Rolled VW

 

I probably wasn’t the only teenager to roll a Bug, but I was probably the only one who thought of herself as Sterling Moss’s little sister.  I took the corner high and called my clipping point just right.  I gave it full throttle at the apex and woosh, she started to roll.  There was water in a depression on the street.  I acted fast to right the car and bam, I hit the curb; over she went.

Now this would have been just another bad choice from a kid, but the problem was compounded because I was one block from my boyfriend’s home where I definitely was not supposed to be and to make matters worse, I took a detour from my assigned task of picking up my sister and invited Karen, a friend along. 

My father hung up on me when I told him I had rolled the car.  It was up to me to find a way home, get my friend home and right the car.  My boyfriend was a great help.  By the time I finally got home my father was so contrite for hanging up on me without discovering if my sister and I were hospitalized that he didn’t say much.

Until a few days later when he asked me who had been in the car with me.  Again, believing he had special knowledge I said yes and asked how he knew.  Karen’s cigarettes had lodged under the seat.  Busted again. 

One more car that disappeared in the night.  I never drove any of his cars again.  I paid to have the Beetle repaired and left home never to return.  I can knock wood when I say that was the last accident I have ever had in a car…thirty+ years ago.  But I still look at old Bugs with nostalgia.

In fact, when I married, years later, our first car was a Beetle.  Now the story on that one is a lot happier.  I loved the car, I had chosen the blue color and drove it across the Oakland-Bay bridge every weekday to San Fransico State.  One expecially windy day the car was bounced across lanes and frightened me to the point of cold sweat. 

Later that night I described in exaggerated detail the awful experience and my fear.  We sold the car the following week to a friend’s daughter.  She kept the car for fifteen trouble free years.  My husband and I, in turn, purchased a Rover Sedan, a luxury car with polished mahogany and leather seats.   It turned out to be a lemon, but that is another story.

 

My First Car

My friend Suzanne who has two children, a boy and a girl, is an excellent observer and a very pragmatic philosopher. She tells me girls are born with the doll gene and boys are born with the truck gene. She, as with most mothers, tells of the many differences between girls and boys from their first cries.

I think she is right. But somehow I got the truck gene. Don’t get me wrong, I still have the shoe gene and all the other girly things, but I love old cars.

My first old car was a red plastic hotrod with a friction motor. I was all of seven when my Father, just home from his job as a supervisor at the CTS in Cleveland, sat on the floor with me and showed me how to use it. He revved up about five times on the black and white checkered linoleum then released the car to slam into a wall, bounce and keep going. What a thrill. That hotrod became my favorite possession.

My next favorite old car was a maroon 1949 Ford purchased in the early fifties. I was still a little tyke and could watch the street race by from a hole in the floor board in the back seat. I thought all cars came with view holes.

But my all time favorite old car is the 1950 Ford flathead V8. The last of a breed of cars; easy to repair, fun to drive and inexpensive to own. I drove the car, when I could wrestle it away from my Father, to the beach, to college as a day commuter and to my first job. He told me once, “I know you have been speeding in that car. I am going to put a governor on it if you do it again. Then you can never go more than 45 miles an hour.”

Years later he confessed he just assumed I drove fast because he did and the car seemed to demand it. He also reminded me it was his car and if he had put a speed governor on it, it would be there for him as well. Fathers!

I did slow down, but eventually, I drove it right into a parked car. Hey, I was young and my nephew’s ball rolled under the brake pedal. Thus ended the life of this car…I always wondered what happened to it. It just disappeared one day. I suppose my fascination with old dead cars started from that incident.

I was able to convince my Father his next car should be a Beetle, which he bought and which I also crashed, rolled, actually. But that is another story.

For more pictures:  http://flickr.com/photos/26112774@N05/