My Wheels — Chapter 15
1969 Opel Kadett

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Denny

opel1969 When it came time to replace the Dodge, we opted not for another American sedan but for a small import. However, since this was to be the family car, we made it a small import wagon, a 1969 Opel Kadett B Caravan. The family had, in fact, grown and there were now two young boys to fill the back seat. I don’t recall the purchase price but do remember that we bought the car from a couple professing to be witch and warlock and that the sickly Suzuki motorcycle was part of the deal.

The engine was an inline four which online sources indicate would have displaced something between 1.0 and 1.9 liters. Since I believe the car had something like 60 horsepower, the most likely power plant seems to be the 1492 CC unit rated at 64 HP. The transmission was a four-speed manual. What set this car apart from other Kadetts was the after market air conditioner hanging under the dash.

As you’ve probably guessed, sixty-four (or possibly less) horsepower wasn’t really enough to run the AC compressor and move the car too. The AC was pretty much useless in city traffic, where it would have been appreciated, and even on the highway it demanded a certain amount of awareness. It was fitted with a thermostat controlled clutch so that the compressor was only driven as needed. If it happened to be “needed” when climbing a hill or passing another car (Oh yes I did.) the climbing or passing was severely attenuated. One soon learned to switch off the AC when starting a pass and keep a hand near the controls in any situation that taxed the engine. Even at a steady pace on level ground, the compressor kicking in was an event that couldn’t be ignored. We joked that we should probably be wearing helmets when running the AC because the abrupt jerk might slam our heads into the windshield.

Unlike most of the vehicles that preceded it, the Opel was undamaged and running when we parted. This time it wasn’t a wreck or blown engine that ended our time together. The motor didn’t fail. The marriage did. The Opel went with the wife.

Previous Wheels: Chapter 14 — 1965 Barracuda
Next Wheels: Chapter 16 — 1962 Chevy II

My Wheels — Chapter 14
1965 Barracuda

Posted on December 28, 2014 by Denny

barracuda1965 A white Plymouth Barracuda became mine after the Suzuki disappeared from the roadside and I think it was still running when the purloined motorcycle returned. I bought it from a co-worker for $300 or maybe $350. Though barely a half-dozen years old, the slant-6 3-speed had accumulated more than its share of miles and developed an appetite for oil in the process.

Of course, the Barracuda was my main ride while the wife drove the “good” car. I often took the bus to my downtown job and even when I did drive it to work, the car’s oil burning tendencies were kept in check by the fairly low speed route. Then a job change inserted about twenty miles of expressway into my workday drive. Some carpooling helped and I drove the wife’s car when I could. Sedate right-lane travel, frequent looks at the dipstick, and an ever present case of cheap oil in the trunk held off the inevitable.

I was still in a band and that was the job where the Barracuda’s oil consumption became something of an issue. Actually, it was just one particular gig. This gig was in Napoleon, Ohio, near the top of the state. We played there multiple times and each was a three night, Friday through Sunday, deal. I was working about 150 miles away in South Lebanon, Ohio. With looser schedules, the rest of the group drove up on Friday afternoon. I headed north as soon as I could slip away. This freed me from lugging in and setting up equipment but meant I had some real time constraints and basically walked through the door and started playing after a non-stop drive. Or maybe a one — or more — stop drive. At 50 MPH or less, the Barracuda could squeeze a few hundred miles out of a quart of oil. At 65 MPH, the rate was closer to 100 MPQ and at 75 or 80 it was noticeably worse. More than once I found myself trying to mentally calculate whether I would get there sooner by rocketing onward and making a high-speed dump-in-a-quart pit stop or slowing down and saving the oil. I don’t recall ever getting that worked out satisfactorily.

It’s probably not surprising that other ‘Cuda stories are also band stories. One involves having my drums loaded in the car. It was actually pretty good for that. With the rear seat folded down, there was a goodly amount of space under what was the largest piece of glass ever used in a production car at the time. Details escape me but we had stopped somewhere to see another band play. The others wanted to stay longer than I did so, after hearing a few songs, I went out to the car to sleep. Maybe I had to work in the morning or maybe I was just tired. By moving some things to the front seat, I dug out enough room to snake around what remained and fall asleep. I awoke when the light of a thousand suns hit my face. My head was toward the rear with that big rear glass just inches away. I eventually figured out that there was just one light, not a thousand, and that it was white and probably not the sun. I couldn’t look directly at it, of course, or see around it and I felt completely helpless and pretty darned scared. The car was locked but if someone wanted to smash a window and drag me out by my feet I certainly couldn’t have stopped them. At last the light pulled back and I could see that it was held by someone in a uniform. There was another person beside him and in time I could make out badges and realized that it was a pair of police officers. They chatted with each other and, although I couldn’t make out what they said, they apparently decided I was harmless and moved on. I went back to sleep. With long distance hindsight, I’m thinking that those cops may have glimpsed a horizontal body in the car and hit the light for some parking lot picture window porn. Sorry to disappoint. Wish I could have obliged. Really.

The back end of that car really could hold a lot. A Hammond organ, for example. It wasn’t a line topping B3 and it wasn’t completely pure but a real Hammond did get transported inside the compact Plymouth. It was an M3; Noticeably smaller than a legendary ‘B’ but still a potent music maker with two keyboards. In the interest of portability, the organ’s “guts” had been removed from its finely finished tall wooden cabinet and placed inside a sturdy but far from finely finished black plywood box. The desired playing height was achieved by screwing legs made of pipe into brackets on the bottom of the box. A similar box held the volume pedal and the bass pedals were simply left at home. I have absolutely no memory of why it became necessary to carry the organ in the Barracuda but things like that seem to happen fairly common in the music world. The big black box went in and out the passenger door and I recall that someone had to force that seat forward and down while the organ was squeezed over it. Apparently once was enough. We henceforth put enough effort into planning to avoid a “Hammond Under Glass” repeat. Sure wish I had a picture.

Previous Wheels: Chapter 13 — 1966 Suzuki
Next Wheels: Chapter 15 — 1969 Opel Kadett

Greetings from the UK

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Denny

I’ve received a fair number of email messages and even a couple of real mail messages from folks who have read my book By Mopar to the Golden Gate. Some reported an error or two but none have been negative and every one of them put a smile on my face. One, however, had me not only smiling but shaking my head in disbelief. It came from a race fan in England who wanted to be at the Bonneville Salt Flats to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first land speed record set there. His initial thoughts were to fly to the east coast of the US and dash across the country to the event. His wife thought attending the festivities was a fine idea but not so the “dash across the country”. She wanted to see more than a few expressways. They discovered the Lincoln Highway Association website and, in his words, “that was that… the LH was perfect”.

Detailed route planning, it seems, did not go much beyond that. There wasn’t much time and I have the impression that this pair of Brits is rather spontaneous as well as adventurous. After all, the idea of going to Bonneville had been hatched while watching a TV show about the upcoming centennial. He got a copy of By Mopar to the Golden Gate a few days before they left and started reading it on the flight to Newark. I was certainly grinning broadly as I read that but then came the line that led to the head shaking. “Your book was our guide as we did the 2500 miles to Utah”, he wrote.

Surely he can’t mean that, I thought. The book certainly was not intended to be a guide book and I could not now imagine it being used that way. There are no real directions and no maps with resolution much finer than the average county. Eventually, though, I think I understood. From the online map and other sources, they had a pretty good idea of the highway’s course and roadside markers, beefed up in spots for last year’s Lincoln Highway Association Centennial, were quite helpful. The couple wasn’t trying to follow every inch of the old highway. They wanted to get to Bonneville and following the general route of the Lincoln Highway was an entertaining way to do that. The book is about the LHA Centennial Tour which stopped mostly at major highlights so highlights are essentially what appears in the book. It provides a list of some major spots that define the Lincoln Highway and that is the sort of guide that was meant.

Reading the following paragraph gave me more of an ego boost than is healthy but it’s really the road and not the book that prompted the praise.

Denny we had a great time we met fantastic people in all kinds of small towns we stayed in some really cool places such as the Virginian in Medicine Bow and were guided by you and the Valiant mile after mile. We lost the markers from time to time but always got back on track.

Sadly, rains and flooding caused Bonneville’s Speed Week to be canceled (Which is why I started this article with a picture from the book of our similarly flooded out 2013 stop.) but the drive saved the trip. Ian and Caroline are planning to return to the US for Speed Week and the rest of the Lincoln Highway in 2016. Plus, a colleague borrowed and read the book and is now starting to think of his own Lincoln Highway trip.

By itself, By Mopar to the Golden Gate cannot actually guide anyone along the Lincoln Highway (for that I recommend Brian Butko’s Greetings from the Lincoln Highway) but maybe it can identify some highlights along the historic route and introduce it to some folks who know little or nothing about it. I’m ending this with the sentence that ended Ian’s email. It makes me grin every time I read it.

So thank you Denny you gave me a plan and we have had a blast, driving on red brick Ohio lanes and seeing seedling miles (after filling up with gas at the garage) dirt roads drive ins and a sense of adventure.

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My Wheels — Chapter 12
1961 Falcon

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Denny

falconfutura1961 The 1961 in the title is something of a guess. I know for sure it was a first generation Falcon Futura. The first generation of Falcons ran from 1960 through 1963 with the bucket-seated Futura introduced in 1961. I believe mine was a ’61 but I guess it’s possible it was a year or two newer. If, however, you judged the car’s age purely on its condition, you would be challenged to believe it was a maximum of ten years old when I bought it in 1971 for $35.

When the Dodge went off to get its transmission fixed, I needed transportation for a couple of weeks. A friend of a friend had a friend with a car for sale that might make it that long. No guarantee, of course. At some point in its life, my car must have looked like the dark blue ’61 in the photo but it wasn’t on my watch. There was no evidence of a major collision but there had obviously been plenty of small ones and rust was a major player in the color scheme. The interior was a trifecta of torn, shabby, and faded. I remember that all or most of the fancy Futura console was present but it was not actually attached to anything and sort of bounced around the drive shaft hump as it saw fit.

The first problem I had was getting the title transferred. The seller was a college student from Louisiana. He had lived in Cincinnati for a few years but, because license, taxes, or something else cost more in Ohio, had never transferred the title. When I went to a title office in Ohio, I was turned away because of some time limit. Then someone suggested that if we got the title notarized out of state, we might get away with claiming it was done while the guy was on the way to Ohio to deliver the car. We found a cooperative notary in Kentucky then got a new title in Ohio without a hiccup.

The Falcon did its job until the Dodge came back then stayed around in a part time role. At that point in my life, I knew lots of people with cars that were not 100% dependable and who might need a loaner now and then. The Falcon was almost perfect for this since it did provide the desired function but did it in such a way that no one was tempted to delay the repair of their own car any more than necessary. The car met its demise while on loan.

One of the car’s many quirks was a temperamental ignition interlock. The transmission was a column shift automatic. Like most cars of the day, the Falcon’s transmission had to be in “park” in order to start the car. More often that not, it had to be extra deep in “park”. ‘P’ was all the way to the left; reached by pushing the lever up. When I got the car, the cast metal casing was already cracked from all the shoving on the lever to get the starter to engage. The crack grew. The car’s last driver had the lever come off in his hand as he pressed it upward. I retrieved the plates, left the signed title in the glove box, and waved goodbye to the best $35 car I ever owned.

Previous Wheels: Chapter 11 — 1967 Dodge
Next Wheels: Chapter 13 — 1966 Suzuki

Hudsonly Yours

Posted on July 27, 2014 by Denny

People with an interest in old roads or old cars may be familiar with the phrase used in the title. It’s part of the signature of knowledgeable road fan and very knowledgeable Hudson fan Alex Burr. I’m counting on Alex being as gracious toward my borrowing of the phrase as he was in sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm with me at the Hudson Essex Terraplane International Meet in French Lick, Indiana, on Thursday.

I scurried along the interstate to Louisville then picked up US-150 for a very pleasant drive through southern Indiana. The meet was being held on the grounds of the impressive French Lick Springs Resort & Casino where I had to park my non-Hudson vehicle in the Brand X lot. I missed Alex sitting in one of the rocking chairs arrayed on the long porch (veranda?) across the front of the hotel but a phone call had us connected in no time.

Alex has spent a lot of time as something of a librarian and historian for the club which made him the perfect guide through the several lots filled with Hudsons, Essexes, and Terraplanes (HETs) of every vintage. The oldest was this brass trimmed 1909/1910 model at the corner of the first lot. The first Hudsons were built in 1909 but sold as 1910 models which is pretty much how the whole auto industry operates today.

HET meets are often promoted with the slogan “Come for the cars. Stay for the people.” and Alex makes a pretty good people guide, too. That’s Alex in front of a 1928 Hudson Town Car and Charlie Woodruff, one of the people he introduced me to, in front of his own 1951 Hudson Super 6 that he drove to French Lick from Schenectady, New York. That’s his “I DROVE MY HUDSON…” decal in the picture at the top of this article. Charlie has driven the car to many other meets including the one in Spokane, Washington, in 2010. That trip resulted in a book, The Long Ride, which helped me believe that I might be able to cross the country in an unrestored older vehicle myself. I did (By Mopar to the Golden Gate) though the car I drove was a dozen years newer than Charlie’s.

The weather was just about perfect for strolling through the rows of great looking cars. The car in the third photo is one I didn’t even realize existed. For a couple of years following the merger, American Motors offered both a Nash Metropolitan and a Hudson Metropolitan before shortening the name to simply Metropolitan. I’ve seen plenty of Nash Metropolitans and just plain Metropolitans and maybe I’ve seen some Hudson Metropolitans without knowing it. They are all the same car, of course, so I guess I need to pay more attention to the badges in the future.

The 4 cylinder power plant on the left is in a 1932 Essex Terraplane. I don’t recall what held the 6 cylinder on the right. The dual carburetor Twin H-Power setup was initially an after market item before becoming a dealer installed option. It provided pretty good boosts to the engine’s power and to Hudson’s image as a performance car. Note that the old engine is quite capable of handling modern add-ons like air conditioning.

If just looking at Hudsons isn’t enough, this is also a great place for picking up the basics for starting your own Hudson collection or for acquiring the finishing touches for something currently in your fleet.

Just looking was enough for me though I think I’d like to do it again. I doubt I’ll make it to next year’s meet in Colorado Springs but the 2016 meet in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is already on my “probable” list.

Old, Strong, and Fast

Posted on July 13, 2014 by Denny

Although I saw no single piece of equipment that possessed all three attributes, over the last couple of days I saw a lot of old stuff, strong stuff and fast stuff. The old stuff was primarily at the Greenville Farm Power of the Past 15th Annual Reunion with the strong stuff showing off at the day ending truck and tractor pull. That was Friday. The fast stuff blew by on Saturday at the East Coast Timing Association‘s event in Wilmington, Ohio.

A recent post told of my meeting up with an old friend after two score and seven years. That friend, Terry Wolfe, collects and restores Wheel Horse tractors and had several on display at the Greenville event. Despite my good intentions, I never did get a proper photo of the display. The shot at the top of the article, taken while the two of us, along with Terry’s brother Joe, sat and talked, is the best I can do.

I had timed my arrival to take in a scheduled threshing demonstration. This is not something I haven’t seen before but it had been quite awhile and I generally enjoy seeing older equipment of any kind being used as intended. Before combined harvesters became common, wagon loads of freshly mowed grain stalks would be brought to a stationary thresher where the actual grain would be separated from the straw. As we walked toward the demonstration, Terry told me that this was where the term “straw boss” came from. The primary boss concerned himself with the machine and the grain while an assistant would head up a crew to deal with the accumulating straw. Terry also told me of the tradition of the straw boss tossing his (usually straw) hat into the thresher at the end of a job. Sometimes that hat made it through more or less intact. Sometimes not. The tradition is upheld here. There is no need for an actual “boss of the straw” during the demonstrations but the term is used, a bit incorrectly but quite respectfully, to refer to the fellow who would be the “big boss” in the field. Come Sunday, when the last demo of the year is over, a hat (Lester’s, I think) will go into the big machine.

There is no shortage of big equipment on the Darke County Fairgrounds but Terry and I sort of concentrated on the smaller stuff during our walkabout. I’ve always been intrigued by “hit-and-miss” gasoline engines and the variety of mechanisms creative minds applied to to control their speed. A local connection is worth some extra points so I naturally liked the nicely restored Greenville built 1906 Wogaman in the first picture. Terry, who is under that red hat in the second picture, has exhibited here for several years but this year the Vintage Garden Tractor Club of America is holding their Ohio regional show in conjunction with Greenville Farm Power of the Past and there are even more of the smaller tractors than usual. Maybe the item in the last picture doesn’t quite fit the normal definition of “power” but I had never seen anything like it and just had to include it. A sign identified it as a MantaMower and a web search turned up the information that it was patented in 1923 and manufactured (in Grand Rapids, MI) until about 1962. There is no question of its being light and safe and I don’t doubt it was rather effective as long as you didn’t let the grass grow just a tad too tall.

Here we have the strong stuff. The Darke County Tractor Pullers Association is a pretty big organization and this was one of their events. I don’t know enough about it to describe things much beyond saying there were some really big tractors dragging a bunch of weight for a pretty good distance.

The previously pictured tractors were clearly not stock but I do believe they were powered by engines that began their life in a tractor. These are from a class powered by transplanted and modified V8s. The announcer referred to them as “hot rods” although I have no idea whether that’s an official designation or not.

Trucks followed the tractors with more classes as well as more total entries. I think we made it to the beginning of the final class but left well ahead of the final pull. If you don’t count the clutches that were sacrificed getting off the line, there was very little equipment damage. Only one tractor had needed a tow and the dragging drive-shaft on the blue Ford was the only failure we witnessed among the trucks. Opportunities remained, however.

Calling it the “Ohio Mile”, the East Coast Timing Association holds several events each year on the former DHL facility now known as Wilmington Air Park. Speed runs take place on the runway in the background while the foreground pavement is the return lane as well as being used by spectators and other traffic.

We parked then walked to the starting line where a wild variety of vehicles, in no particular order, awaited their turn. It took us awhile to figure it out but we eventually realized that entrants were not timed through the mile but were clocked at its end. There is no need for jackrabbit starts or even super quick acceleration.

After watching a few fairly unexciting starts, we set out for the other end of the track. On the way, we paused at one of the field’s more unusual vehicles. It’s a 1951 Crosley Super Sport whose owner believes will go 110 MPH. Whether it did that today is unknown. In fact, I didn’t realize we had seen the car on course until I was home and looked at my pictures. I’ll update this when results of this meet are posted but, for now, the only performance information I have is the 56.9548 MPH it turned in during the May meet. The website promoted on the car contains little information about the car but does include a video that, along with a certain amount of “Jesus is my mechanic” flavoring, has some pictures of the car being built.

ADDENDUM 27-Aug-2014: The Run Log posted by the ECTA shows that the Crosley managed a run of 97.6987 MPH. Not quite the targeted 110 but getting closer.

One reason that we don’t know how the Crosley did today is that there is nothing like a scoreboard or other visual indication of speeds or anything else. Nor is there any PA in the normal sense. There is a low powered FM radio broadcast which, had we brought a pocket radio or chose to sit in the car, would have kept us informed. As it was, we picked up the occasional scrap of information only when we passed an appropriately tuned radio.

This is pure conjecture but my guess is that about one-third of ECTA members would like more spectators to help with expenses and another third want more spectators to add some legitimacy and prestige to what they are doing. To the remaining third, spectators are probably a real aggravation. When we did hear the announcer, it was interesting and definitely added to the enjoyment. A signboard flashing a car’s speed might help but I think a few radios hanging on poles would help more and probably cost less.

My Wheels — Chapter 11
1967 Dodge

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Denny

1967_dodge_coronet2 The crumpling of the Corvair was just one of several major events occurring within a few months time. Wreaking the Corvair led to purchasing another car and one of the other events led to purchasing a house. That event was my wife’s announcement that she was pregnant. We lived in a small one-bedroom apartment and immediately started looking for something larger. We looked at multi-bedroom apartments and a few rental houses. The owners of one house we looked at were considering renting as a last resort. They had already moved to a fancier place and were paying two mortgages. The financial strain coupled, I believe, with a little sympathy for the growing young family, resulted in them selling us the house on a land contract; a form of owner financing. So, in fairly short order, we became expectant parents, bought a three-bedroom house, and moved across town. Somewhere in there, we also bought a car.

We bought the car at one of those shady looking lots that can be found lined up on certain streets in every city. That’s not our car in the picture. Some of the paint looks really dull on the car in the picture and that wasn’t the case with our car at all. Otherwise, it’s a pretty close match. The lot where we made our purchase wasn’t a “buy here, pay here” place but it was barely one step removed. I’m sure the lot owner and the guy from the finance company were good friends or maybe related. The Dodge Coronet was no more than two years old but had obviously just been retired from some sort of fleet work. I don’t remember the mileage but doubt it was accurate, anyway. Other than the 318 V8 and automatic transmission, the car was completely devoid of options; not even a radio. But the salesman was slick and the dark blue four-door did look the part of a family sedan for our developing family image. I hung an 8-track player under the empty dash and used the new car to bring our new son to our new house.

Here are a couple of stories involving this car.

Our house sat on a hillside with a small almost unusable garage in the back at the level of the walkout basement. The driveway sloped sharply beside the house. The normal parking spot was about even with the front of the house at the top of the slope. One night, at just about the same time as I heard my wife at the door, I heard a loud bang. Half joking, I said something about the car rolling. She was only part way through the door and, looking over her shoulder, assured me that the car was still there. We laughed and forgot about it — until morning. When I headed off to work, there was no car in the driveway. Most likely left in “Drive”. it had rolled down the slope and halfway over a low stone wall at the top of a steeper and longer slope. It took a tow truck with a long cable to winch the car from its perch atop the wall.

During the time we had the Dodge, I was in a band and occasionally towed a trailer full of equipment. That wasn’t at all good for the transmission which I’m sure wasn’t treated particularly kindly in its previous life. It eventually died and was sent off to some shade tree mechanic for a rebuild. It seems likely that what he did was swap in an oldie from a junkyard but the car once again became mobile and I was happy. Before long, however, the transmission started slipping again. This happened while I was visiting my friend John and he was pretty sure the problem was merely a clogged filter. After we pulled the pan off of the transmission, we realized we needed some technical information so we took out our smart phones and looked up the specifications for a ’67 Coronet. Actually we did the 1970 equivalent and drove to the library to copy some information from a Chilton auto repair manual. Before leaving, we placed the transmission pan on some trash cans beside John’s house. I’m sure our jaws really dropped when we got back from the library and realized that the trash man had come and gone in our absence. Our panic was short lived, however, as John’s wife pointed to the pan lying beside the door. The trash man had started to cart off the detached piece of my car then had second thoughts and knocked at the door to see if it might not really be part of the week’s trash. Saved from myself by another unnamed hero.

Previous Wheels: Chapter 10 — 1964 Corvair
Next Wheels: Chapter 12 — 1961 Falcon

Valiant No More

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Denny

The Valiant departed this evening for its new home. I thought it would sell for a little more than it did, but I’m satisfied with the price and am much more than satisfied with the purchaser. Even though I claim no child or pet like emotional attachment to the car, it’s still nice to think it is off to a good home and that’s something the several telephone conversations I’ve had with the new owner have made me pretty certain of. Goodbye old girl, you’re going to have a much easier time traveling to Oklahoma than you did propelling yourself from there in July.

Attention Shoppers
Valiant for sale

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Denny

I’m using the blog this morning in an effort to make everyone within range of my keyboard aware that the Valiant I drove across the USA last summer is now listed for sale on eBay here.

ADDENDUM 6-Feb-2024: The eBay listing resulted in the car being sold in April 2014.

My Wheels — Chapter 10
1964 Corvair

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Denny

The replacement for the ten year old Austin Healey was a three year old one owner Corvair. I really can’t remember where the money came from for this major upgrade. Possibilities include a “distribution” from my grandparents like the one that enabled my sister and me to buy that 1959 Chevy or some money from my wife’s family. It is for certain, though, that we didn’t buy it with money saved from the wife’s secretarial earnings or my halftime co-op job.

Our 1964 Monza, with 110 HP engine and 4 speed manual transmission, looked pretty much like the car in the ad at right. Although seat belts were showing up quite a bit in the first half of the 1960s, they were not required in new cars until the 1965 model year so that the double entendre of the ad was perfectly legit even if it was’t exactly responsible safety wise. The car remains one of my all time favorites. It looked great, was fun to drive, and even handled snow better than most cars of the day.

It’s tough to write more than a paragraph or two about the Corvair without mentioning Ralph Nader. There is a common misconception that Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, killed the Corvair. The marketplace killed the Corvair. Americans just were not ready to embrace the unconventional rear-engine design. On the other hand, Nader’s criticism of the car’s handling had some basis in fact. The earliest Corvairs had no front stabilizer bar. To compensate for most of the weight being in the rear, Chevrolet specified a huge difference between front and rear tire pressure (15 PSI front, 26 PSI rear). In practice, that unusual specification was probably not adhered to very well. It didn’t even apply to my car since, for the 1964 model, a front stabilizer bar and transverse-mounted rear spring were added. The suspension was completely redesigned for 1965.

That’s not our car in the photo but, with the possible exception of that chrome trim around the gas lid, it could be. I believe we had the Corvair for about two years and during that time the incompatibility of our small and spotty paychecks with the need to eat and pay rent became rather clear. This was the car I drove to my first full time job and it was on the way to that job one morning that I tested the car’s crumple zones.

I was the third car on the I-75 entrance ramp when the lead car started to accelerate for the merge. I looked at the traffic on the expressway and decided there was a sufficient gap for all three of us. When I turned my attention back to where it should have been, I discovered that the lead car had decided that there wasn’t even enough room for one of us and stopped. Car #2 hit car #1 just a moment before car #3 (me) hit car #2. I don’t know if either of the other drivers was charged with any thing or who paid for their damage. I wasn’t and didn’t. After looking things over and talking to everyone, the policeman handed me a citation listing my offence as “having an accident”. There was no fine or other penalty and I was responsible only for the damage to my own car. That was enough.

The badly wrinkled car was soon sold. Normally that might be the end of the story but I sold this car to a friend and it wasn’t just any friend, the buyer was Dale, the lifelong buddy who has appeared in other posts including the Whizzer and the 4CV. I contacted Dale and got a bit of a memory refresher. The yellow Corvair made it to Darke County where it was fitted with the front end of a non-running green Corvair (1960 I think) that Dale already owned. The front end was painted to match and Dale drove the car to St Louis where he then lived. A blown head gasket revealed itself on the trip. “…about gassed us out”, Dale remembers. “Bad headache for a couple days.” In St Louis, he got a cylinder from a junkyard only to find that the replacement would not clear a crankshaft counterweight. So Dale, “with hacksaw in hand, made a relief in the cylinder and it worked.” Ah, those were the days.

Dale drove the car for quite awhile including a year or so around northern Indiana’s Fort Wayne. Dale’s green Corvair had a gas heater. There was a little burning odor and people looked at the car warily when they first heard the heater burning off excess gas after the engine was turned off but it sure worked good for keeping you warm. 1963 was the last year for the gas heater, even as an option, so the yellow ’64 had only “direct air” heat. Dale’s last comment on the yellow convertible sums it up pretty well, “Sure was a fun car but a crappy heater.”

Previous Wheels: Chapter 9 — 1965 Honda 65
Next Wheels: Chapter 11 — 1967 Dodge

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