This man was proudly showing off his new (for him) ride by lounging on the hood. You could do that in the 1970s; cars were still built with thicker metal.The Ford Mustang was a hot car during that era. Everyone wanted one. Note the contrast between the Mustang and the vehicle behind it on the other side of the street.
I took this picture in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood in early 1974, just months after the first OPEC oil embargo. My memory is that the price of gasoline quadrupled within a year of the embargo. It went from about 25 cents per gallon to about a dollar a gallon. The sharp increase meant a downturn for Detroit and an upturn for compact-car imports from Germany and Japan. It changed America forever.
