Used Cars
A gearhead's path through life (Part 2 of 2)

Author’s Note: This is the conclusion of a two-part article, the first half of which can be found here.  Life on Wheels is an ongoing series of memoir entries centered on the many cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles and other vehicles I have owned over the years. Names and places may have been changed for obvious reasons.

Have you got yourself caught up? So far we’ve covered the vehicles in my life from 1985 to about 2003, right when my second marriage was dissolving. Lupe and I parted amicably, but our considerable fleet of cars, trucks and bikes had to be liquidated, and by the time I actually moved out of the house I was down to just the Coronet wagon and the GoldWing, both of which I sold while living at the old Harrison Apartments in Delano, at the time a haven for drug addicts, disability cheats and various other sketchy folks. I suppose I fit right in. But I soon got a job opportunity that would turn things around for me in a big way, and I needed some wheels, so…

26 | 1981 Yamaha 650 Midnight Maxim. For the life of me I cannot remember where I bought this bike or from whom, but I will assume I saw it on some online classified ad site. And I can’t have paid much for it either, as I had precious little income at the time; I can only assume I applied some of the cash from the sale of the Coronet to this purchase. At any rate, it was a perfectly functional generic motorcycle that I found completely unremarkable outside the fact that I considered it really aesthetically unappealing. The “Midnight” appelation indicated the all-black color scheme of these bikes, but otherwise it was just another 650 Special, the big brother to that first 400 Special I had learned to ride on more than a decade before.

This was the machine I was riding to work when I got my cushiest-ever job, working at an alumni magazine for a major state university. I barely had any clothes suitable for an office job, and my grandmother gave me some money to buy a couple nice shirts and some pants. I am pretty sure most of my coworkers there didn’t know what to make of me, but I got on well with everyone and did my best to just put my head down and do the work. The job was actually something like a dream until a new executive director came onboard, running off all the best employees one by one as I tried to hang on long enough to drag my credit rating out of the post-divorce garbage, and finally I too left to pursue my own entrepreneurial dreams — but not before my bike blew over in the parking lot one blustery day, smashing up the driver’s-side door of the car adjacent to me. And of course the car belonged to the beloved dean emeritus of students! Fortunately, he was kind (and wealthy) enough to let me off the hook.

There is nothing exciting to say about the Yamaha other than that it got me around dutifully for a short period during a time of rebuilding, when I needed solid transportation the most. I don’t even remember selling it, but once I did, I never missed it at all. (I did take at least one picture with it, but not sure why I’m wearing the name tag…)

27 | 1961 Ford Thunderbird. After getting the job with the alumni magazine, things started looking up. I was making a bigger salary than ever, and living on the cheap — first at the old Harrison Apartments, and then in a little mother-in-law house tucked away on a cul-de-sac in beautiful Riverside. The house was owned by an old friend of mine, a realtor who had a couple rental properties, and it served me well as the base camp for my most major attempt to date to get my shit together. I ordered all my credit reports and started making deals to close all the old open accounts leftover from my failed marriages and bankruptcy filings, and was pleased to see my credit rating starting to peek out of the basement for the first time ever.

I made my annual sojourn to the bluegrass festival that year, and just at the tail end of it I met an extremely comely woman who was visiting from Texas. We were introduced by mutual friends and there was an immediate and undeniable attraction between us. I gave her my contact info, expecting nothing, and was shocked and delighted when she emailed me shortly afterward. Thus began an affair that ran for maybe a year or so, with her making numerous road trips from hundreds of miles away in her slick Jaguar XJ12 to spend a few days at at time with me. I found this shocking, too, I have to admit; I didn’t think of myself as that kind of draw, but she seemed pleased to do it, and I was happy to let her.

Carrie had just dissolved a marriage of her own, to a far older man, and one of the remaining factors that tied them together was the 1961 Thunderbird he had given her some time before. The car, she told me on one of her visits, was sitting in Colorado at a relative’s house, and she asked if I would be interested in it.

The next thing I knew, I was headed out to Colorado Springs with a friend who was kind enough to both help me out with a loan and drive me out there in her car. The first time I laid eyes on the Thunderbird, I forked over the required cash, took the paperwork in hand, and drove it back to Kansas, stopping overnight in Pueblo to stay with some old family friends.

The next morning, as we rolled across the western Kansas prairie, I put my foot down on the accelerator and that big 390-cubic-inch V8 woke right up. The space-age “Bullet Bird” took wing and rocketed hard and fast down the road. That’s a 6.4-liter engine, mind you, with 300 horsepower and a stump-pulling 427 foot-pounds of torque — and it had NO problem moving two tons of Ford down the road right freaking now. I looked down at the speedo just as the needle swept past the 100-mph mark, and decided I should let my chase car, a tiny underpowered econobox, catch up to me. As potent as the engine was, I felt like maybe it had a little miss or perhaps the timing was off, and when we stopped for gas somewhere near Garden City, I opened the hood. Imagine my surprise to find one of the spark plug wires had come loose from its loom and had burned in half on the exhaust manifold! Even on seven cylinders this thing was a beast!

Back in Wichita the Bird became my daily driver. (Here’s a contemporary pic of me all cleaned up for office work, with the Bird as my computer wallpaper.) I loved just looking at the thing. It had been competently rejuvenated without any major surgery, and was clean and sharp inside and out. The thing was built all the way back during the Kennedy Administration but had factory power seats, power windows, air conditioning, even the crazy swingaway steering wheel! I joined a local Thunderbird club and they recruited me to design a logo and build a website for them. I felt like kind of the odd man out, though, as most of the other members were rich old Republican farts with whom cars were the only thing I had in common. Even so, it was still fun to get together for the monthly buffet meeting and do a car show for charity.

Winter came and it was a sloppy, cold, icy, miserable bitch. One day driving to work, the Bird started running erratically, backfiring through the carburetor. I pulled out of the street mired with filthy slush and up into the parking lot of our neighborhood diner. Open opening the hood I was horrified to see a little fire break out from under the air filter. I shucked my coat and used it to smother the flames, then pulled out my Nokia and called AAA. They were busy with rescues all over town at the time, and they sent a third-party contractor to tow my Bird home for me. Somehow the dipshit driving the wrecker managed to gouge a big gnarly swath of paint off of the car’s trunk lid with his tow boom, which infuriated me. I went around and around with the tow company about it and never did manage to get them to fix it.

I don’t remember what the cause of that breakdown was, but it was solved in short order. Another frustrating issue was when the steering shaft coupler deteriorated to the point that I could no longer steer the car. I had to run down the correct part, which was harder than it had to be — and I feel like I had a hard time trying to replace it and finally paid someone to do it. The details escape me now, but I remember well the vexation.

After a time I just started feeling like I wasn’t really in a position to own a car as nice as the Thunderbird. Not that it was a matter of whether I deserved it, so much as the fact that I didn’t even have a carport to keep it out of the elements. The thing had been garage-kept for years and it sat in my dirt driveway in the rain and snow and sleet and wind and dirt and I felt bad for it. While scrolling around the used car ads — which I have always done and still do pretty much daily, no matter if I’m happy with my current ride(s) or not — I happened to see a listing for a super cherry ’65 Ford Galaxie 500, at a very nice price. Now that was still a cool vintage car, but not one I’d feel quite so bad about sitting in the driveway as the elegant, luxurious Bird.

I ended up selling it to an older lady in the Thunderbird club; she already had a quite lovely chiffon yellow ’64 but had apparently always had a thing for the Bullet Birds. After she drove it away I never saw it again, but I still think of it fondly, and often.

28 | 1965 Ford Galaxie. I went by to look at the Galaxie mentioned in the previous entry, and I was instantly smitten. I had always loved the body style of these cars since I was very small; I remember our neighbor two doors down had one in the early ’70s. This particular model was the four-door hardtop, not sedan, meaning there was no center post between the front and rear windows on either side. When you rolled all the glass down, there was just one open space all the way from the wing window up front to the C-pillar at the back, and it looked gangster as hell. The car was being sold by the second owner, who had only had it a year or two; he had all the paperwork going back to 1965, and told me the car had been resprayed with the factory paint color just once, after someone had backed into the driver’s door and mashed it in. This guy had also just replaced the tired original 352 V8 and auto transmission, and both the old units came with the car as part of the sale.

I don’t remember what I paid but it was worth every cent. I rigged up a stereo system I could use to play MP3s off an awkward early digital music player device, put the windows down and drove the hell out of this great rig for about the next two years. Sitting on the big black vinyl front bench seat gave the feeling of cruising a midcentury modern sofa down the road, and though it wasn’t a race car, the big V8 moved it as fast as I needed it to, on demand, every time. I don’t remember doing any major repairs on it at all outside of once rebuilding the big four-barrel Motorcraft carburetor, which I did on my patio picnic table using instructions printed out from the internet — still a novelty circa 2004.

The Galaxie served me super well overall and I just loved it, which makes it extra strange that I can’t remember now why I decided to sell it. But I did, some time in 2006, not long before I moved out of the little house into the bigger one on the corner lot next door. I don’t recall ever seeing it on the streets around here after that, but I’m kind of glad for that, as I really do miss that old Ford. It was everything I needed it to be (except cool in the summertime, what with no AC), and I will always hold its memory in high regard. Here’s a bonus goofy pic of me with the Galaxie and my old Les Paul guitar, which was new to me then. Both have passed from my life now and I hope they are in good hands.

29 | 1971 Honda CL450. By this time Craigslist had come to Wichita, and it was very quickly killing both the regular newspaper classifieds and all the little free weekly shopper magazines that carried ads for vehicles. For a nerd whose hobby was window shopping used cars, it was the beginning of a golden age. One day I caught a listing for a little Honda Scrambler similar to the one I had owned years before (see entry number 10), a barn find that had been revived and was in running order. The guy was only asking $800 for it, which was entirely reasonable, but there was a catch: It was located about 140 miles to the east of Wichita, almost to the Missouri border.

I got hold of the old retired farmer who had placed the ad and he told me the whole scoop. The bike had sat covered in dust in the back of a literal barn for 20 or more years before he took possession of it and got it running. He rode it around a little bit, then decided he wanted something bigger — so he bought a recent model GoldWing and listed the little Honda for sale. It had 9809.9 miles on the odometer the day he posted the ad.

My then-girlfriend Janet was kind enough to drive me out to the rural site where the bike was located, and after filling up with gas at what seemed like the only service station in the county, we headed back west toward home.

What I didn’t know was that the Honda, which ran perfectly fine at low-to-middling RPMs, had some carburetor adjustment issues that prevented me from getting all the way up into the power band where I wanted to be at highway speeds. On top of that, the throttle cable was so sticky that the simple act of driving it was like curling a barbell for the whole trip. I could not get above about 50 mph, maybe 55 on the downhills, less on the uphills. (Yes, there are hills in Kansas — at least the eastern half of it.) The trip took a grueling three-plus hours, at the end of which I was entirely exhausted. Also super sunburned, as you can see in this photo Janet insisted on taking when we got back to my house.

I spent some time tinkering on it, replacing old cables and tires and other antiquated bits and bobs — and before long this bike, with its fairing, dual saddlebags and cargo rack, became my most common daily transport for quite some time to come. Like my previous CL450, this one proved rock-solid dependable, though it possessed one annoying tendency common to these old Honda twins: It did not like to be started in the cold. And as the factory starter was too sluggish to actually spin the engine over with the required speed, I relied on my foot to kick the engine to life. Sometimes this meant me forcibly pressing down the kickstarter lever with my right foot over and over and over again until the bike would sputter to life. As I was still in my prime OCD days then, I would of course have to count the kicks, and I remember one particularly stubborn morning when it took 75 fucking kicks in a row. By the time I was done I was sweating through my winter clothes.

Other than that, though, this bike brought me mostly joy, and I kept it a long time, making a few repairs and changes along the way. When I listed it for sale myself in 2010, the odometer indicated 15,515.2 miles, meaning I had put 5705.3 miles on it, mostly just puttering around town to work and the store.

Down the line there came another motorcycle I wanted real bad (stay tuned), and I let go of the little CL450 to have some cash in hand. Though I hated to lose it, I have to say that this little bike really helped cement in my mind the idea that old Honda twins are really just about bulletproof, and as you will see, this one would not be my last.

30 | 1971 Plymouth Valiant. It had to be late 2006 by this time, when I was about to buy a house — the one next door — for the first time, and the weather was starting to get downright autumnal. I had sold the Galaxie by this point and was relying only on my Honda as a daily rig; something more enclosed against the weather was called for. On Craigslist I found this beat-to-shit old barebones Mopar, listed for a few hundred dollars; I am positive I didn’t pay more than $600. It had been through the wringer, with many miles on the clock, lots of dings and little dents, no hubcaps, cracks in the dash and upholstery, homemade wiring jobs everywhere — but it fired right up and ran.

My time with the pair of ’66 Dodges had given me an appreciation for the Mopar world, and I was enamored of the tough-as-nails Slant Six engine in particular. In the case of this Valiant, which must have been the basest base model available from the factory, that humbly reliable powerplant was backed up by a three-on-the-tree manual transmission, and there were absolutely no frills to be found anywhere. The car had even been delivered from the factory with a radio-delete blockout plate where the radio would normally be; I wondered if it had been originally ordered as a fleet car.

Now, this Valiant started and ran fine, but I quickly ran into a major hurdle in its operation: The pair of shift linkages under the hood, connecting the column shift lever to the actual transmission several feet away, had become extremely sloppy over time, which meant sometimes during mid-shift they would get bound up together like two adjacent keys on a typewriter, and I found myself frequently having to go through this rigmarole: pull the car over with the clutch pushed in, turn off the engine, jump out, open the hood, pull the two levers apart manually, slam the hood, jump back in and hope it doesn’t happen again in the next couple miles. As you might imagine, this quickly constituted a major pain in my ass.

Of course I could have replaced the linkages, but at the time I was juggling a lot and frankly didn’t want to make the investment in such a hoopty ride. I was just hoping it would make it through the winter.

I sold the Plymouth to a teenager who I think lived in Wellington or maybe Haysville, somewhere down to the south of Wichita. He was very excited to get his hands on some old iron, and as I went through the laundry list detailing the numerous things that were wrong with the old Mopar, he waved each off in turn. I’m pretty sure I sold it for the same price I paid for it.

Maybe six months or a year later I ran into that young fellow again randomly, and we recognized one another. I asked him if he was still driving the Valiant.

“Aw no, man,” he said, laughing, “I flipped that sumbitch over on the ice last winter.”

31 | 1968 Mercedes Benz 220. That winter at the end of 2006, I happened to be driving by a downtown car lot that specialized primarily in luxury cars and European marques. There were always Saabs and Volvos and Audis parked out there, usually an interesting mix of vehicles that you didn’t see every day on the street in a place like Wichita, which was dominated by more anodyne vehicles such as Ford pickups and cheap Japanese roller skates. On this particular occasion I happened to spy an older sky-blue Mercedes sedan, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off it. The original paint was still in evidence, but faded in places, leaving an unrestored patina that I thought looked elegant in its way, and all the window glass was tinted very slightly blue to match. The car was so sharp I had to stop and look, but it was after hours and the place was closed; I resolved to go back later and ask about it.

Luckily at that moment, right as I was buying a house, my credit score was still the best it has ever been (and is ever likely to be again) — and I was able to get a loan for the cost of the car from an area credit union that worked with the car lot’s customers. I can’t remember exactly what I paid but I think it was in the neighborhood of $2500. As a bonus, the car’s previous owner was local music legend Bob Love of the Love Family Band, so it was a conversation piece in that sense as well.

In fact, one day on my way to work I stopped at my usual QuikTrip for coffee and when I walked out there was a handsome, middle-aged Black gentleman eyeballing it. He asked if it was my car, and when I told him it was, I realized I was talking to Bob Love! I had seen him perform but never spoken to him up close and personal. We had a lovely conversation out in front of the convenience store, with him smiling and shaking his head wistfully and sighing, remembering the good times he had enjoyed in the old Benz. I was really glad we had that chance encounter.

The car had been well taken care of, but at nearly 40 years of age, it was showing its age a bit. The first job I did was to free up the vent motor for the heater, which had seized up way down deep behind the dashboard. I had to remove the cowl between the hood and windshield to get at it, and even then had to resort to some gymnastics in order to simply spray the old motor unit with lubricant and tap it a bit with a mallet. Despite the required effort, this did prove to be a rather easy fix, as I didn’t have to actually physically replace anything. And now I had heat, which was important, as I got the car the last week of December and it was quite cold out.

There were a number of other random weird issues with the old Benz, which I continued daily driving as I sorted the bugs out one by one. I can’t remember what was wrong with the differential, but I know it was dragging for some reason, and a buddy of mine replaced it for me, using a salvage part a guy on the internet was kind enough to send me for the cost of shipping (which was itself costly enough, considering the weight of the item). After that it drove much more smoothly, though it was admittedly one of the slowest-accelerating rigs I have ever owned. The factory said it took more than 13 seconds to go from zero to 60 when it was brand new, and the old 2.2-liter four-cylinder engine was most likely not pumping out its full 103 hp anymore, so it didn’t matter how hard I mashed the gas pedal or how fast I rowed the four-speed floor shifter.

I had to do some ignition rewiring, too, which wasn’t so hard once I found some good reference material online to help me figure it out. Remarkably one of the only things I never had to futz with at all was the twin SU carburetor setup. These carbs were designed roughly around the time the Great Pyramids were being built, and are commonly found on old import cars from Europe to Asia — and they have a reputation for being fussy. These never gave me a lick of trouble.

When I needed new tires, a matching set of decent used ones fell into my lap for free, though they were a bit oversize, and I had to watch out in bumps or making sharp corners to prevent them from rubbing against the inside of the fenders. The bigger shoes lent the car an air of almost caricature, but if anything, they further softened out the already-smooth road feel.

A funny thing about this ’68 Mercedes is how much it reminded me of my old ’68 Beetle, and the Bus, and the Squareback too. There was something about the way the seats were shaped, and the pattern of the vinyl covering them; the layout of the dashboard, the gauges, the size and presentation of the steering wheel. It was just so vintage German! And it struck me that it was not really any nicer inside than any of my VWs of the same era had been, despite the rather enormous price difference when they were new. (The 1968 base price for the Benz was $4,360 vs. the Beetle at $1,699.) And that got me thinking…

Next thing you know, I was on eBay looking for another old Bug. And eventually I found one. I sold the Benz to an old girlfriend of mine who had always admired it, and after that I lost track of it for a long time. In 2023 I saw it pop up for sale on Facebook Marketplace, where it had been listed by a pawn shop. The red “Kansas/Miss America” tag I had taken from my Coronet and put on the Benz was still on there. I can’t remember what they were asking for it, but they said it still ran. I wonder who has it now?

32 | 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. Yes, I got bit again by that old VW Bug, and tracked this beautiful ’63 down on eBay. A younger guy in South Central LA had spiffed it up some, but not gone crazy, so it was just the level of “nice” I wanted — a really solid 20-footer that I could daily-drive without worrying about anything happening to it. I cannot recall what I had to pay for it; I think it was under $3000 but I also had to pay several hundred dollars to have it delivered to Wichita. When I picked it up at the local dropoff spot, it was really love at first sight for me.

Mechanically this car was really solid, and over the next several years of daily-driving it, I don’t recall making any serious repairs to it. That being said, the very first thing I did when I got it was take it to John Byers (RIP) of The VW Shop to remove the sport muffler and put the clunky factory heater system back into place; the kid who sold it to me had pulled all the stock heater biz out as he never needed it in L.A. But other than that, I mostly just kept the oil changed and the valves adjusted.

Over the course of three years or more, I drove this pretty little Bug everywhere, every day, all the time, in every kind of weather. Around this time I had become friends with the members of a local band who were all students from Japan, living in Wichita while attending the state university here, and they really enjoyed our roadtrips in this car to Action City to visit my grandmother and attend the hometown fall festival, and up to Yoder to eat delicious Mennonite-made pies at the Carriage Crossing. I taught multiple younger people to drive stick in this Beetle, too, as the clutch/shifter operation was quite forgiving.

I even found the little Bug useful as a camping vehicle, as its roofrack was capable of carrying a lot of supplies, and like most every old air-cooled VW, it was nigh impossible to get it stuck anywhere. The interior of these tiny cars is surprisingly cavernous, and what I couldn’t fit inside could be lashed down on top, like the lawnmower in this photograph taken July 4, 2009.

I am pretty sure I was already driving the Beetle when I quit my job at the alumni magazine, which I did in order to start working on my next entrepreneurial project, a donut shop that would also function as a community gallery and performance space. I know for a fact it was the car I drove onto the property the first time I went down to take pictures of the building that would eventually serve as our shop, as I have the photos from that day.

On January 29, 2011 — the 150th anniversary of Kansas statehood — a couple friends and I made a motorcycle trip up to Lindsborg for a sandwich and a beer, just because the weather was so unseasonably gorgeous. I wore only a jean jacket that day, and the other guys were in their shirt sleeves. On the morning of February 1, scarcely two and a half days later, I awoke to one of the messiest snow dumps Wichita had seen in some time. At the time I had my first iPhone, a 3GS, and had downloaded a camera app that emulated the look of various old home movie film stocks. On the way down to the donut shop and back home that day, I shot video, which I later paired with an appropriate song from one of my favorite albums of all time. The car never lost its footing for a moment.

By that time I had taken the liberty of bolstering the car’s rather weak factory heater setup by incorporating a pair of electric blowers into the system, which had the effect of absolutely roasting me out of the car. It worked shockingly well until the plastic casing around one of the blower motors became distorted by the heat and seized up. It was a good effort, anyway.

I drove that little Beetle hard and frequently, and after three years a laundry list of little fixes and maintenance chores started piling up. Also the summers seemed to be getting hotter and longer by the year, and having no air conditioning in the car was getting less tolerable — and in that summer of 2011 I was an expectant father-to-be, as well. My roving eyeball started sniffing around for some newer, more child-friendly wheels. Before long, I found something that fit the bill, or at least appeared to, and I sold the VW to a younger guy who had never owned a vintage car of any kind. The wide-eyed wonder with which he gazed at it let me know that I had the right guy.

33 | 1978 Chevrolet/Grumman Kurbmaster step van. Let’s rewind just a little bit, to the summer of 2008, not long after I bought the Beetle. My partner and I were getting our business off the ground and thought we could use a van. We looked at a couple that were too expensive or too problematic, and then I found an old bread truck on Craigslist for $1500, and we bought it.

The previous owner had moved to rural Western Sedgwick County from high in the mountains of Colorado, and had used this truck in his mobile auto repair service there; he said he had himself driven the old rig all the way to this new location. That seemed a pretty worthy testament to its fortitude. In the back were some built-in shelves and cubbies with locking doors, so you could store things securely, without them flying all over the place every time you drove around a corner or hit the brakes. There was also an old Uniden mobile phone mounted to the wall in there, an artifact of the time right before pocket cell phones became ubiquitous. The legendarily dependable Chevy straight-six engine started and ran smoothly and I was thrilled at the great bargain we had scored.

I had a friend at a sign shop make some giant decals of our shop’s logo and squeegeed them onto the sides of the aluminum box myself, just like I had done in my old “sign guy” days. The cab of the truck was separated fully from the box in the back by a double layer of thick heavy plywood, which I cut through with a Sawzall to make a walk-through doorway from front to back. The edges were far from square but it did open up easy access between the two areas of the vehicle. The transmission dipstick tube sprang a leak and I replaced it with a chrome one from a local mom & pop auto parts store, and I think I swapped out the mechanical fuel pump in it at one point, too. But mostly I put the key in it and it fired right up and worked like it was supposed to.

The first real task I put the Kurbmaster to was using it as a camper at the bluegrass festival in Winfield. On that particular year, the Walnut River had flooded well beyond its banks, forcing festival campers to set up instead at nearby Winfield Lake, just a few miles outside town. Though this made for a more spread-out campgrounds, the setting still served us well, as did the truck. I would go on to use it as a camper at the fest every September through 2014, along with other random campouts.

Mostly the donut truck was used for my weekly sojourns to local vendors to pick up supplies, and it sat in our parking lot the rest of the time. It racked up so few miles that I changed the oil in it I think only one time in six years, and I never even pulled out the spark plugs or had to adjust the carbs or do any other maintenance of that sort. There was a new battery, I know, and I think I had to rewire a couple taillights that were on the blink, but that was about it. It was so fun to drive; I loved sitting up high on the single front seat, held in only by a lap belt, with the doors locked open so I could feel the open air as I rode along down the street.

And then on the way back from the bluegrass festival on Sept. 21, 2014, something happened. The temperature gauge suddenly shot up and up and up and maxed out, and I could smell hot antifreeze and feel the engine losing power. I pulled over between Derby and Mulvane, just so close to home but still so far away, and let it cool down a bit. Among the considerable pile of supplies I had leftover from the festival were some jugs of drinking water; I poured some into the radiator and started the engine again. This time I made it to the QuikTrip at 31st South and K-15. I was able to put more water in there, and the beast fired up one last time, but the engine died near Washington and Lincoln, and I finally had to throw in the towel and call a tow truck.

Once the wrecker dropped the Kurbmaster off in front of my house, I unloaded everything out of it — a considerably larger pain in my ass without being able to pull it up close to the garage — and wondered what I was going to do about it. I tried the ignition again and was surprised to find that the engine started, though it was running very rough. I wasted not a second, immediately throwing the truck into gear and jockeying it into position to back it up from the street all the way into my back yard and out of sight behind my house. Somehow I managed to sneak it perfectly into the exact position where I needed it to be, and then I switched the ignition off for the last time.

After that the truck became for a while a place I stored garbage temporarily while I was frustrated with local waste haulers, and later a pretty fantastic chicken coop. It sat in that spot in my back yard, never moving a millimeter, until May 22, 2022, when I very slowly and singlehandedly moved it into my side yard manually with the help of a come-along, so that a fellow who offered to buy it could more easily tow it away. It would sit there for another year before he finally came and got it. What a fine rig it was. (Bonus glamour shot here.)

34 | 1972 Triumph Daytona 500. Right as my partner and I got the donut shop off the ground, the opportunity arose for me to buy a British bike from an older friend of mine. This Triumph had been originally owned by another older fellow I knew, and I had seen it around town — and drooled over it a little — for many years. Though it wasn’t the best time for me in a financial sense, I was offered the nice price, and couldn’t resist.

Everything I had always heard about British bikes, the good and the bad, turned out to be largely true. The vaunted upright twin engine was torquey and meaty and sounded just right through the short aftermarket tailpipes, the bike pulled through the gears like an angry jackal, and it was just such a classically handsome piece of machinery, it looked like Steve McQueen from every angle.

On the other hand, everything people say about Lucas-brand electrics turned out to be unfortunately true, and I kept experiencing the bizarre phenomenon of my headlight suddenly growing super bright and then burning out the bulb as I drove at night. I had to replace the bulb three times in a row, and they weren’t the cheapest. I replaced the weirdo ballast resistor unit mounted under the headlight for maximum cooling, but another bulb popped anyway. It was very frustrating.

Another issue I had was with detonation, the engine pinging under load, especially when hot. I took the opportunity to take off the teeny, stone-age Amal carburetors and completely rebuilt them, adjusted the timing and replaced the ignition wires, points and plugs, but no dice. I asked all the old-head motorcycle guys and the best advice I got was to add a little acetone to the gas tank to up the burnability of the fuel, which did seem to help a little.

The weirdest part about riding a UK bike is that the foot controls are reversed, so that the rear wheel brake is now on the left side and the gear selector on the right — opposite of every single other bike I had owned up to that point. The result was that occasionally I went to tap the brake to take a little speed off but instead slammed the bike down into the next lower gear, which did in fact have the effect of slowing me down, but also of spiking my adrenaline through the roof.

I really loved the Triumph, but with all the various hassles that kept arising, I found myself leaving it behind and riding the old CL450 instead. I think it could have been a great bike for me had I been able to afford completely rebuilding it, but it just wasn’t in the cards. After about a year I sold it to a guy who worked as a professional roadie for numerous major arena rock acts. I only saw it one time after that, in traffic. It still looked fantastic riding away from me.

35 | 1978 BMW R80/7. The donut shop started making my partner and me a little money — not a lot at first, as our overhead was tremendous and we had loans to pay off — but enough so that by June 2010 I was able to pick up a motorcycle I had been dreaming of for years. I had long appreciated the oddball majesty of BMW’s weird bikes, with their VW-style boxer engines and iconoclastic styling, and after searching for some time all over the middle of the United States, I found just the right one for me in a suburb of St. Louis.

The man who was selling the bike was an 80-year-old retired aircraft engineer who had built kit aircraft in his garage as a hobby until catching the motorcycle bug in his 60s. He had gone through this BMW quite thoroughly, and included literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of printed-out documentation, manuals, internet forum threads, etc. with the purchase. The bike also came with a period-correct vintage Wixom Brothers fairing, which the old man had customized by adding an aluminum lower to prevent wind blowing up from underneath into the rider’s face, a spare king/queen comfort seat, the original hard-side luggage bags, a pair of engine guards that were not bolted to the bike at the time, and sundry other goodies. I got an amazing deal on it, and for I think an extra $100, the old man loaded the bike onto his neighbor’s pickup, and that gent brought it halfway to me, dropping it off in the Kansas City area at the home of one of my friends.

I rented a car one-way from Hertz and drove up there, spent the night with my buddy, and the first time I got on the bike I rode it from Overland Park all the way home to Wichita, about 190 miles in total. The minute I rolled up in the driveway that first time, my then-roommate was sitting on the porch. He obliged me with the photo seen at left below. (The other was taken in the same spot ten years to the day later!)

The BMW in motion was a blast — not what you would call fast by any stretch of the imagination, but that horizontally-opposed two-cylinder engine just sounded and felt so good as it pulled through each gear, and it had no problem at all sustaining indicated speeds of up to 100 mph, though I don’t think I trusted the speedometer entirely. One thing I didn’t like about it was the big heavy clunky fairing, which did look “right” for the era of bike, but felt “wrong” to me. Not only was it bulky and opaque, but it was permanently affixed to the bike as well, meaning I neither take it off nor put it back on easily. I ended up replacing it with a quick-change Plexifairing, which suited me much better.

Mechanically this bike never needed much attention, little more than an occasional oil change (which was kind of a pain due to the weird two-part bendy oil filter you had to finagle around a section of bike frame), new plugs maybe once over the years, a new starter relay. I did almost immediately unplug the audible turn signal beeper, because it drove me nuts every time I was sitting at a corner waiting to turn, just as the one on my old GoldWing had done. The dual Bing carbs ended up sassing me more toward the end of the 13 years I had with this bike, but never actually failed me.

I rode this bike to Lawrence on multiple occasions, down to Action City countless times, all over the place, and only one time did it ever leave me stranded — and that was only because the starter relay had wiggled itself loose and I couldn’t figure that out in the dark when it died on me. I made so many great memories on the BMW.

The R80 was the vehicle I owned the longest ever, by a pretty good margin, and I honestly thought I would have it the rest of my life. But my financial situation finally got dire enough that it had to go, and in early 2023 I sold it to a doctor who had been looking for such a bike. Sadly, I think it sat a little too tall for him, and I saw it relisted for sale just a few months later. I sure hope somebody is out there enjoying it now.

36 | 1986 BMW 735i Executive. News of my impending fatherhood had me rethinking my daily drivers, which at the time were the ’63 Beetle and a couple motorcycles. I started poking around the local classifieds to see what was out there at a reasonable price. I was surprised to find a listing for this immaculately clean high-end-spec BMW sedan, at a dollar figure that should have filled me with trepidation, as I had long heard the admonition: “There is nothing more expensive than a cheap luxury car.”

I couldn’t help myself.

I went out to a used car lot out near the airport and gave it the once-over, test-drove the BMW and was impressed. Everything seemed to work as intended, even 25 years after the car had rolled off the factory floor in faraway Bavaria. It had all the bells and whistles one would expect from a baller car of its era, including a rudimentary dashboard computer that showed current MPG, range and other data. And a working sunroof! I think I paid $2500 to take it home.

It wasn’t long before I started feeling a weird vibration in the driveline. I took it into a local BMW specialty garage just around the corner from my donut shop and had them go through the whole normal multipoint inspection. They figured out the vibration issue; this car has a two-piece driveshaft, the middle of which is supported by a carrier bearing — which was failing with age. I had them swap it out and the ride smoothed right out.

For a while it was a solid daily ride for me, and I enjoyed how easy it was to break the rear wheels loose in corners. On one damp and misty spring day I managed to drift it for a full 360+ degrees around one of the Riverside Park roundabouts with complete control, but a WPD cruiser warned me with a short yawp of the siren and I straightened up and exited the circle. As summer came around, Cathy, my son’s mother-to-be, suddenly needed a vehicle, as her old crappy minivan pooped out, and so I gave her full use of the BMW for a month or two.

Fortunately for me there was scarcely any rain to be had that summer, and I could ride my motorcycles everywhere every day without getting wet. On the other hand, it was also a miserably hot summer, with sustained heat domes that kept the temperature up around 100 degrees even as midnight approached on many nights. And that’s when the BMW’s air conditioning went on the fritz. Mind you, it didn’t quit altogether — it just worked sporadically, with no discernible rhyme or reason. The first time I drove Cathy down to visit my grandmother, the afternoon sun brought the temp up to 105°, and of course the AC mostly didn’t work. We arrived in my slick European luxury sedan sweaty and rumpled.

It seems like something else more annoying/expensive was brewing with the BMW, but I don’t recall what now what it might have been. As my kid’s due date loomed ever closer on the horizon, I started looking around for something maybe a little more modern and dependable. I found a nice used Suzuki four-door with manual transmission at a local Ford dealership, and I traded in the BMW as part of the deal. I drove that car for a week before the salesman called me back and said my loan had been retroactively voided due to a more thorough review of my (admittedly godawful) credit history, and I would need to bring the car back!

And then something happened that I never ever would have predicted: They offered to sell me a brand-new Ford, at a much lower interest rate than I was to pay on the Suzuki, as the new car could be financed through their own credit service. I drove off the lot in a silver base model 2011 Ford Fiesta sedan, like the Suzuki equipped with a five-speed floorshift. And that was that for the BMW.

37 | 2011 Ford Fiesta. So, for the first time in my life, I had a car with essentially zero miles on it. The plain-jane Fiesta wasn’t going to win me any cool points, but the zippy little engine coupled to the five-speed manual gearbox made the lightweight little rig a blast to drive hard. Just days after I got it, my son was born, and the first time I drove him anywhere, it was in this car.

There’s not a whole lot to be said about the Fiesta, honestly. I kept the oil changed on schedule, and I drove the piss out of it everywhere I went. Once I found myself running late getting back to Wichita from Lawrence, and put my foot down hard on the turnpike all the way home; I reached my destination less than two hours later, which means I sustained an average speed of 90+ mph for the trip. The anodyne, sensible Ford did everything I asked of it and never gave me any grief at all.

Over the three years I owned this car I made no real changes or updates to it, save one: After losing one of the generic-looking factory wheel covers in the street somewhere, I decided to ditch the other three, and dressed up the black steel wheels with a set of cheap chrome trim rings from O’Reilly’s. Honestly I think it was a big improvement.

The Fiesta’s service to me came to an end in the fall of 2014, when I traded it and another vehicle (to be revealed below) on another brand-new Ford. What it lacked in panache, it more than made up for in rugged dependability. It served me very well!

38 | 1981 Harley-Davidson FLHS Electra Glide Sport. This is where things start getting extra motorcycley. Other than the teeny old Harley Hummer I had briefly owned — which I never actually rode — I had never had any American motorcycle, and frankly it was mostly because I just wasn’t really interested in them. I loved my Japanese and German bikes, and based on pretty much everything I had heard my whole life, I admit I had kind of a low opinion of the quality of Harley-Davidsons.

To be fair, I also have to admit that I had no practical personal experience with them, and when I came across this stunning Shovelhead for sale on Craigslist in late spring 2013, I couldn’t stop drooling. Though it was built in the early ’80s, the paint and custom touches on this particular one harked back to an undeniably classic earlier design aesthetic. I had to go at least take a look.

I rode my BMW out to the far west burbs and met the owner, who had several other cool toys in his well-stocked garage. A quick test drive later and I was sure I wanted this tank. I couldn’t pay cash, and I wasn’t sure I could get a loan — but the guy told me the name of a friendly loan officer at a Wichita hometown bank, and to my surprise, that guy was game, and the Harley came home with me.

I am sorry to report that my old bigotries against the brand, which I had hoped to dispel with the purchase of this machine, were instead only reinforced. It’s true that I loved looking at the Harley, but riding it was frankly an uncomfortable drag, especially if I approached anything like highway speeds. This bike was built toward the very end of Shovelhead engine production, and I could see why the powerplant had been abandoned and replaced by the comparatively smooth and dependable Evolution engine design that HD used for many years thereafter. The transmission had only four forward gears, and on my one and only Sunday ride up to the monthly summer bike rallies at Cassoday, I was blown away by how unpleasant it was trying to maintain any speed north of 50 mph. The engine shook so hard it was like riding a hardware store paint shaker machine down the road; my feet kept vibrating completely off the little footboards and on the return trip I was ready to pull over and kick the thing into the ditch and set fire to it.

Also this bike was ridiculously heavy, literally 50% heavier than my trusty old BMW, at 760 pounds dry, Combined with its physical size, the weight made it a total pain in the ass to maneuver around parking lots and other tight spaces — and unlike my favored German bike, the Harley provided no place anywhere to carry so much as a pack of gum. It was a completely impractical, absurd, ridiculous way to get around.

I put a vintage style windshield on it, as in my middle age I preferred to be as comfortable as possible on bikes, and rode it around for some months, constantly adjusting and fixing things as I went. The long Cadillac-style fishtail pipes looked awesome but kept sagging, and I had to futz with them all the time to stop them from dragging in the street. There was a slow battery drain issue I never figured out, and the thing leaked oil to a degree that would make an old air-cooled VW blush.

One day I was sitting at a red light on a hot day when an oil line suddenly split, showering my right leg with piping hot engine oil. It was all I could do to get home without sustaining serious burns, and by the time I parked the bike I was just about at the end of my rope. I took it to a shop where I knew a good cycle mechanic and he chuckled: “You know HD stands for ‘hundred dollars,’ right? Like every time you ride anywhere on it, it costs you a hundred dollars.”

I put the Harley up for sale and got back just about what I had in it, more or less. And I have rarely been happier to see a vehicle go off to a new home. Thinking back now on all the microaggressions from Harley dudes I’ve encountered over the decades as a rider of German bikes and “rice burners,” I have to wonder how these guys possibly ever had the nerve to feel superior.

39 | 2004 Mercedes-Benz E320 4MATIC wagon. I was still daily driving the humdrum-but-spunky Fiesta when some old friends of mine announced they were selling their family station wagon — just about the time my son was getting too big for the little Ford’s back seat. This was during the one very brief period in my entire life when I brought home an honest-to-god middle class living, and I was making up for all the years of privation by splurging on probably too much: cars, bikes, guitars, good food, nicer clothes, etc. My friendly loan officer gave me the credit hookup again and I sealed the deal on the Benzo.

Now this was a massive update from any of my previous German vehicles. It made my Executive model BMW from the ’80s look like a toy, and my old VWs were primitive museum pieces by comparison. The 3.2-liter V6 under the hood put power to all four wheels with aplomb, and I was surprised at how quickly the beast moved in every kind of situation. To date it remains the only AWD vehicle I have ever owned, and I was into it.

I got the car in January, just as Wichita was experiencing some pretty heavy winter weather, and the ease with which the wagon handled even the shittiest road conditions was impressive to say the least. I remember being called out of bed late one night by a lady friend who had got caught out in a snowstorm, and her car had come completely stuck in high drifts in the street. The E320 easily made the miles across town through all that mess, reminding me of my old VWs — but with way more oomph.

I didn’t have to really put any work into the Benz, and it was a totally solid daily driver for me. There was a ton of room in the back, plus a roof rack and plenty of regular seating space for five tall adults, with heated leather seats, a sunroof, kickass stereo with subwoofer, pull-down window shades on the rear seat windows to keep the sun off your babies, good-looking alloy wheels, and power to spare. The only thing I didn’t like about it was my gas mileage, which averaged about 17-18 mpg during the time I owned the car.

I got tired of making two car payments — on both the Benz and the Fiesta — and when the Ford dealership made one of their occasional calls asking if I was ready to do a trade, I went in to see what they might have in stock. I ended up trading both cars in on another new Ford, which will of course be covered below.

40 | 1975 Honda CB750F Super Sport. My experience with old Honda twin motorcycles had me yearning to try one of their legendary four-cylinder models, and a local artist friend of mine, who had a studio and gallery on the same block with our donut shop, offered to sell me this one. It had not been started in some time, and I had to do a lot of futzing with it onsite before I managed to get it to start and stay running long and well enough to get home. (In fact in digging up photos for this story I found a 17-minute video of me trying to start it that first day. By the end I am a sweaty mess.)

Yes, there was considerable carburetor tinkering to be done, plus it needed new points and plugs and ignition wires, an oil change, the usual maintenance chores. Somehow with my limited shade tree mechanic skills I was able to get the bike running very well, and before long I was zipping all over the place on it, even with its old hard and cracked tires.

I have never in my life owned a motorcycle that was as exciting to ride as this one, a first-year example of the Super Sport derivative of Honda’s game-changing and enduringly popular CB750 platform. The four-cylinder engine revved so high, so quickly, I felt like I was getting behind the wheel of a NASCAR racer after years of driving stock street cars, and when I accelerated from a stop, revving through the gears one by one, the engine screamed like a banshee caught in a jet turbine, faster and higher and more intense all the way up to — and even past — the redline of 8500 rpm. It was an absolutely exilhirating machine to ride.

I even rode up to a lake halfway across the state to attend the wedding of two friends, and though the last few miles of bumpy gravel road was tricky, the old Honda ripped the rest of the way down the blacktop like a laser through a stick of butter. The thing rode like glass down the road, smooth as could be, and I found I could lie down on the gas tank with my feet resting on the rear passenger footpegs and gun the throttle and she’d do 80-85 mph so easily I could have fallen asleep. Whoever developed the Shovelhead could have learned a thing or two from Ishirō Honda.

This was a bike I would have liked to have kept forever, but after a while I started hearing a light sporadic knocking in the bottom end of the engine, and I knew this would likely mean a complete teardown and rebuild to remedy. I was not up for the challenge, nor was I in a position to pay probably thrice what I had given for the bike to have somebody else do it for me. I listed it for sale, and a guy who clearly had lots of experience working on these bikes gave me a fair price for it. Of all the vehicles that have come and gone from my life, to this day that old Super Sport is still probably a top fiver on my “ones that got away” list. I would love to have another, though it is increasingly unlikely at this point that I will ever have the opportunity again.

What’s that they say about it being better to have loved and lost?

41 | 1974 Honda CL360. I had a live-in girlfriend through much of the year 2014, I’ll call her Brenda. Though she was a lot younger than me, and had grown up in a very restrictive religious household, she was definitely an “old soul,” very sharp and funny and talented. She enjoyed riding with me on my motorcycles, and before long started talking about maybe getting one of her own.

I spied an ad for a killer old Honda scrambler for sale locally, and we drove way out into the boondocks on a very cold, crisp March day to check it out. This 40-year-old bike was beyond clean, with super low miles on the clock and just about every part of it looking like it had just rolled out of the factory. Brenda said yes and I rode it back to our house, freezing my ass off, while she drove my car.

Like my very first Honda, this bike still retained its standard scrambler exhaust configuration, with the pipes running back along the left side of the machine at about knee height rather than having one on each side down low. The only issue this little CL360 had was a funny sound I could only hear sometimes, and I figured out it was coming from the transmission cover, where the chain entered and exited. I looked inside and found the dessicated, discarded skin of a snake that had evidently crawled up inside there and molted some years before.

I took Brenda out to a nearby parking lot where the drivers license office conducts their motorcycle tests, and attempted to teach her the basics of riding. She was handy on a bicycle, so she had no problem with the balance and steering mechanics — but she was not accustomed to shifting gears, and had some trouble understanding the process. She was getting a little overwhelmed and suggested maybe we knock off, and coasted up to where I stood, making a perfect gentle stop — but she didn’t take her feet off the pegs in time, and the bike fell over with her still on it and mashed her left ankle pretty good. We knocked off for the day.

Not long after this, Brenda and I were enjoying a pleasant afternoon’s bicycle ride around our neighborhood when she collided with me at the bottom of a long, fast hill. It happened so fast, I couldn’t parse it out for a moment; all I knew was that suddenly I was standing up on my feet and my bicycle was not underneath me, and Brenda was…

Oh shit, Brenda was hurt bad, lying on her back on the sidewalk with a trickle of blood emanating from the back of her head. She spent about a week in the hospital with a skull fracture and traumatic brain injury, after which I brought her back home and played nursemaid as she regained her facilities and abilities. She told me she didn’t want her own motorcycle anymore, and though I was sure sorry at the circumstances, I was not unpleased at all to welcome yet another bike into the fold.

As I mentioned earlier, these were getting to be some pretty bike-intensive times at the house, and the scrambler was but one of my several two-wheel options on any given day I wished to ride. I didn’t put a whole lot of miles on it, but it was sure a fun little machine around town, easy to maneuver, easy to park, good looking and a conversation piece too. Eventually I needed some money and had to start thinning the pack, and it went. While I had it, though, it was mostly perfect.

42 | 2014 Ford Fusion Hybrid. Remember earlier when I mentioned trading in both my Fiesta and the Benz wagon on a brand new Ford? Well, this is it. It must have been around October or November 2014, and this unit had been sitting on the lot for nearly a year, with the 2015s coming in any minute. It had 1400 miles on the clock, as it had been used as a test driver — in fact I found a gas station receipt from Kansas City under the driver’s seat — and there was not only a big discount on the price, but it seems like there was also a kickback from the State of Kansas for first-time buyers of hybrids or electric cars. I made the deal and entered the modern era.

This was the first year for the styling upgrade on the Fusion, borrowing its clean lines and front end shape from corporate cousin Aston Martin, and I thought it was a very handsome sedan, at least as far as modern cars go. It was also white, which lent me the air of invisibility in traffic normally afforded generic fleet cars. It had heated leather seats, sunroof, satellite radio with two or three free years of service, a pretty banging stereo, all the modern conveniences, and I found it instantly to be a comfortable driver.

I know a lot of people who shit on Fords, and others who shit on e-cars/hybrids (and some considerable overlap of the two, too) — but I drove the absolute piss out of this car for nine straight years and the one and only repair that ever had to be made was when a wheel bearing failed prematurely, which was covered entirely by warranty. For the first several years my oil changes were even free at the dealership. I drove to Chicago and back with a friend on less than 40 gallons of gas — at highway speeds averaging 80+ mph, with the air conditioner blasting. Years later, as the odometer approached the 100K mark, I changed the spark plugs in it for the first and only time. I had no trouble whatsoever with the twin-powerplant setup, nor the CVT transmission system, and I never even had to replace the battery. When was the last time you knew an automotive battery to last a decade?

I lost the Fusion in 2023 in a bankruptcy debacle, still owing a lot of money on the note after nearly a decade, and I still miss it. At the time I had to give it up, I checked the dashboard computer for the cumulative gas mileage over the life of the car — and even with my leadfooted ways, I had managed to average 36 mpg in this well-appointed, full-size sedan in our time together. That’s more than double the mileage I got in the Benz wagon, and a third again better than what I had averaged in the Fiesta.

I couldn’t have made a better purchase with that one.

43 | 1972 Honda CL450 w/Velorex sidecar. As I started making a little more money at work, I found myself not only paying my bills on time — a theretofore unknown experience to me — but also suddenly being able to buy slightly more extravagant toys, if only on credit. (Hey, at least I had access to some, eh?) By the time my son was three years old, he was already going crazy for motorcycles, and I thought a sidecar bike would be just the thing to share my love of bikes with him. I started hunting online.

The bike I settled on was located in Florida, but had been built, customized and painted I think in New Jersey, by some motorcycle specialty shop. It was another Honda CL450 — my third! — so I trusted it to be a dependable machine. The beige-and-orange color scheme would not have been my first choice, but it was well done, and there were even a couple small tributes to the US Marine Corps included, which I knew would please my dad. I don’t remember what I had to pay, but I found a mom-and-pop hauler who brought it up to me for a very reasonable price, tucked away inside an anonymous box truck.

When the guy dropped it off on the street across from my house — in one of the diciest offloads I have witnessed in my life — the first thing I did was get on it and run it immediately into the curb. Turns out riding one of these hacks is not at all like riding a regular motorcycle. On a two-wheel bike, you just lean in the direction you wish to turn, and the bike goes that way; on a sidecar, there is considerable more geometry involved, and the amount of practice I had to indulge in to get my shit together behind the handlebars was frustrating. An older biker friend of mine loaned me a great book about sidecar riding technique, and the information in it really did help a lot.

I installed a lap belt in the car’s passenger seat, and following advice I found several places, I threw a couple heavy bags of river rock into the floorboard to keep the hack from flying up off the ground on hard left turns. And after a fashion, I got to where I could handle it, though I forever found it substantially more difficult to ride than a regular bike.

This rig with its big sidecar took up a lot of space in the garage, and ended up getting pushed to the back, where it was harder and harder to justify digging it out. An earthquake shook a bunch of stuff off some shelves out there, and the bike suffered some nasty paint scratches and a couple minor dings. For a while the only time I dragged it out was for our local annual charity toy run. I was able to take my son along with me two years in a row, which we both really enjoyed.

Eventually I found myself in a cash crunch, and the rarely-used Honda hack was an obvious candidate for liquidation. By this time my second son was born, and he had always been too little to ride in the hack, a fact that stuck in his craw as he got older. When I pulled the CL450 out of the garage to get it cleaned and tuned up to be listed for sale, I indulged him in his first and only ride. I don’t think he stopped smiling for three days after that.

I listed the rig on eBay, which is where I had found it in the first place, and somebody in another faraway state bought it and arranged to have it shipped to them. I hope they are getting the opportunity to enjoy it more than we were able to.

44 | 1976 Dodge Sportsman camper. 2015 was a particularly heinous year for me, but it was not without its bright spots. I met a really wonderful woman and she helped me get through a lot of really dark times for a while — and I came across an ad for a pretty decent-looking, affordable camper van. The woman in question, Darcy, rode with me in the Fusion from Wichita up to Sterling, some 75 miles away on the other side of Hutchinson, to take a look at it.

Of course the only reason I was looking for a camper in the first place was because the donut truck had blown up on the way back from the bluegrass festival the year before, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for accommodations come September. And when I pulled up to the small-town address and saw this beast, I knew it was the one for me.

The guys who were selling it were young farmboy brothers, both championship bowhunters who lived together in a house completely festooned inside with taxidermy animal heads. When the battery in the Dodge proved too weak to turn over the 318 V8, one of these guys pulled the battery out of his own truck in the driveway and swapped it in. The engine had not been started in some time, it appeared, and it took quite some time before we got it fired up — but once it was running, it sounded great and pulled strong. In no time I was in the captain’s seat, wheeling the big rig home down the highway with Darcy driving my car in the rearview mirror.

And then, just outside Hutch, the van sputtered to a stop and refused to start again. I suspected fuel starvation, but had no tools on hand, and it was getting dark as well. I heaved a sigh and called AAA, who told me that due to the size of my vehicle, they would have to call a special wrecker from all the way down in Belle Plaine, itself 70+ miles away. Darcy and I drove into the adjacent town and hit the only restaurant we found open — fucking Chili’s — and ate fried garbage while we waited for the tow service.

Because the camper broke down and stranded me on its maiden voyage, I christened it the Minnow, after the ill-fated charter boat on Gilligan’s Island.

Back home I found out that it was indeed a fuel delivery problem. I pulled off the fuel filter and found it so full of crud it was a miracle I had been able to get down the block, much less down the highway as many miles as I had. I put in a new filter, but the next time I tried to move the van anywhere, it clogged up again. Clearly the tank needed to be cleaned. I booked it into a local garage I trusted and had them do a full inspection and tune-up, and they pulled the gas tank and spiffed it up as good as new. After that, the Dodge ran like a champ the rest of the time I had it — though I am pretty sure I replaced the fuel pump at one point or another. That was an easy and cheap job, though, thankfully.

I sewed curtains and pillow slips for the interior of the camper, which had a table/booth setup that converted into a bed, plus an additional storage/sleeping area over the cab. There had been an old sink and toilet installed in the original factory conversion, but all the waterworks were long out of order, so I converted the minuscule bathroom into a closet, and removed the sink in the main area altogether, replacing it with a food prep countertop where I kept the coffeemaker and portable two-burner electric cooktop. When parked at a campsite, I could run 110V AC into the rig and power everything, including the very effective rooftop HVAC unit. I had never glamped so hard as this.

For the next few years the Minnow sat parked either behind the donut shop dowtown or in the side yard of my house, ready to hit the road at a moment’s notice, always game. Once I had the bugs shaken out early on, I had very little hassle with it of any kind. Most everything worked as intended; the factory air conditioning system under the hood, which had mercifully been converted to use modern refrigerant, needed charging once, but after that always blew cold. The only thing I remember messing with was trying to recaulk around the edge of the AC unit on top, which would let condensation drip into the interior if I parked at just the right angle. I tackled that job while camping, climbing up on top with some goop I bought at an RV place, and it seemed to work. We took it to Winfield, to multiple area lakes, to my dad and stepmom’s place out in the boondocks in Cowley County, and it worked like a champ.

Times got harder around the house when I lost my business in 2018, and it became an everything-must-go kind of situation. After one last trip out to my folks’ place for the Fourth of July, I put the Minnow up for sale, and an older woman bought it, intending I think to live in it full-time. It is missed for sure, but we haven’t really done much camping since anyway, so it’s just as well somebody else is getting more use out of it than we would.

45 | 1967 BSA 650 Lightning. Not long before my personal fortune took a hit, I heard a local motorcycle legend, whose kids were all friends of mine, was selling an old BSA. I certainly didn’t need any more damn bikes, as I had four in my garage at the time, but when I saw the damn thing, I had to have it. Remembering my troubles with the old Triumph I had owned years before, I hoped this rig would serve me better.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t.

The first time I drove it to work, one of the shiny red BSA badges on the sides of the tank fell off, and I didn’t notice until I got to the donut shop. I had too much pressing work to do to go back and look for it, but somehow upon retracing my route hours later, I found the thing all skinned up in the gutter, just down the street from my house. The Lucas electrics on this thing sucked balls, too, and sporadically the engine would backfire through the carbs without warning.

When everything came crashing down for my finances, I was not sorry to put the BSA up on the block for sale. The guy who bought it was an obnoxious bully who lowballed me hard and I was this close to telling him to go fuck himself, but I really did need the money, and every day this old British bike was feeling more and more like an albatross around my neck. I let him have it, only to see him immediately relist it for sale at an even higher price than I had paid. I hope he lost his ass on it.

Please enjoy this bonus photo of all five of my bikes in the driveway at once.

46 | 1994 Ford Tempo GL. My grandmother, by this time in her mid-90s, had given up driving sometime in the 2010s, leaving the chores to my mother, who shared the old homestead back in Action City. And when my mother’s health took a shit and she had to move into a nursing home, my gran had no further need for the crappy little econobox sedan she had bought used when she gave me the Oldsmobile in the late 1990s. She asked if I wanted it, and I of course said yes.

I mean it didn’t really want it, but I was happy to spiff it up a little bit and resell it to someone who would give it a good home. My mother had bumped it into a couple things, and the front and back bumpers were both a little chewed up, but overall the car was reasonably sound considering what a half-ass vehicle it had been designed and built to be in the first place. I did a deep-cleaning on it and replaced a squeaky belt pulley under the hood, and sold it to a very nice immigrant family from the Asian subcontinent. I never even titled it in my name.

47 | 1974 Datsun 260Z 2+2. Speaking of my grandma, she finished out the last year of her life right here in our house in Wichita, as the infirmities of age had forced her into assisted living, which drained her life savings in just a couple years’ time. She passed on May Day 2022, leaving us a trust account with a few thousand dollars in it, and most of that had to go to catching up on the mortgage and sundry other red-letter bills. We allowed ourselves just a few frivolous expenses, including a trip for me and the boys and their mom to Bentonville, Arkansas to see Kraftwerk.

About that time I had been keeping my eye out for an old ratty Mustang or VW, hoping maybe I would find something the boys and I could work on together, and then my older son might be able to drive it once he got old enough to have a license. I wasn’t actually planning on buying anything, but when I put out a feeler on Facebook, a friend asked if we would be interested in an old Datsun Z car — for the sum of $500.

The boys and I cleaned our old ramshackle garage as well as it has ever been since I have lived in this house, and we had the Datsun towed over. The friend who sold it to us had bought it seven years prior for considerably more money, intending it to be his then-teenaged son’s car, but the kid wasn’t into it, so it sat instead in his driveway, covered with a tarp, until we had it moved to our place. We were told it had been driven to its previous long-term resting spot, so I figured we could get it going without too much trouble.

To catch you up on what has happened with it since would be a novella-length story on its own, so suffice it to say that now, two and a half years later, we have taken many steps forward, yet remain pretty much where we were at the beginning with this project, perhaps a little worse off. In short, the car has been hacked on by multiple previous owners, and not only are we having to deal with 50 years of the usual wear and corrosion, we’re also having to unbodge a lot of dodgy work. It’s been expensive and frustrating and I myself have made some mistakes that have set us back both money and time, and despite our collective desire to bring this project to fruition, it’s been very slow going.

The boys continue holding their semiannual lemonade stands to raise funds toward getting the Datsun back on the road, and we hit it again in fits and spurts, but at present we are at an impasse, the resolution of which requires more tools, expertise, working space and money than we have access to, so I’m not sure how we will move forward. At any rate, it’s in the garage right now, and if you would like to see a bunch of detailed videos showing us working on it, they can be found on my kids’ YouTube channel. And if you want to help out with money or space or expertise…we’re listening.

48 | 1998 VW Golf GTI. When I got the news that I was going to have to forfeit my Fusion Hybrid, I started looking around for pretty much anything I could afford to get into. I bought this clapped-out 25-year-old Golf from a guy who had got it from some kid in Michigan as part of a trade. The engine had scarcely 100K miles on the clock and ran like a top, and the interior looked practically new, so I overlooked the terrible rust around the rockers and made the deal.

As I still think of the Golf model as a Rabbit, we called this little car the Blue Bunny, and it was an absolute blast. But the flaws quickly added up. The suspension was shot all around, and after ordering new shock absorbers and struts to replace the plainly-broken factory units, I was distressed to find both of the rear ones completely frozen in place with fasteners so misshapen from rust that they couldn’t be turned with traditional sockets or wrenches. I ended up having to buy a MAPP gas torch, a new set of cold chisels, and several other tools to free the wretches from their mounts — a process that lasted days. And even when I got done swapping all four corners, the other components in the front end still needed lots of attention. I ruined the set of low-profile tires on the front within weeks of starting to drive this car, as the caster/camber was insanely out of whack, and could not be adjusted without replacing all the worn-out parts affecting it.

The rust was the worst I had ever seen on any vehicle in my possession; there were soft spots and holes in the floor you could see from underneath the car, but were hidden by carpet inside. It was worrisome even to try to jack the thing up to take a wheel off, as I was afraid the jack might poke right through the rotten subframe. I felt less safe driving my kids around in it by the day, and knew I would have to pass it on.

A fellow drove down from up around Fort Riley to pick it up, and gave me a fair price. He told me the car would be scrapped and the engine and transmission transplanted into a very nice Golf convertible belonging to his daughter, who had evidently somehow ruined the existing engine in it. I drove the Bunny up onto his trailer and watched wistfully as he ratchet-strapped it down and drove it off down the road. I’d sure like to have another GTI some day.

49 | 2008 VW New Beetle 2.5L. Just as the Bunny was on its way out, I was scrambling for something to replace it when an older friend of mine dropped by my house unexpectedly and pressed a stack of $100 bills into my hand. He explained that he had just received an inheritance, and he felt like spreading it around. I was flummoxed, humbled, and most of all just so grateful. The timing could not have been better.

Poking around online ads, I found this New Beetle in Salsa Red for sale at a little car lot run as a retirement gig for an older gent out near Augusta. Though there were 220,000 miles on the odometer, the thing ran exceptionally strong, and it had clearly been very well taken care of by the previous owner, who had apparently had it for 12 of its 15 years. I bought it and took it home.

These cars are actually based on the Golf platform, so underneath, the mechanicals were not so different at all from the GTI I had been driving, and this particular model had been fitted with the larger 2.5-liter straight-five-cylinder engine, backed up by a five-speed manual transmission with floor shifter. This thing was unbelievably sprightly on the road, and I continually found myself grinning deliriously as I cut my way through traffic, never at a loss for speed or power. The torque that mill cranked out!

But it was showing its age a little, too… Like the Bunny, this thing needed new suspension all around, and every time I went over a bump the size of a pencil, the front end clattered and shook my teeth. I blew an axle shaft one day while pulling away from a stop sign, requiring a tow to a garage for repair. (I could have swapped it myself but was assuming it was a failed clutch issue, and the shop did it cheap enough.) The headliner, already a little saggy when I bought the car, got looser and looser and finally one day I just pulled it out whole.

A construction truck hit the Beetle as it was parked on the street across from a local record store over the winter, and the owner of the company paid out of pocket to have the damage — mashed fender, hood, front apron, headlight, etc. — fixed. The finished body work looked fantastic, but the guy paid well more to get it done than I had to buy the car in the first place.

I really loved this car, and so did my kids. Hell, I taught my older boy to drive stick in it on his 12th birthday! But I lived in fear of the day the random thing would break that would cost more than I could possibly afford to fix, and when I ended up inheriting a free car in April of this year, I figured it would be best for me to let go of the Beetle.

I replaced some sensors under the hood that had been causing some sporadic rough-running conditions and throwing codes, and listed the thing for sale. After a couple weeks of tire-kickers driving by and “thinking it over,” a good friend of mine bought it without haggling, and has since invested enough in it to get the suspension updated, and now she is enjoying the thrill of tearing around corners in it just as I was only recently. I hope she drives it for many years to come!

50 | 1998 Honda Civic LX. On April Fool’s Day of this year, a very good old friend and neighbor of ours passed away after an extended period of illness. I honestly had thought he might be getting better the last time I had seen him, but apparently he was just putting on his familiar brave face, which I ought to have suspected. A mutual friend recruited me and the boys to help with the late gent’s cats, and before I knew it, I was helping his niece and other friends sort and donate his things. I asked the niece, who was his estate’s executor, if she needed any help selling the Honda that was always kept in the attached garage, and to my surprise, she told me I could just have it.

The old man had owned this Civic for 12 or 13 years, in which time he had put only about 7,000 miles on the clock. Total mileage was 125K, and literally everything still worked like it ought to. Yes, it’s true that I don’t think the interior was ever swept or wiped down even once over the past decade-plus, but the seats and dashboard and door panels and headliner are all in at least B+ condition, if a little grubby. The car was stolen once, several years ago, and when it was returned to my friend, the thieves had upgraded the factory radio with a better unit — but had also broken off a trim piece on the driver’s side door and put a hoss-kick dent in the rear quarter panel on that side, too.

This is the car I am driving now, having only just now got all the necessary paperwork to transfer the title all these months later, and so far it is serving us quite well, despite its various idiosyncracies. The transmission is sloppy as hell, the air conditioner either blasts like the Arctic wind or occasionally just decides not to blow cold at all, one tire has a slow leak, and once in a while when you turn the key, it will start and then quickly die, and will repeat this behavior four or five or six times in a row — but then will fire right up and run like a champ the rest of the day. I gotta figure that out.

So now it’s just the Honda in the driveway and the boy’s Z car in the garage. I miss having a motorcycle of my own, but as long as I’m alive, I know there will always be at least a slim chance that I’ll get into another one, at least as long as I am physically fit to ride.

In the meantime, I’m just hoping to teach my boys to maintain and repair whatever type of machines they may have to deal with as they go through life. My older son wants to be an engineer, so the Datsun certainly is providing a fair amount of hands-on mechanical tutelage. My younger has his eye on being a pilot, and I think he’s the one I’m going to have to keep my eye on as he gets older, as he clearly feels the need for speed. With a little luck, the time we spend getting greasy together today will pay dividends in both their lives for years after I’m gone.

Fingers crossed.