Measuring our lives by the cars we drove...
Like most “boomer guys” or at least the working-class guys I grew up with, I can measure my life by the cars I drove. Getting a license at sixteen was a critical step towards adulthood. Kind of like getting drafted or going away to college, although most of my friends did the former and not the latter.
Instead of going away to college, they got a job in a factory up in Aurora until they got drafted. Once they got back from the Army…or the Navy...or the Marines…or the Air Force, they went back to the factory where they stayed until they got downsized or if really lucky got to retirement.
I could tell you about Bud Kearney’s pink Plymouth. The one with no brakes, so he had to slow it by using the parking brake judiciously. Or Teddy Fritch’s Studebaker Lark convertible that never ran. Or Tom Felstead’s Dad’s blue push-button transmission Dodge. Once we got out of Sandwich High all of those guys who took the union factory jobs got new cars. Camaros, Mustangs, Chargers. Big engines and four -speed manual transmissions. Premium-fueled wet dreams of male teenagers of the sixties.
Alas I was to drive beaters for another dozen years. A dozen years of poverty induced by enlisted military service, GI bill funded undergraduate school, then law school. I can tell you where I was and what I was doing by the oil burning, rattling vehicle that I drove at the time.
There was a series of them but one of the most memorable was “The Mighty Blue Max”. The “Mighty Blue Max” was a 1968 baby blue Volkswagen Karmin Ghia convertible, or “Charmin” Karmin” as they were known. The Blue Max, as its title was shorted to, came into my possession in my second year of law school. Eight hundred bucks and the fifty-three horsepower chugger was mine.
The school teacher, whose husband talked her into buying a new car, wept as she handed the nine-year-old’s keys to me. With 104,000 miles on her, the faded paint and worn tires matched my faded jeans and empty wallet.
Even with her years and miles, she was cute. The top didn’t leak and the vinyl rear window was solid. The seats without a rip and just the beginning of couple of rust spots above the wheel wells. Altogether a suitable car for a poverty-stricken law student.
I must confess the vinyl rear window didn’t make it through that first winter in Carbondale. Deep in Southern Illinois we could get lovely days even in the midst of February. That first warm weekday the top came down to enjoy the spring-like temperatures. The vinyl window weakened and brittle with the preceding cold weather cracked in a dozen places. Not to worry a plastic dry-cleaning bag and silvery duct tape worked just well enough to keep the snow and rain out while not breaking my student budget.
Although the oil got changed every two thousand miles, I didn’t do any other maintenance other than critical needs, like the time the front axle broke in half due to rust. Although I loved the little two-seater, it did take a lot of abuse that the school teacher had never inflicted upon her. During the summer, the top never went up, unless it rained and sometimes not even then.
There was the Saturday evening when I parked it outside The Pink Pagoda, my summer residence, a twelve by forty-foot single wide mobile home faded by years of Southern Illinois sun from its factory red to pink. As law students are wont to do in the summer time, we barbecued hamburgers on the concrete slab patio outside the Pink Pagoda while consuming large quantities of cheap beer.
The crashing thunder of the early morning storm failed to arouse me from that well-earned slumber. The Blue Max proved its seaworthiness that July night. The next morning when I stumbled out to check on it, x inches of water sat on the floorboards. Not a leak in that German engineered floor pan! Grabbing a plastic bucket, I bailed it out much like bailing a canoe. A few hours later, even in the humidity of a Mississippi River valley summer, the carpets were only damp to the touch. By September the moldy smell was gone.
A year and many adventures later, I parted with the Mighty Blue Max. Some young woman with a thousand bucks in her hand fell in love with the Charmin Karmen and took her off to live in Soulard in the city. Me? I spent the thousand bucks bailing my dad out of jail, but that’s another story.
© William L Enyart 2021
Reflections from the River
www.billenyart.com
Email: bill@billenyart.com
