“There are people in this audience I grew up with,” he told the group. “You can’t understand how important that is when you’ve written about these people and they show up.”

They came to hear Lankton talk about his new book, Motor City Boomer: The Car Culture That Defined a Generation, published by Wayne State University Press.

A towering Cadillac tail fin dominates the cover, evoking an era of big cars, bright chrome and dramatic styling.

But the cars are only part of the story.

“The truth is, the cars were never really the main point of the story,” Lankton’s daughter, Laura Kloss, said while introducing him. “They were the backdrop to a colorful childhood, just as they are the backdrop to our rich history.”

Lankton, 79, is a professor emeritus at Michigan Technological University. His book combines memoir with the automobile history he studied and taught for much of his career.

An earlier publisher liked the manuscript but not its autobiographical approach. Lankton set it aside for seven years until a younger colleague urged him to return to it.

His wife, Rachel, who attended the Ella Sharp program, also helped as the manuscript took shape. In the acknowledgments, Lankton credits her with reading chapters and catching mistakes.

He originally called the book Auto Biography: Growing Up with Cars in the Fifties and Sixties. The title reflected a realization he had while teaching his “Automobile in America” course: The postwar social changes he was explaining to students had happened to his own family.

“This is my auto biography,” he writes in the introduction, inviting readers to “ride shotgun” through his life with cars.

Lankton’s academic interest in automobiles goes back to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. He later worked from 1971 to 1973 as curator of power and shop machinery at The Henry Ford. At Michigan Tech in Houghton in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, he taught for 31 years, including his automobile course for 30 years, and wrote about the region’s Copper Country.

But in Jackson, Lankton deliberately put the professor aside.

“Tonight, I’m not going to talk as an academic at all,” he said. “This is pure memoir.”

For the Jackson audience, he focused on his Schaffer Drive childhood and memories of racer Ralph Donaldson at Jackson Motor Speedway.

Jackson, Lankton explained, is one of his two hometowns. The other is Danville, Illinois, where his family moved after leaving Schaffer Drive. His Danville book-tour stop followed shortly after Jackson, and he saved that next part of his story for that audience.

“We’re telling the story down there too,” he said.

His family had moved around 1954 from Stanley Avenue to a new ranch house on Schaffer Drive. The neighborhood was so new that the yard, driveway and street were dirt.

“Our whole world was dirt,” Lankton recalled.

The house had a large lot and a two-car garage, part of the suburban growth transforming postwar America.

“You can’t have suburbs without cars,” he said.

Lankton recalled baseball, bicycles, streams and swamps, and trips to nearby Ella Sharp Park. The Schaffer Drive house was “the center of everything.”

More than 70 years later, some of the children who shared that world were sitting together as he told the story.

The cars changed along with the country, and the soaring fins on Lankton’s book cover have a Michigan history of their own.

Before World War II, General Motors designers visited Selfridge Field near Mount Clemens — now Selfridge Air National Guard Base — to examine a Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter plane. Its twin tail helped inspire the small fins that appeared on 1948 Cadillacs. The fins grew increasingly dramatic as Detroit automakers borrowed imagery from aviation and eventually the space age.

Chrome also gave designers natural dividing lines for increasingly popular two-tone paint.

And then there were those fins. Lankton described a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible he had recently seen at The Henry Ford as “about two miles long, one mile wide,” with “great knife-edge fins” that looked sharp enough to cut an arm.

The Henry Ford connection runs through Lankton’s story. More than 50 years after working there, he returned for an author talk about Motor City Boomer just days before his Jackson appearance. Images from The Henry Ford collections were also used on the book’s cover.