Author’s Note: 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. This is the first half of a two-part article, the conclusion of which can be found here.
My love for cars and trucks and motorcycles has never been a secret; since 1985, when I started driving at age 16, I have owned 50+ vehicles. Many of these were precarious rigs bought for very little money, and poverty taught me how to do maintenance and repair on them as each new mechanical crisis arose. Some I miss very much, others I was quite happy to see go.
Below please find a catalog of my life as a gearhead, told to the best of my memory in the order in which each new vehicle came into my life. I have omitted a scant handful of random rides I only took in trade, or bought for parts, or otherwise had no hope of ever actually streeting. Also note that there is significant chonological overlap in my ownership of some of these, so be prepared to jump back and forth in time a little bit. (Just pretend it’s a Christopher Nolan movie.) Actual photos of my personal vehicles have been included where possible, otherwise I have scoured the interwebs for pictures of identical models.
Buckle up!
1 | 1980 Chevy Citation. The cars of General Motors’ X-Body series have earned legendary status as some of the most renowned lemons in the company’s history — but we didn’t yet know that in 1985 when my grandmother bought one for me, on the condition that I would keep it insured and filled with gasoline. My Chevy Citation hatchback was indeed a poorly-made car, but it at least had the optional bigger 2.8L V6 engine, which made this fugly beige-over-brown econobox just as fast off the line as the base model Camaro of the era.
I got a job at Long John Silver’s to keep up my end of the deal with my gran, and that first summer I reveled in the freedom to go anywhere I wanted, when I wanted. I drove the car over to nearby Winfield a few evenings to catch a series of classic movies at Southwestern University; that’s where I first saw “Easy Rider” and “The Graduate” and probably a couple others I forget now. That same summer was the last time I went to Grand Lake for my annual family summer vacation, and the only time I made that trip in my own car. A few months later I started going out with my first serious girlfriend, and in fact I lost my virginity* in the little Chevy’s rear cargo area, with the back seat flipped down.
I had countless problems with the Citation, and admittedly, my spirited teenage driving didn’t help matters. I even wrote a letter of complaint to GM and they sent a local Mr. Goodwrench out to inspect the car — but I was told the previous owners had crashed it and put it back together badly, which allowed the company to wash their hands of it. The coup de grace came when I jumped a well-known local natural ramp in a city street, got airborne and broke a motor mount upon landing, flopping the engine forward and down, halfway out of the engine bay. By that time I was delivering pizzas for a living, and ended up borrowing my then-girlfriend’s 1965 Corvair to make deliveries for a while — but it was the end of the road for the Citation.
2 | 1963 Rambler American. I had been daily-driving the depressing Citation for about a year when I unexpectedly fell deeply in love at first sight while passing by a dumpy dirt used car lot on the south end of Action City. A little gold two-door Rambler station wagon sat there, already showing significant wear despite being not yet 25 years old — but my young roving eyeballs saw only promise. The lot was closed so I had to come back the next day to talk to the old fart who ran the place. I paid $125 cash, he handed me the title — and only then did I notice the car had a manual transmission. I had to call a buddy to come drive it over to where I planned to hide it from my grandmother, as I knew she would not approve of the purchase.
My buddy Ray let me keep it at his place down in Sleeth Addition, where he taught me how to drive stick using the wagon’s old school three-on-the-tree shift mechanism. We spent a hot, sticky couple of days in the rickety garage of his mom’s rental house, listening to a “Beatles A-to-Z Weekend” on the radio and painting the car red, white and blue in an American flag motif. We repaired the leaky gas tank, replaced the broken front seat, and generally got the Rambler back into roadworthy shape.
I loved this car so much, and I drove the absolute piss out of it — and it just seemed to eat it up, as though it was glad to have a second lease on life.
The Rambler’s straight-six engine was designed in an L-head configuration, which meant the spark plugs stuck straight up out of the top; you could take them out with a pair of pliers if you couldn’t find the right socket. And it had a teeny little one-barrel carburetor that betrayed the car’s heritage as a fuel-efficient option from an era in which there were few to choose from — but its air cleaner was missing so I improvised one for a time from an old one-pound coffee can with a coffee filter taped across its mouth. Everything under the hood was so simple, even a noob like me could get his head around most of the mechanicals. I once fixed a broken throttle return spring with a rubber band just long enough to get back home from out of town.
Eventually, though, a piece of the clutch mechanism broke, and no replacement part could be easily found. I parked the Rambler when my former high school gifted counselor and his wife offered to give me their Mercury Monarch (see below), and the little old wagon sat broken and forlorn in my grandmother’s back yard while I moved off to college. After a year or so in the big city I was needing another vehicle, and my gran offered to take the Rambler to her local good-ol-boy mechanic to see if he could get it back on the road. He actually fabricated a replacement part for the broken clutch bit, and next thing I knew, the wagon was my daily driver once again, but now on the mean streets of Wichita.
And mean they were. One night some anonymous Chad jumped on the Rambler’s hood and kicked a hole in its windshield as it sat parked outside Drago’s Pizza, a by-the-slice place catering to the college bar crowd just east of 21st & Oliver. I never did find out who did it, but later that summer the broken windshield got me pulled over for a safety violation. I was told by the trooper that my license was suspended — a complete surprise to me — and I was taken to jail. The Rambler was towed off to impound, and I couldn’t afford to get it out, nor did I feel comfortable asking anybody to help me retrieve it. I never saw it again, but every once in a while, even now, it comes back to me in a dream. I would love to have another but the possibility of that is increasingly unlikely.
3 | 1975 Yamaha RD350B. My first motorcycle was given to me by the middle-aged guy next door to my grandma’s house, who had let it sit in his garage unused for years, then found the engine locked up when he tried to start it. I don’t remember exactly when this was but it was in the same era when I got the Citation and Rambler. In fact it may have predated either. My biker dad took one look at it and said, “Be careful with that thing… That’s a waspy bike.” His warning was unneccesary, as I never managed to get it running, and sold it to a friend who later swapped the engine out for a 450cc version. I rode on the seat behind him once, hanging on for dear life as we screamed down the highway between Winfield and Action City. It was a thoroughly terrifying experience and I have avoided riding pillion ever since.
4 | 1972 Chevrolet Vega. I actually owned two Vegas at the same time, one of which barely ran at all, the other of which had been souped up with a small block V8 by a previous owner but then suffered a catasrophic engine bay fire. I can’t even remember where I bought them now, but I tried to Frankenstein them together into one usable car. All in vain I am afraid, as I was still an absolute beginner to the art of wrenching, and had no real money to spend on the project anyway. This entry is notable mostly due to my memory of being temporarily trapped under one of the two Vegas in my grandmother’s back yard when it tipped over off the jack and into my lap. I was lucky that day.
5 | 1975 Mercury Monarch. As mentioned above, my high school gifted counselor and his wife gave me their old Monarch coupe when they moved up to a new Toyota Tercel. The car — Mercury’s analog to the popular Ford Granada — was blue, with an aftermarket sunroof and three-on-the-tree manual transmission backing up a straight-six engine. The trans was problematic, so I ended up having a used one swapped in for cheap at a local shop, and moved the shift lever to the floor. I really liked this car, but bad luck befell it repeatedly; someone smashed the sunroof out, and after a breakdown I left it parked in Winfield in a place I thought would be safe, but it got impounded. I paid to get it out of the clink and discovered that while it was in the impound yard, someone had cut the lock out of the trunk lid and stolen all my tools out of there. I don’t remember now why I ended up ditching the Monarch, but I recall it fondly from our short time together.
6 | 1980 Yamaha XS400 Special. Shortly after I moved to Wichita to attend college in August of 1988, the university administration handed me a student loan refund check, as I had ended up dropping classes in the wake of a registration debacle beyond my control, and there was money leftover. As I had no vehicle at all at the moment, I promptly went to K&N Yamaha and bought a used motorcycle. I had never yet driven a bike on my own, only ridden behind as a passenger, and I taught myself how to do it right then and there on the street as I drove back to the dorms on my new ride.
I practiced riding in the dormitory parking lot and on the narrow roads winding around the cemetery across the street, and quickly got comfortable behind the handlebars. I stopped going to classes due to the aforementioned registration snafu and started staying up all night riding the little bike around the empty streets of Wichita. I taught my suitemate Bob how to ride, and soon he started borrowing the bike during daylight hours while I slept. I rode that Yamaha all over town, plus back and forth to Action City to visit my gran several times — until the weather got cold, which was coincidentally just about the time I got a job working at a local Pizza Hut carryout/delivery unit. I then traded the use of the bike to my old girlfriend Marya, who had also moved to Wichita for school, in return for the use of her massive 1975 Cadillac. (More on that below.)
Marya fell over on the Yamaha and banged it up a bit, so by the time she traded it back to me, the left-hand rear turn signal stalk was broken and dangled low enough that it almost threatened to bump into the rear tire. I got pulled over by a cop and was issued a fix-it ticket for this, though I protested, as the light still blinked; I later fixed the issue but never got the ticket dismissed, leading to the suspension that eventually led me to be arrested in the Rambler (as mentioned above).
I traded the Yamaha to a weird buckaroo for a Chevy Caprice in early 1989. More on that to come.
7 | 1975 Cadillac Sedan deVille. The summer before we both moved to Wichita, my ex-girlfriend Marya bought a powder blue Cadillac from White’s Used Cars — the same place I found the Rambler — for $300. It is rather remarkable that such a luxurious and expensive automobile, reasonably well-kept, lost over 97% of its MSRP in scarely a dozen years, but that was the case. Though we were broken up as a couple by then, Marya and I still ran around with the same group of people, and I remember on one occasion driving the Caddy on a washboard dirt road outside of Action City and laughing as the headlights bounced and clattered, the light of the high beams jittering madly in the distance.
As mentioned earlier, I ended up not owning but taking possession of this car for some time during my brief period living in the dorms. The enormous 500-cubic-inch V8 drank up a gallon of gas every eight miles around town, but fuel prices were under a dollar a gallon, and I happily delivered pizzas in it, pocketing a 50-cent fuel credit for each pie I dropped off, on top of my hourly pay.
My biggest memory of the Cadillac is of driving west near the airport on Kellogg late one night with five other passengers, all of us high as kites on Mexican dirt weed, cruising at about 70 mph. I got a hankering to see what the old girl could do, and floored the accelerator. I think we were all surprised at how fast we rocketed up to 100, and how smoothly — but I swear to god I saw the gas gauge needle move steadily downward the whole time I had my foot on the floor.
I ended up trading the Caddy back to Marya for the bike, which I in turn traded for…
8 | 1980 Chevrolet Caprice Classic. I met a lot of weird people in the dorms but probably none as weird as Cutter. He was intense in a way that recalled the actor Crispin Glover, but with a kind of rough-hewn hayseed vibe around the edges. He was hot to own a motorcycle, and offered to trade me his car for my Yamaha. As it was a bitterly cold winter, I took him up on it.
I had always thought the Caprice was a handsome car, if rather anodyne in design, and this particular one appeared to be in pretty good shape. The first time I drove it more than a mile or so, a connecting rod came loose and clattered around inside the legendarily limp-dicked 305 engine, making an unholy racket that could be heard for blocks. I was seriously pissed off, as one might imagine, at this immediate failure — but in the end, the failure of the Caprice ended up being the catalyst for getting my Rambler repaired.
As a coda to this story, no sooner had the Caprice taken a shit than I received an urgent phone call from a police officer out near Colwich, miles out in the country, asking me if I owned a Yamaha 400 motorcycle. Technically I still did, as Cutter had not yet transferred the title over and was still riding on my license plate, and I said as much. The cop told me my friend had been pulled over riding the bike with no M class license, and would not be allowed to continue riding. Would I be so kind as to come out and ride the bike back to town so they wouldn’t have to impound it?
Let’s just say Cutter is lucky I am a nice fellow.
9 | 1970 Toyota Corona. As mentioned earlier, my old Rambler was resurrected and brought to Wichita for a time in 1989; after it was lost to the impound yard, I spent a while without a vehicle at all. I was living downtown, still in shock after surviving an evening of horror with an armed gunman who ended the night by killing our close friend Steve, and I really just wasn’t getting around much for anything. But I couldn’t resist the opportunity when my mother’s friend Pug, a songwriter who reputedly had sold one of his tunes to a famous country singer and was ready to head to Nashville to follow his dreams, offered to sell me his vintage Japanese sedan for $50.
Now, I had never before seen a Toyota Corona, nor in the years since have I been in the physical presence of another. I thought it was a really striking automobile, and this one ran like a clock. Unfortunately my license was still suspended, so I had someone else drive it home for me. I ended up letting my buddy Harvey borrow it long-term on the condition that he chauffeur me to the grocery store once in a while.
I finally paid off all the fines required to have my drivers license reinstated, but I had lost my physical copy of the damned thing and was told I would have to bring in a pile of official identification to get a new one. Even though I wasn’t completely legal yet, I took a chance and got behind the wheel of the little Toyota, driving it down to my old hometown to pick up a copy of my birth certificate from my grandmother’s safe deposit box at the bank. While in Action City I hit a bump in the street unexpectedly hard and knocked the starter loose. I didn’t figure this out until a few minutes later, after I had stopped at a gas station and attempted to restart the car.
By this point I was starting to learn a few things about working on old iron, and I managed to snug the starter up enough to turn over the engine and get back on the road. I had my receipts from the county clerk’s office, and now my birth certificate and the other assorted paperwork I needed, and I was happy to be in the home stretch of the ordeal. I headed back toward Wichita feeling accomplished.
And then, on Cowley 3 just south of Udall, a loud BANG emanated from under the Toyota’s hood, and the red OIL light blared suddenly from the dashboard. The engine died, leaving the car to coast silently down the dark highway to a sad stop on the narrow grass shoulder. The smell of hot oil and metal rose from the engine bay and the only sound was the ticking and pinging of machinery beginning to cool. I turned everything off, gathered the few items I needed to keep, and walked into the darkness toward Udall, abandoning the Toyota. A friendly redneck in a pickup gave me a lift the mile or two into town, and I called a friend in Wichita from a gas station pay phone, asking him to come get me.
I never did see that lovely little car again, but a week later my dad said it had been reported in the local paper down there that a car registered to me had been found turned upside-down in the ditch off the side of Cowley 3. I hated hearing the Toyota had suffered such an ignominious end. It deserved better.
10 | 1970 Honda CL450. In ’89 I had become friendly with a guy named Sid Garrison, a local townie rich kid who introduced me to lots of fun people and places and frankly mentored me as a young rube trying to fit in with the cool kids. I volunteered to help his mom and little brother and stepdad move house, and in the process I saw this little red Honda gathering dust in the garage. Sid’s stepdad said it had been his bike in college days, but he most likely wouldn’t be riding it again, and he’d be happy to sell it to me cheap rather than move it to the new place. I think I paid $150 for the bike, which was equipped with an aftermarket fairing, and came with a complete spare engine and transmission assembly in a box.
This excellent and extremely sharp-looking little machine, with its sporty swept-up “scrambler” exhaust pipe, is the bike that made me into a motorcycle guy for life. Here is a short list of things I did on it between 1990, when I first got it running, and 1996, when it was stolen:
• Rode it as my only daily driver transportation off and on for years.
• Bike was nearly destroyed in a horrific sudden wind storm while I worked at a liquor store at 13th & Oliver; we were listening to the weather coverage on KFDI when they advised “EAST WICHITA TAKE COVER NOW!!!” and I ran outside and quickly walked the Honda into the alcove on the back of the strip mall where our big dumpsters were located. Everything in the parking lot got blown away, and later that night I rode home in pitch blackness as all the city lights were out, and the streets were so flooded my exhaust pipes were underwater. (Coincidentally I would take magic mushrooms for the first time later that evening.)
• Was pulled over on the Honda by a police helicopter late at night on my way home from work at the liquor store and detained by ground officers in a harrowing but fortunately brief case of mistaken identity.
• Accidentally rode bike down a couple unseen stairs on a dark wet sidewalk in front of the strip mall where the Flicker Lounge used to be, causing me to fall over at walking speed and tear up/burn my left leg pretty bad. (I walked it off.) To this date still the worst crash I have ever had on a motorcycle, and it was trivial enough that it didn’t even leave a scratch on the bike.
• On my first date with the woman who eventually became my first wife, we stayed up all night on LSD — her first trip — and at dawn we hopped on the Honda and drove out around the edge of the county enjoying the beautiful morning as the last vestiges of the trip wore off, replaced by sleepiness and a ravenous craving for coffee and bacon and eggs.
• Found out about a Butthole Surfers/Flaming Lips/Stone Temple Pilots show happening in Kansas City the day of, and Brenda (the aforementioned wife-to-be) and I hopped on the back of the Honda and rocketed straight to the venue, wearing only the clothes on our backs. No windshield, no helmets, no boots, just the constant thrum of the little 450cc twin engine running near redline for two and a half hours straight, broken only by a couple stops to take a piss. We got to the gig having missed the two openers but just in time to see the Buttholes.
After the show we got back on the bike and headed into the Westport district to meet some friends and have some drinks. A cop pulled me over and informed me Missouri had a helmet law, and insisted I park the bike. We walked the rest of the way to our destination, met our buddies, spied some rock stars, got kicked out of a bar and crashed on a friend’s floor overnight. The next morning Brenda opted to ride back to Wichita in a car with some folks we knew, and I looked forward to the long ride home alone, being able to enjoy the trip without having to hurry.
The second I merged onto the highway headed south, it started pouring rain on me. This continued all the way to El Dorado. The sensation of riding into hard rain at speed was practically unbearable, every drop hitting my forehead and cheeks and knuckles stinging like needles, and I could only manage to bear a top speed of about 55 mph. It was absolute brutality. And to boot, my shift lever fell off at one point, and I had to pull in the clutch, coast to a stop, then walk back a half-mile to retrieve it. What a trip.
• Rode down to my dad’s house in Oxford, about 45 minutes to the south of Wichita, so he could help me replace the bike’s drive chain. On the way home after, I took off from a stop sign on a dark, deserted blacktop at full throttle just for the thrill of it. I quickly changed through the gears, and in seconds the speedo had climbed to just about 85 mph — and then there was a CLACK and the engine went silent and I was freewheeling down the road at speed. My heart leaped out of my mouth!
I let the bike coast as long as it would go, then pulled over. The clip that held the chain’s master link together had either been faulty or perhaps not snugged up properly during our install, and the chain had come apart — binding itself up in the transmission and completely wrecking the shift assembly. The engine was locked in gear with the trans and could neither be turned over nor disengaged. Once again I hitched a ride, and once again I used a pay phone to call for a lift.
The next day a friend with a pickup helped me retrieve the bike, and it sat next to the back porch of the apartment in South Wichita I occupied in the wake of my divorce — until I came home from work one day and discovered it had been stolen. In the process of writing this, I managed to find but a single blurry photo of that bike, and it was taken as it sat broken in that spot.
I would go on to own some other Honda twins of this era (more to come!), but this one will forever remain closest to my heart. Every time I see one like it, it hurts a little, even now.
11 | 1960 Ford Falcon. I had formed a band and was living with a couple bandmates in half of a rental duplex just a couple blocks south of the university and our favorite watering hole, Kirby’s Beer Store. One day my pal Harvey came into town from the nearby bedroom community where his family lived, bored as hell — and very, very thirsty. Now, Harvey was aware that I had my eye on this old Falcon, which I had spied sitting in a row of other disused family cars along a treeline on his folks’ farm, and he made me a deal I couldn’t refuse.
“How much cash do you have on you right now?” he asked me.
I fished around in my pockets and produced 25 dollars.
“Give me that right now and the Falcon is yours,” he said. “I will have my sister sign over the title.”
The deal was made, Harvey got his case of beer, and soon I was standing at the edge of a field trying to resurrect the Falcon, which had been parked on that spot perhaps ten years prior. I figured out the ignition coil was faulty, but we snatched one off a nearby Mustang II that had been in a rollover, and to my delight, the tiny Ford’s straight-six sputtered to life. I mean, there was a small fire for just a second, but we batted it out quickly with some old mildewed carpet sample rectangles that were lying on the ground nearby.
I got the Falcon insured and tagged and drove it every day for a time. My boy Ray from Action City helped me put a wild colorful psychedelic paint job on it, and I enjoyed the shit out of the little car for a while. It reminded me so much of the Rambler in its simplicity, in its deliberately spare design, even in its “old car smell” — horsehair and axle grease and gasoline.
And then one day as I approached my own house, I pulled the column-mounted gear selector from third down into second, and as I let out the clutch, the transmission locked up firmly, bringing the car to a sudden screeching halt and throwing me bodily into the steering wheel. It was like I had run into a brick wall. Just as had been the case with the Honda CL450 bike, the engine and trans were firmly stuck — but in this case, the rear wheels were still immobilized, rendering the car impossible to push out of the street. I had to have a tow truck come get it, and they had to jack it up and put the back wheels onto rolling dollies so they could move it at all.
I don’t remember what happened to that car; I didn’t have enough money at the moment to replace whatever it was that broke, so I imagine I just let it go to salvage. I was still in a long post-traumatic haze from the summer before, and frankly let a lot of things go by the wayside in this period.
12 | 1953 Harley Hummer. An older friend of mine was helping his mother do some cleanup around her property and asked if I’d have any interest in his late dad’s antique hill climber project bike. Of course I was! I think I gave him 50 bucks for the machine, which had been extensively stripped and modified. The fenders were gone, the exhaust consisted of a single unmuffled pipe, hacksaw blades had been taped to the bare handlebars to act as an ignition kill switch in case the rider fell off, and an enormous rear sprocket had been bolted up to the factory one, giving this barebones little rig way more uphill torque. I could find no information whatsoever on these bikes, and when I walked into local Harley places, I was met with disdain for even asking about it. I gave up on trying to get it going, and sold it to a local fellow who works in TV news. Last I heard, he had it up and running, and I am truly glad for that.
Strangely, this is the only vehicle I ever owned from the 1950s, though I did buy my second wife a project ’55 Chevy much later on — but I can’t count that one as mine.
13 | 1976 GMC Sierra. My dad gave me this great truck, which he called Goldie, and it served me very well for a while. I remember one particular hellride in it, though, helping my friend Vanessa retrieve some things from a storage locker out in far-flung Great Bend. The trip out there wasn’t so bad, but I had just lost my eyeglasses, and the return trip was marred by a storm that brought darkness, haze, and horrific road reflections off the seemingly endless miles of orange-and-white reflective construction barrels that dotted the long final stretch back into Wichita.
I can’t remember now how I came to rid myself of this fine beast, though I do remember having some water pump trouble with it. There are many times lately when I could use a good truck. Pity.
14 | 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. I was buying some weed from a friend who lived right down the street from the old band house on Holyoke near the U, and couldn’t help but spy a sharp-looking black VW in the drive. As it turns out the car belonged to another guy who happened to be hanging out there at the weed house, and he was in fact interested in selling it. I had gone in the front door just looking to buy a dime bag — but ended up making a deal to trade 500 dollars for the title to the Beetle. I had no idea what a wild ride I was going on.
I had friends who owned old air-cooled VWs, and was already friendly with the local hippie Volks mechanic, and was extremely pleased with this purchase. The car was in overall pretty good shape, its only major issue being a large hole in the rear passenger seat floorboard, over which the previous owner had placed a wedge of plywood, which did little to stop wind and dirt and rain from entering the interior through the floor back there. I loved the way it looked, and the way it drove too. I have learned over time that a spunky little car is often more fun than a pile of muscles on wheels, and the Beetle was a veritable fun dispenser.
At the time I started driving this car, I was in the process of opening my first business in Wichita, a punky coffeehouse located next to the city’s seedy Greyhound bus terminal. The very first evening we were opening, I remember parking the Beetle at the curb across Broadway from the shop. There was already a line of people standing there waiting for the doors to open as I was last-minute scrambling with errands. I hopped out of the car, flipped the driver’s seat forward and leaned in to fetch a huge heavy box of freshly-roasted coffee beans out of the back seat — and CRACKED my forehead HARD on the car’s unforgiving, sharp steel rain gutter above the door.
I reeled backward, dazed, stumbling nearly into the path of a passing car, and almost fell over. With everybody watching, I retrieved the coffee from the VW’s back seat, closed the door, and walked across the street. Looks of concern fell across the assembled faces as blood trickled from the fresh cut on my forehead. (It wasn’t so bad but bled a lot; worse was the bruise across the top of my face for the next week.)
The Beetle served me as a daily driver throughout pretty much the entirety of my relationship with my first wife, across numerous jobs, to countless band gigs, camping trips, visits back home to my gran in Action City, in literally every type of weather. It is practically impossible to get a VW Beetle stuck in mud, snow, ice, or sand, and I had plenty of occasion to find that out — including the time I helped push a car stuck in the ice and ended up driving a couple of young women around town all night, not realizing until I was in too deep that I was chauffeuring them to a series of crackhouses. (Oops.)
I only had a major issue with the VW twice in all that time.
The first big headache came when a spark plug blew out of one of the car’s two engine heads, which, having been repaired before, was not reparable a second time. This meant removing the engine from the car, replacing the head on that side, then doing the whole thing in reverse, reinstalling the engine. This would have cost me a number of hundreds of dollars at my friendly local shop, on top of the cost of the part, and I decided to try to do it myself.
My good friend/coworker Jack let me use his tiny little 1930s garage to work on it, and I was grateful for the space. Guided by the famous John Muir “Compleat Idiot” VW repair manual, I managed to get everything detached from the engine, and easily pulled three of the four bolts that hold the whole powerplant in place. But that fourth one! Located in a place I could not see from any angle, requiring my arm to bend in a way it didn’t like, and rounded off to boot — I spent literally hours trying to get that one fucking fastener out. I even went to the pawn shop and bought multiple wrenches of different design, hoping one of them would finally budge the thing — and eventually, after a week of going over to Jack’s place after work each night and sweating and cursing for a couple fruitless hours, the thing finally budged.
After that the engine removal was a cinch, all by myself. I only needed help a couple times, to physically lift the back end of the car over the engine after it had been lowered to the ground, and later to help me steady the mill on the jack while trying to guide it back into the transmission smoothly. One of the most accomplished moments of my life came when I put it all back together, sat in the driver’s seat, turned the key — and the car started and purred like a kitten. (Well, after a couple alarming pings and tings that turned out to be the normal sound of pushrods seating themselves.)
At some point I painted a pair of cool offset racing stripes on the Beetle, all the way from the front apron, over the hood, across the top, down the back all the way to the exhaust tips. I chose a bold golden yellow, which popped against the factory black, and I painted the wheels to match. It was a striking look. Later still I spray-bombed the entire car a pretty wine color. (Amazingly, I found a photo!) I don’t remember what prompted that but I know it happened around the time someone broke into the car sitting in my own driveway, removed the steering wheel — and stole the turn signal mechanism out of the steering column. Just down the street were some locally-loathed hillbilly kids who drove VWs, and I will always suspect they were behind it.
Looking back now it’s hard for me to recall why I decided to let that Beetle go. It happened just as my marriage was breaking up, and it seemed like everything in my life was in flux. I sold the VW to a friend who was planning to move to the Pacific Northwest, and I got my original $500 back. It would not be my last air-cooled Volks, as you will see…
15 | 1974 Lincoln Continental Mark IV. My replacement for the reliable, fuel efficient Beetle was this monstrous, precarious, gas-guzzling rig, equipped with a 460-cubic-inch V8 powerplant, and coming in at only three inches shorter than the Cadillac. I must have been looking through some sort of local classified ads in those days, because it seems like a lot of cheapo car deals were flying around, and I remember calling about this one and setting a time to go look at it. The owner was a middle-aged Black man, and when he introduced himself, I recognized his name. He and his family seemed wary of the dorky white boy in the living room until I asked, “Hey, was that you who had D.D.’s Mini Club over there at 13th & Hillside?” The gentleman’s eyes lit up at being recognized as a celebrity. I paid $300 cash for the car, he and I went to the local Dillon’s store to get the title notarized, and I was the owner of one of the most deluxe rigs I ever drove. It even still had a functional eight-track player!
Deluxe though it may have been, the thing had 20+ years and about 160,000 miles under its belt by then, and was showing its age pretty badly. The bodywork was in good condition, as was the interior; this car had been kept clean and tidy its whole life. But the suspension squeaked and clattered, the transmission slipped, and worst of all, the engine had a habit of overheating. The one time I drove it out of town, headed south to visit my grandmother in Action City, it boiled over just as I rolled into tiny Belle Plaine, and I ended up having to sit there a long time waiting for it to cool down enough to even add any fresh water. And this was before cell phone days, so I just sat there sweating in the merciful shade of a nearby tree.
My grandmother had just then bought a newer lightly-used car, and, mortified that I was driving such a heap, she told me I could have her old Oldsmobile station wagon, the car I had spent my teens riding around in with her behind the wheel. I was very pleased to let go of the Lincoln.
16 | 1979 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser. The last major purchase my grandfather made before his unexpected death by heart attack in 1982 was this lightly-used Olds station wagon. I think it had 15,000 miles on it then. He and my grandmother were my brother’s and my legal custodians at that time, and they figured it would be a good vehicle for family road trips. The old man died very shortly after, and this car would spend its next 13 years sitting in the carport of their house in Action City, serving as my grandma’s only vehicle — which meant driving no farther than a two-mile round trip to the supermarket or the hair salon a few days a week, maybe a 15-miler if the old lady went out to visit her sister east of town.
My grandmother bought a year-old Ford Tempo in 1995, and gave me the Olds. At that time the odometer showed only roughly 40,000 miles. It was like a new car, just nearly 20 years old. Sadly, its years of disuse started showing quickly once pressed into regular daily service in the big city.
The shocks were shot. The car bounced and wallowed through bumps and around corners, amplifying its already precarious tendency to understeer, and the back end would drag on the ground coming in and out of driveways. There had been a fake-leather wrap laced to the steering wheel for years, and as its plastic sinews cracked with age, it started to come loose. I pulled it off and was horrified to discover the actual hard plastic of the steering wheel itself crumbling to pieces, leaving only the thin steel ring inside. The brake master cylinder died. The power steering pump died. The water pump died. The fake woodgrain vinyl on the driver’s side — which had been exposed to the elements in that carport all those years — started flaking apart and looked like absolute shit. On a trip to Kansas City to play some gigs with friends, the Olds vapor-locked in a busy urban area and a local street hustler dude helped us get started again — but then squeezed us for $20.
The only time I think I drove the big wagon out of town without a hiccup was a trip I made with a couple friends down to a wedding at Lake Carl Blackwell outside Stillwater, Oklahoma. The three of us and a very small dog made our way down there and back with no problem; we all got quite drunk at the party, and I was pleased that the car made such a very comfortable place for me to sleep. As it turns out, the only photo I have of that car was taken the next hungover morning.
Someone stole the factory hood ornament while the car sat parked in the off-alley area behind my post-divorce apartment on South Main (the same spot my CL450 was yoinked), so I went to a local trophy shop and found a shiny chrome-plated chicken and mounted that in its place. I came out one morning a couple weeks later and found someone had stolen that one too. I later put a bowling trophy topper on there and it stayed the rest of the time I had the car.
I finally got rid of the Oldsmobile when I was living with my later long-term girlfiend Marlo, it must have been late ’96, around the time I bought the VW Bus (yet to come). I put a FOR SALE sign on it and a very nice Mexican guy came by the house with his wife and — I shit you not — six kids, and he looked it over thoroughly. A mechanic by trade, he was happy to pay me $300 for the car. The kids all piled into it, some in the rear-facing seat at the very back, burbling excitedly in Spanglish, and they drove off into the evening and that was that.
17 | 1978 Yamaha XS500. After blowing up my trusty old Honda CL450, I was in the market for another bike. I can’t recall how this one got on my radar, but I’m pretty sure I paid $500 for it in 1996. I thought the styling was kind of ugly, all angles and corners where I preferred softer and rounder lines, and as a joke I made stickers based on the logo for the old Soviet newspaper PRAVDA and slapped them over the “Yamaha” on the gas tank. It was remarkable how many people asked me, “What kind of bike is that?” even though the word “Yamaha” was still clearly visible, literally engraved into the metal on the transmission case below on both sides of the bike. (The only photo I have of this bike is poor but shows the graphic.)
This bike was so reliable that I have few anecdotes to relate; I drove it to work every day the weather allowed for four years. Eventually something finally went afoul, I think maybe an ignition coil died. By that time I was living with my second wife on Estelle Street just north of Douglas, and I left the bike parked on the front porch for some time, too occupied to mess with it. A local redneck guy kept driving by the house and eyeballing it, and finally stopped to make me a cash offer. As had been the case with my old Beetle, I ended up getting my $500 back. Another bike would come on the horizon very soon…
18 | 1970 Volkswagen Transporter. I bought this barebones Bus for $300 from an old fart in Mulvane, having seeing it listed for sale in some local classifieds. It ran poorly but was quite straight and mostly complete, minus its passenger side windshield wiper and middle row seat. It had been equipped with rare optional air conditioning, but the compressor had been removed long before, and I ended up pulling out the inner components of the system as well. The engine had some issues, but I assumed I would figure them out; the thing ran well enough to get around, so long as I drove it gingerly.
My love for this rig came on hard and fast, and I delighted in the unusual driving experience of being up so high above the road, and so close to the windshield too. In a VW Bus the driver’s seat is right on top of the front wheels, so one is forced to relearn how to turn corners, especially hard rights. I ran over several curbs before I got used to having to drive a little farther forward into the intersection before turning the wheel. The sensation of sitting atop that pivot point in tight turns was nothing short of bizarre at first.
One night shortly after I bought this VW, two other friends of mine with Buses met me at the McDonald’s on South Hydraulic and we all rolled together the remaining blocks to the Starlite Drive-In, which was screening Cheech and Chong’s “Up in Smoke” for one night only. The three of us parked in a row down in the front row close to the screen and all these excited stoner kids came over to chat us up. On another occasion I drove the Bus up the highway to nearby Newton to catch a free outdoor concert by Johnny Cash, June Carter and Johnny Western, in the parking lot of the new outlet mall. The show was fantastic, but on the way back, the Bus’ engine acted up. We made it home, but I had to admit it was getting to be time to really finally sit down and start diagnosing the problem(s).
And then I made the poor decision to try driving the Bus to Action City to visit my gran. Marlo and her little daughter and I found ourselves stranded just east of Oxford with a completely dead vehicle on the way down, and we were lucky to catch a ride most of the remaining distance courtesy of a friendly fellow in a Porsche. This gent not only gave us a lift to Strother Field, just a few miles outside the old hometown, but let us use his cellular car phone — a device I had never seen up close and personal — to call my grandmother. I had the Bus towed directly to the friendly hippie VW shop in Wichita and paid about a grand to have the engine completely rebuilt.
After that the old Bus was a reliable workhorse for me for two or three years. Not only was it my daily driver, but Marlo and I made numerous road trips in it up to Lawrence, attending weddings and parties, and later delivering the monthly music/art tabloid I published out of her shared home. As long as the headwinds weren’t terrible, this rig would do a steady 70 mph (indicated) all the way across the Flint Hills with my foot on the floor. I will never forget the LSD-infused Easter egg hunt hosted by some friends north of the river in Lawrence, in which the hosts hid probably 200 plastic 35mm film canisters, each filled with various types of booze, all around their property. I’ve never seen so many grown people stumbling around on Easter morning, hungover from the night before but laughing their asses off as they scrambled hither and yon with baskets, picking up the “eggs” where they found them, cracking the lids and drinking the contents.
“This one’s bourbon I think.” <snif snif> “Piña colada here.”
Marlo and I were on acid that whole day, and I am pretty sure we weren’t the only ones. In the afternoon the live music started, as this party was thrown and attended by a bunch of musicians; a killer country band set up on a side porch of the house and played a set of classic truck driving tunes and we danced on the grass, deliriously happy. Eventually we had to start back for Wichita, and I made that whole trip back behind the wheel of the Bus in the dark as Marlo dozed in the far rear seat, never uttering a word. The thrum of the engine at top speed consumed my being and I was overcome with the sensation of being the pilot of a small airplane, navigating across an open and empty expanse of black sky, unafraid, confident in the engineering that made my flight possible. It was a most meditative drive.
The only mechanical issue I had after that initial engine failure came somewhat later, when one of the constant velocity joints in the rear self-destructed. I ended up rebuilding it myself, which turned out to be not so bad as I expected — though I did have to borrow and buy some specialty tools to get the job done.
I worked in Cheney for a while, about 30 miles due west from Wichita, and drove the Bus out there and back five days a week. In my memory it served me very well, so it’s perplexing to me today that I cannot remember why I let it go. I don’t recall it breaking down or causing me inconvenience. But sometime around 1999 I sold it. And it’s still probably in my top five “ones that got away.”
19 | 1991 Pontiac Sunbird. Around the time Marlo and I broke up, I was in need of another car. I had always wanted a convertible, and happened to see a little red Pontiac with a white soft top sitting at one of the easy credit auto lots on South Broadway. I gave it a little test drive and it seemed OK enough for the price; my grandma cosigned a loan for me and I took it home. At the time I had never owned a vehicle built later than 1980, making this little vert by far the most modern ride to have graced my personal inventory.
Like any other car, this one had its pros and cons. In the plus column was the fact that I could put the top down and enjoy open-air motoring. The minus side of the equation, on the other hand, constituted rather a longer list. The wheezy four-cylinder engine was anemic in the extreme, and tended to overheat. The convertible top was easy to put down but extremely difficult to latch back into place with only two hands, especially on cooler days when the vinyl material was less pliable. I had electrical issues with the lights. The ignition switch had to be replaced. A factory brake line failed. An issue developed in which the ignition would randomly shut off for a few seconds while at highway speed, then kick back in as though nothing had happened. I took it to my old country boy mechanic and he clucked his tongue and said, “All these J bodies are junk, I’m afraid.”
But I was still making weekly payments on the thing at the car lot, and kept pouring more money into it. The fact was, despite the problems, driving a convertible is just about 80% as intoxicating to the senses as riding a motorcycle, and I just loved being behind the wheel on a cool night with the wind in my hair, John Coltrane blasting on the tape deck. I wooed my second wife Lupe in that car, most notably on a moonlight-bathed impromptu trip down to the Oklahoma border. It was so late when we rolled through my old hometown on the way back to Wichita that the mom-n-pop donut shop had its drive-up window open. We got the hottest, freshest donuts of the day and coffee and milk and ate them in a reverie as we wended our way toward home.
Probably the most vivid memory I have outside of that is from the night I drove all the way across town from Kirby’s to my shitty bachelor apartment near Central & Ridge in a terrific deluge, forced to pull over several times because I literally could not see ten feet in front of the car even with the wipers on maximum. I waited for some time under the awning of a closed gas station, and when the rain finally let up a bit, I continued on my way along flooded streets, trying hard to stay toward the crown in the center. But right around West Street and Zoo Boulevard I got into trouble when my car lifted off the ground altogether, and before I knew it I was floating quite briskly southward down West, my engine dead and me with no way to control my direction.
Fortunately, I finally managed to catch a high spot in the road and the car bumped to a temporary stop, but I could feel the great roaring pressure of the current, and I knew I needed to get out of the damn street. I tried the ignition several times, and finally the engine sputtered to life, and I was able to stab the trans into gear and just barely make it up into the parking lot of an insurance office. I got out of the car and stood under their awning and smoked a cigarette, watching the raging river rush by me. I was gobsmacked when a little Geo Metro managed the same trick I did, getting just enough of a small foothold of asphalt to launch up and into the parking lot, and when the car came to a stop, the driver and passenger both opened their doors and I swear to God about 200 gallons of water poured out of the interior.
I made it home that night by carefully driving down the sidewalks along West Street until I got to Central, where the street flooding dissipated enough to take to the main thoroughfare once again. I was extremely happy to climb into my bed after all that.
The Pontiac’s redeeming qualities fell drastically short, and I think I actually stopped driving it altogether before I finally managed to finish paying off the loan. It spent some time immobile in the driveway of the house Lupe’s parents had bought to rent to us, and eventually I sold it to some other poor sap for pennies on the dollar. I wasn’t sad to see it go.
20 | 1967 Volkswagen Squareback. I was living with Lupe in our house on Estelle when I became obsessed with this car I stumbled across in an eBay auction. It was in Wisconsin, some 800 miles away, and not running, but was super complete and just as cute as a button. I had long been a fan of both station wagons and VWs, and this little rig was a double whammy I couldn’t resist. I had a cushy new office job at a successful local design firm at the time, and found myself refreshing the auction listing throughout each day on my candy-colored work G3 Mac. Nobody was bidding.
As is my nature, I impulsively put in a last second bid, not sure if it would cover the reserve price. Imagine my surprise when I found I had won the auction — for $350. Now all I had to do was go get the car.
Luckily, one of my new coworkers was Donna Boyle, an outrageously friendly lesbian and fellow VW enthusiast who owned a Bus — and a Chevy S-10 extended cab pickup with V6 and tow package. When she heard of my dilemma retrieving the Squareback, she immediately offered me the use of her truck to tow it home. I asked around some local Volks folks and found a guy who had built his own tow bar specifically designed to pull Type III VWs (Squarebacks, Fastbacks, Notchbacks); he was kind enough to lend it to me gratis.
I contacted the seller in Wisconsin and Lupe and I steeled ourselves for the trip. The plan was to drive straight up, sleep a little, then drive straight back with the car in tow. Our good friend Dudley Sweet tagged along, spending the entire trip in the tiny little half-seat area behind the front seats. We chain smoked cigarettes, listened to music and laughed all the way up to America’s Dairyland, arriving late at night after about 12 hours on the road. We all passed out in the cab of the truck, only to be awakened in the early dawn by the seller, who came out and knocked on the driver’s window. We settled up, got the Squareback attached to the truck, and made our way back toward Wichita, stopping for a fine breakfast at a local diner on our way out of the city of Burlington.
The return trip was a dicier proposition. I had never driven this particular truck until the day before, nor had I ever pulled another vehicle on a tow bar at highway speed over any kind of distance. The one-ton brick-shaped object being dragged only a yard behind us created all sorts of drag, catching stiff wind gusts left and right and making long uphill runs more challenging. I had to watch my speed always, and the engine RPM too, keeping the five-speed floor shifter in uncharacteristically vigorous play throughout the journey. At one point I found I could not stop fast enough, and locked the brakes up through a stop sign and straight through a mercifully-deserted crossroads. Then I ended up jackknifing the VW against the bumper of the truck while trying to back up and turn around. It was a mess the whole way, and we lost an entire day to the trip.
In fact we lost more than that, as by the time we reached the very top of edge of the Kansas map on the way home, all three of us were exhausted beyond the ability to keep our eyes open. We had no choice but to stop. This time we opted to spring for a room, and the three of us shuffled bleary and rumpled and unbathed into the lobby of a generic motor lodge around Marysville. No sooner had we fallen into deep slumber than the front desk clerk banged on our door. We smelled so heavily of cigarette smoke from our two days in the truck that he thought we were smoking in the room, which was against hotel policy. We told him to fuck off as politely as possible, crashed out again, and finished the drive in the morning, fueled by the meager offerings from the continental breakfast bar.
Back in Wichita I tinkered extensively with the Squareback, but just couldn’t get it running as well as it should have. I took it out to my hippie VW mechanic and he set it right — for a moment. Sadly, as I was driving it home from his shop, a clatter developed inside the engine compartment, and it sounded like a connecting rod was threatening to give up the ghost. I made it all the way back to our place — by then we were living in a duplex near Central and Woodlawn — but never drove it again. I didn’t have enough cash coming in to keep messing with it, and thought it broke my heart, I let it go. I have always wished for another like it but they are getting rarer by the year.
21 | 1965 Ford F-100. Another $300 vehicle I found in the classifieds was this beefy old Ford pickup, a longbed Styleside model that had come from the factory in Marlin Blue, but had later been halfway primer-coated a dull pastel yellow. The front passenger fender and bumper were mashed a little from a low-speed collision, the brakes were almost entirely nonfunctional, and there was a hole in the exhaust manifold which made the rig sound like God’s own tractor any time the engine was running. But it showed promise, and the price was right.
I did all the brake work myself, and straightened out the wonky body work with a come-along just enough so that the passenger side headlight pointed the right direction again, and set to using the pickup as my daily driver. Along the way I made many repairs and upgrades, swapping out the clutch with the help of a friend, replacing all the heater hoses, front end suspension stuff, battery cables, a shiny new air cleaner (as there was none when I bought the truck) — I even found an original 1965 factory AM radio on eBay and mounted it in the empty hole in the dash where there was none. The very first time I turned it on, I tuned it to KFDI-AM just in time to hear “The Lord Knows I’m Drinking,” and for a moment, all was right with the world.
My compulsive online auction habit nabbed me a cool 1970s jukebox for cheap, up around Kansas City, and as I prepared to go fetch it, my buddy and former coworker Stan Shedd asked if it might be possible to extend that drive a little farther in order to retrieve a Corvair engine he had waiting for him in Columbia, Missouri. As he was willing to split the fuel cost, it was a no-brainer. We blasted up the highway together, shouting ourselves hoarse at one another the entire way over the interminable roar of the big 352 V8 with the exhaust leak, and the truck made the 600-mile round trip journey without a hitch.
Now, a pickup truck is a wonderful second vehicle to have on hand for when you need to move large and/or heavy things, but as a daily driver, it has many drawbacks. This rig was large in every dimension and a pain in the ass to maneuver in parking lots. It used copious amounts of gasoline to get anywhere, and I became increasingly self-conscious about the noise, as well. (At least gas was cheap at the time, as you can see in this photo.)
I listed the truck on eBay and sold it to a doctor from London, Ontario, who said it was the exact model his dad had driven back when the good doc was a young man. His plan was to make it a father-son restoration project for him and his own kid, then a teen. The guy flew into Wichita and drove the truck back to Canada. I sometimes wonder if he ever got it spiffed back up.
22 | 1977 Honda GL1000 GoldWing. For a time there, it seemed like smoking deals on vintage cars, trucks and bikes were just raining down from the sky, and I found resistance quite futile. In 2001 I had been without a motorcycle for some months, and came across a listing for a first-series GoldWing being sold by its second owner in nearby Hutchinson. I went up to look at the thing and was amazed to see it had been decked out with every imaginable accessory by the guy who had bought it new — himself a motorcycle cop. There was the super deluxe Windjammer fairing, complete with the rare detachable lowers (for protecting the legs), deluxe king/queen seat, floorboards and a heel/toe shifter, huge hard saddlebags on both sides and a large matching trunk case, complete with a padded seat back for the “queen” position passenger, optional chrome-plated dipstick, and not one but two eight-foot-long whip antennae — one for the CB radio, the other for the AM/FM/eight track player, both of which were present and functional.
I gave $850, which seemed like a lot. The bike, with its water-cooled four-cylinder engine of 1000 cubic centimeters’ displacement, ran like a scalded dog, insanely smooth (and remarkably quiet) power flowing instantly with every twist of the throttle. I hated that big heavy Windjammer and took it off, but then found I would need to source a factory-style headlight bucket, as the light in the fairing had been built-in. A local motorcycle shop specializing in salvage parts hooked me up, and I sold the fairing on eBay for $350, recouping some of my original cost outlay.
As much as I loved the GoldWing mechanically, I really hated all the add-ons that had been piled onto the machine by the OG owner. One by one I kept taking things off, trying to make the bike both look better and simply weigh less. I was accustomed to much smaller, lighter and easier-handling two-wheelers, and this one was a drag in parking lots, especially when you were leaving a spot in which you had to park facing downhill. A friend of mine who did artistic metal work was trying to get into bike customization and asked if he could take a crack at doing some basic mods on the GL1000 just for practice. I said sure.
I’m not sure what all he did, but the bike sat lower, with the handlebars turned up to a position I found more comfortable, and he moved the driver’s seat backrest, which I found annoying to step over getting off and on the machine, to the passenger position. It was closer to my style for sure. (Here’s a pic!)
Lupe and I split and I ended up bouncing around couches and basements for a while, and sold off a bunch of stuff, the GoldWing included, in the process.
23 | 1978 Ford Courier. Someone told me a kid they knew had a little mini truck for sale for cheap, and I called the number I was given and went to check it out. I was tickled that the little Japanese-built rig, actually a Maza rebadged for the US market, had flames painted on the hood, a big chrome skull shift knob and smaller chrome skulls atop the door lock stalks. The kid wanted 500 bucks and I gave it to him.
To my recollection this truck was an absolutely killer vehicle, and outside its thirst for motor oil, it only let me down on one single occasion. I was driving the Courier up to Lincoln, Nebraska to pick up a set of vintage wheels for another car (more on that later) when the alternator seized up just outside Moundridge. I was extremely fortunate to find the super nice guy mechanic at the local Co-Op garage willing to call the parts store in another nearby town and stay an extra hour or two at work to fix my truck.
After that it was an easy ride up and back. I have an intense cinematic memory of the return trip: As I drove toward a distant thunderstorm, the long version of “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” came over the AM radio, and the song’ spooky, edgy, tense intro served as perfect soundtrack to the dark clouds dropping to the ground around me as I drove. Long crooked streaks of lightning zapped across the sky miles ahead of me, throwing outbursts of static on the radio in unison. It was a wholly trippy experience.
Lupe and I drove up to Lawrence in the Courier to see Neko Case in July 2002, as documented in this rather crummy lo-res digital photo.
In September of that year I crafted a makeshift tonneau cover for the bed of the Courier using vinyl banner material and grommets, and Lupe and I took the little truck to the bluegrass festival in Winfield, where we traditionally camped for a week each year. That’s where the photo above was taken.
Sadly, as I mentioned earlier, we ended up having a lot of vehicles on the property at once, and needed to lighten the load. I asked Lupe to choose between losing the Courier or the bedraggled Honda CRX she had been driving since high school, and she just couldn’t part with the Honda. I sold the truck for the same $500 I paid for it.
24 | 1966 Dodge Coronet. Another eBay score was this incredible nine-passsenger station wagon, which I think I paid maybe $600 for. Some kids had pulled it out of a garage intending to use it for a demolition derby car, but found it too nice to destroy. I mean, there was some rust in the rockers and rear wheel arches, and the front grille had been damaged from bumping into something, but the interior was practically perfect, every single electric accessory down to the dome light and cigarette lighter were fully functional — and the wide-block “polyspheric” 318 V8 engine ran smooth and quiet as a hummingbird.
Lupe drove up to Salina with me, about an hour and a half up the road, and I couldn’t believe how clean the car was in person. It looked better than the pictures in the auction listing! I happily forked over the cash and drove the car straight home without a hitch, as seen in this photo (complete with Lupe behind the wheel of the Courier in the rearview mirror). In the days that followed I did some cosmetic surgery on the mangled grille, replacing the center support trim piece with one I found on eBay, then with a pair of tinsnips carefully hand-trimming out the aluminum grid that made up the factory grille design so that it at least looked deliberate. I thought the result was pretty tough, actually — and it looked tougher still once I got those slotted aluminum mag wheels on there, the ones I had fetched in the Courier. A set of brand new white-letter Uniroyal Tiger Paws completed the makeover.
There were some mechanical problems, admittedly. The car was nearly 40 years old and had only about 75,000 miles on the clock, but frankly suffered some of the same side effects of long disuse that had plagued the Oldsmobile wagon. I had to replace a motor mount, and later the transmission’s reverse band quit, forcing me to have the whole trans rebuilt. I put new shocks on all around — nice modern gas-charged units up front, air-adjustable ones in the back. There were other issues, too, but most minor.
I drove this car for a year or so, then listed it on eBay when Lupe and I were splitting and I was out of work and needed the cash. A guy came in from somewhere way to the east, Indiana or Ohio, and drove it home.
25 | 1966 Dodge Dart. No sooner had I started working on getting the Coronet ship-shape than I happened to spy its little brother sitting in a yard near Central & Oliver, a FOR SALE sign displayed on the windshield. I talked to the dude who had it and looked it over, and I really wanted to buy it. I wasn’t going to be able to get the required money — I think he wanted five or six hundred bucks — together for a few days and I worried it would get sold out from under me. But lo and behold, some money fell into my pocket from somewhere and I was able to pull the trigger.
The little Dart sedan was equipped with Mopar’s excellent “Slant Six” engine, coupled to an automatic transmission. The car was pretty barebones, with few accessories beyond the absolute basics: a bench seat, lap belts, AM radio, lighter, defroster, not much else. But it didn’t need anything else to be beautiful in my eyes. I loved the clean lines of the Dart, and its rather spartan layout had me waxing nostalgic for some of my older rides, like the Rambler, the Falcon and the VWs.
My wife Lupe loved it too, and soon we found ourselves daily-driving a pair of ’66 Dodges, me in the Coronet and her in the Dart. Around this time I found, by sheer coincidence, two different vintage license plates commemorating Kansas’ two Miss America winners from the 1960s, and I put one of them on each of the cars, as seen here and here. The actual number plates on the back were vintage 1966 Kansas tags that I had registered as antique plates, too; one day Lupe got pulled over by an Eastborough cop who did not know this was legal in Kansas, and she was held there until his supervisor reamed him out over the radio and he was forced to apologize to Lupe and let her go.
One day Lupe and I were running around in the Dart on last-minute errands, preparing to leave town for the bluegrass festival, and just as we were halfway through the turn off of Douglas onto our home street, a mere three blocks from our house, a woman test-driving a brand new Jeep Liberty hit us HARD right in the middle of our rear bumper, sending us into a 270-degree spin. As we lurched to a stop, I leapt out of the Dart to see if the other driver was all right. The first thing I noticed was the front end of the Jeep, the whole passenger side of its front clip mangled like tinfoil, but the two women inside looked to be OK. I didn’t even want to look at the damage to the Dart, but when I did, I was shocked to discover that I could barely tell where the impact had occurred. If I examined the bumper closely, I could see a kind of implied dainty crease mark, and at just the right angle it looked like half the bumper had been twisted maybe a half-centimeter out of true — but one would be unlikely to notice. The little Dart was a tank!
Another time I was leaving the offices of the free weekly paper I worked at downtown just as a flash flood broke out. I once again found myself floating down a city street in an automobile — but this time I was not so lucky as to be able to drive myself up and out to safety. Fortunately a friendly fellow with a push bar on his truck was able to nudge me out of the water into a spot where I could park and wait for the engine electrics to dry out.
My last trip in the Dart came when I drove to Action City for my grandmother’s surprise 80th birthday party. Scarcely five miles into the return trip, in a haunting repeat of my experience with the old Toyota Corona, the Dart unceremoniously threw a connecting rod, punching a hole through the oil pan and painting a long black line of motor oil down the highway. I ended up having the car towed back first to a family member’s house in AC, then later up to Wichita; even though Lupe and I were going through our breakup by that time, she was still fond of the Dart and wished to hang on to it. Last I heard she had sold it to another mutual friend, but that was 20 years ago now…
Part two is now available here.
* Virginity in this case not including the ongoing sex abuse of my earlier life.
