality, they were decals, and large decals aren't made to withstand the heat of the aforementioned Alabama summer. It wasn't long before those decals began to fade, blister, crack and peel, and eventually the car was white, with tiny tatters of wood-colored decal clinging stubbornly to a few spots.
Those old station wagons had three sets of seats: the front seat, the back seat, and the third seat. The third seat could be folded flat when maximum hauling space was needed. (Driving to the lake with four kids, one dog, and enough food to feed everybody for at least a week was one of those times.) And when less cargo space and/or more seats were needed, the third seat could be used; the cool thing about that last row was that the seats faced backwards. (I don't know why this was cool; it just was, probably because it was different. Back in those days, it was OK to be different.)
I remember one station wagon mom-- not mine, someone else who was in our car pool-- wanted the kids who sat in the rear-facing seats to be entertained, so she gave us mirrors to play with. Mirrors don't sound like a great plaything, but they can be a lot of fun, especially if you find things like reflecting sunlight in tot the eyes of the driver behind you entertaining. Fortunately this was before road rage was commonplace; or, maybe, it was a bunch of kids playing with mirrors in the back seat of a station wagon that first inspired road rage. If so, it's understandable.
But it probably doesn't happen anymore, at least not for that reason. Now, people who drive behind a modern station wagon-- and SUV-- have new reasons to experience road rage. As it turns out, nothing is more enraging than getting behind an SUV that is playing a movie on built-in DVD… and having it go in a different direction before you get to see the end of the movie.