Editor:

I’m no “car guy,” but a recent “I regret to inform you” letter from the President of Saturn made me wax nostalgic. You see, Saturn is riding into the sunset to join Oldsmobile and the American cowboy in iconic retirement.

Simply put, though it garnered several Car of the Year awards along the way, the early enthusiasm over the novel 1985 Saturn introduction got bumpy. The final fender bender was Saturn being spurned for a requested $3 billion infusion to revamp its lean product line.

Why, then, my tugging heart? Guess I’m a soft touch for “buy American” and was fueled with hopes that Detroit could regain its glory years. Though some argued Saturn was, at best, simply a cheaper, knockoff version of a superior Honda or Toyota, it was more than a brand. It was an innovative philosophy.

At its prime, Saturn was a bona fide maverick, born of the patented American can-do attitude. It boasted design and manufacturing autonomy from General Motors and touted a fundamental marketing makeover.

Granted, its slogans – “A Different Kind of Company; A Different Kind of Car” or “Things are Different in a Saturn” – might have been Madison Avenue folksiness at its crafted best. Unarguably, though, there was a refreshingly different salesroom ambiance.

Drive in to a Saturn lot and you could exhale. Imagine actually getting out of your car without a salesman in gold chains and alligator shoes tattooed to you. The only pressure you sensed was in the lots’ tires. You never felt if you said you were “just looking” you’d invariably get a stare of frozen contempt or a challenging retort such as “funny, the last time I was only looking I wound up married.”

Saturn, after all, introduced the no-dicker sticker. Its soft-lit cubicles contrasted others’ neon-lit, open pits with upstairs management windows, à la Vegas casinos, looking down, if not, in fact, listening in on. To this day, I swear that at one of these dealers, while a salesman went to get his “closer,” a conversation of my wife and I was listened in on. That or clairvoyance.

By contrast, come around lunchtime to Saturn in the early days and you’d likely be offered a coke and grilled burger. Buy their car, as I have three times, and you’d be serenaded at the curb by the management team. Expect mailed coffee cups, wallet-thin emergency keys and invitations to the annual company picnic in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Matters of planetary proportion? Perhaps not. Yet meaningful small human touches in an increasingly cold corporate world.

But there I go, getting all sentimental over a car company. Saturn, you worked hard and you gave my family, and the country, a darned decent ride. That, in my book, counts for a tank full of gratitude.

Walter Ruehlig, Antioch