I had intended to tell you yesterday about the Spring Break of 1969, and the road trip in the red 1968 VeeDub to Fort Lauderdale, FL. Unfortunately, we got lost in the sagas of the sister to the famed Beetle, the Karmann Ghia. We never got around to talking about any of the other German rolling stock we pointedly ignored in the age of the Detroit muscle car.
I have no idea why Dad permitted me to take the little red car, all things considered. If he had intended to slow me down by providing the sensible little German car- this was shortly before the AMC Gremlin proliferation that occurred in East Grand Rapid, Michigan, this was hardly the way to go about it.
I think we wound up with two or three Gremlins at one point, they seeming to multiply in the garage on their own, or were part of a “buy one, get one free” offer from the local dealer. Forgive the fog, but it was 1972 and I was in college and things get a little hazy at this distance.
Our preparations for the road trip were impeccable, and far more detailed than the plans for going to university that fall. Fake ID, check, case of hard liquor, procured from our package store of choice in Pontiac, check. The four of us each ponied up for three bottles of high test.
I considered myself sophisticated, and at that moment in life, that said “gin.” I think rum, whiskey and rye rounded out the case, which went in the trunk, which of course was in the front.
We drove straight through, of course, since we were too cheap to spring for a room on the road. It was a little short of 1400 miles and 19 hours behind the wheel, which I refused to surrender. I was ‘responsible,’ you know? And bless that nice waitress in Chattanooga who served us beers with our burgers, just because we asked. No fake ID required.
The ID itself was a curious thing, and another part of the motoring rite of passage. A pal had constructed a poster-sized replica of a Michigan Driver’s license with a blank square in the lower left corner. He ran a regular business in which you would visit his garage, stand in front of the poster and have him take a Polaroid picture of the scene.
When the picture developed- remember that little waxy stick that you had to rub over the picture to fix the image? You then got some scissors and trimmed the image to the edges of the poster, laminated it in one of those little heat machines, and voila! you were legal to drink anywhere.
It was actually pretty crappy identification, and some stores confiscated the more amateurish versions, but it served a lot of places to take the blame off the retailer in case the ABC folks were around.
I wish I had a good story about the first independent trans-continental trip, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia rolling by the flat windshield in the endless stream of the American autobahn. Just when we thought we had got some place, the endless hours of the Sunshine State.
The thing I remember at this distance was an AM radio station in Georgia someplace that was running a call-in contest for the favorite song on the Top Forty, and we listened to “Age of Aquarius” twelve or thirteen times in a row.
The rest of the week- and the point-to-point trip back with sunburn and what seemed at the time to be terminal aversion to gin, rum, whiskey and rye- and the adamant refusal of the co-eds to believe we were actually college Freshmen- are all that remains of the near forty hours we spent in the little German machine and the boozy space in between.
That Beetle was the first car I ever drove into the ground. Dad still got a new car every year, but he had moved on to head the appliance styling studio at the Kelvinator end of AMC, which had been Nash-Kelvinator since George Mason’s day. But the VeeDub was the first car devoted to the new drivers in the family. I don’t know how many miles I logged in that car- but the total was sufficient to trash the air-cooled engine when I had it in Ann Arbor during my senior year.
RIP, VeeDub. I got the local Chevy dealer to take it as a down-payment on my first brand new car, built to my exacting specifications: a 1973 Chevy Vega Kammback mini-wagon, in British Racing Green.
I still think fondly of that car. It was a piece of crap, of course, from the great age of Detroit rolling pieces of crap. 1973 might have been the peak year for lousy quality control and UAW workers with attitude. Remember?
We used to say we didn’t want a Monday or a Friday car, which was to say, the work-force was notoriously careless in the assembly process coming back to work after a hard weekend, or getting ready to party for the next.
Of course, we have to take a digression on the matter of the great Oil Crisis and a changing market, and all that. Before we leave the exotic territory of the German cars (for a while) I do have to note one that marked the first time the market was ready for “smaller is better,” even before George Romney tried it.
The Italians came up with the quirky front-door entry design and the balloon shape, but BMW did the engineering on the famed Isetta. It was born out of the rubble of World War Two, when the sturdy Germans needed a car that could get 70 MPG, and was cheap enough to be affordable. It was part of the Economic Miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder:
I actually saw one of them out on Big Beaver Road one time, and I was afraid that was all that Raven was ever going to let me drive after that night in Dick’s Charger R/T.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303