Cars

Ford Fairlane 500 in Picabo, ID

Today we drove over to Boise to see Susan Gelletley and Christian Petrach. On the way we went through Picabo and stopped, as we always do, at the Silver Creek store. In the parking lot was this Ford Fairlane. I love these old classic cars, especially when they go back to the era of my youth. This is probably from the 1958-62 era, which was my late 20s. I wouldn't want to own one - they were gas guzzlers, of course - but there is something elegant about them that sort of grabs me. 

It got me thinking about "cars I have had." My father did not own a car until I was in high school. Dad managed to get along without a car even as a minister  (e.g., in Minneapolis there was ample public transportation) until we moved to Anamosa, Iowa in 1946. There, many of his parishioners were farmers, and he really needed one to call on them.  So he bought a used 1937 Chevrolet coupe. That was the car I learned how to drive in. Dad taught me out on the country roads around Anamosa. 

My brother Stewart and the '37 Chevy coupe

We had that about two years and he bought a 1946 Ford sedan from one of his parishioners. It was the first car Ford produced after the war (all American car companies ceased civilian car production during WW 2).

1946 Ford - our car was the same color

I loved this car and would take any opportunity to wash and polish it. I remember that the maroon paint was very unstable - it oxidized very easily and when you polished it, the rag turned red immediately. 

In 1949, when I turned sixteen, I got a summer job as a chauffeur for Dan Umbenhauer, a 80-year-old member of my dad's church in Anamosa, and a veteran glove salesman for the Grinnell Glove Company. He had never learned to drive but had been able to be a very successful salesman by using buses and trains to cover his three-state territory  of Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. By hiring me as his chauffeur, he could go to a lot of small towns in those three states that he had never been to because they were not served by bus or train. So I got the dream job for a sixteen-year-old - driving a company car - a 1946 Plymouth coupe - all summer long. We covered a lot of territory - about 10,000 miles in all, as I recall. Here is the car:

The Grinnell Glove Company car I drove the summer of 1949 - parked behind the parsonage in Anamosa

I did not own a car myself until I was in college. In 1952,  I became a student minister at a rural Presbyterian church in Pleasant Hope, MO, and needed a car to get there. It was a 1941 Chevrolet, and it burned a quart of oil about every 25 miles! I paid $50 for it. But oil was cheap and gas was only 18 cents a gallon.  

This is a 1941 Chevy, but mine didn't look this good. For $50, what would you expect?

In my senior year at Drury College, 1953, I got a deal on the Dean of Men's used 1949 Studebaker Champion. I loved that car. It had "overdrive" and ran really smoothly on the road.  But when I went to seminary in Chicago in 1954, it was impractical to keep a car, so I gave it to my brother, Stewart. I don't have a picture of it, but it looked something like this:

1949 Studebaker Champion

In 1956, I came to Vermont as a summer minister, and we needed a car. I was married by then, and Shirley and I bought a 1949 Ford in Chicago, drove it to Vermont, used it there that summer for church work, drove it back to Chicago, and sold it. It barely made the trip back!

The 1949 Ford sitting by the house we lived in the summer of 1956 in Dummerston.

Pretty soon after that, we bought a 1952 Chevy. That is the car we drove back to Vermont when I became the regular minister in the summer of 1957.

Sitting on the 1952 Chevy

This car served us well for a couple of years, years that included the birth of our daughter, Betsey, in 1958. That meant adding first a bassinet and then, when she got a bit older, a car seat, and the Chevy began to feel like not quite the right car for our new family. We were driving up near Ludlow, VT, I think, and drove by a car for sale in someone's driveway that really caught our eye. It was a Triumph Estate Wagon, and it was the cutest car we had ever seen. It also seemed like the perfect car for carrying both a toddler and all the additional paraphernalia. I guess the price was right because we bought it. Shirley's parents must have helped us. It was a small car. Getting my 6 1/2 foot frame in and out of it was almost comical - sort of like clowns at the circus. But it was actually quite comfortable to drive once I was in it, and it handled beautifully. It had something of a sports car feel in the way it hugged the road and turned corners. It was, of course, made in Britain and not many were sold in the U.S. We loved it, and Betsey loved the way her car seat allowed her to sit high and see out. 

The Triumph Estate Wagon parked in front of the A-frame in Vermont, c. 1963.

Betsey (right) and a friend sitting on the hood of the Triumph.

The Triumph Estate Wagon carried us through the remaining time in Dummerston and on to graduate school at Brown in Providence, Rhode Island. But by about 1963 or '64, it was getting hard to find parts for it. I remember one time, the starter needed a new part in the solenoid, and the mechanic actually had to make the part because he couldn't find it anywhere.  So we finally had to tearfully say goodbye to the Triumph and we got a Rambler American Station Wagon. By then, Betsey was six and John was three and we needed a bit more room. The Rambler was small compared to most wagons of the time (just compare with the Ford Fairlane at the top of this blog - same era. But it was just right for our family and we grew to love it.

This is what the Rambler American Wagon looked like, but ours was green.

In 1966, I received the Ph.D. from Brown, and I rewarded myself for six years of hard work by buying a sports car! A Triumph TR3. A member of the Central Congregational Church congregation sold it to me for  only $900. I owned it only for the summer of 1966, but I had a blast while I did. I really loved that car. However, it turned out to have serious mechanical problems that were actually quite dangerous - a broken "a-frame" in the right front wheel. I was very lucky a wheel did not collapse while I was driving it. So I sold it for $300 at the end of the summer. There have been many times since that I have wished I had stored it somewhere so that I could have later pulled it out of storage and restored it. But that is a pipe-dream.

My mother and Betsey in the Triumph TR3 in Woodstock, VT

The Rambler American Wagon carried us through graduate school and on to my first teaching job at Keuka College in the Finger Lakes Region of New York. But by then we needed a bigger car for our now-frequent road trips back to Vermont. The Presbyterian minister in Penn Yan, NY, where we lived, was selling his just two-year-old Plymouth Belvedere Station Wagon. So we bought it. We sold the Rambler to a local dealer, and one day we drove by his lot and saw "our car" sitting there for sale, and we all burst into tears! But the Plymouth proved to be a great car. We kept it when we moved to Appleton, WI, in 1969, and had even longer road trips back to Vermont. It was great because both the kids could sleep "in the back." There was even enough room for me to stretch out and sleep while Shirley drove. We kept the Plymouth until we moved back to Vermont in 1973, and several years more after that - probably at least 10 years all told - until finally, it rusted out.  

This is what the Plymouth Belvedere looked like. It was pretty big!

Three vehicles at the house in Vermont, c. 1974  or so. The Plymouth Wagon at the left,  Chevy Pickup Truck with plow in center, and a Buick sedan at right that we inherited from Shirley's mother when she gave up her car and sold her house on Staten Island and moved to Lenox, MA.

Since the early 1970s, I (we) have had many cars - two Honda Hatchbacks (one red, one blue), a Dodge Colt; when the kids were in high school, we got clunkers for them: a VW Bug (we named "Herkimer"), a Chevy Nova, another old Rambler (Betsey took that to Wellesley, to Bowdoin College her Junior year, and even to a summer job on Nantucket - it was actually a great car); a Honda CRX (another car I loved and literally cried when it inexplicably stopped running, could not be fixed and had to be sold for junk!), a Toyota Tercel, a Subaru Legacy Brighton, and then Ellen's Toyota Corolla (which went 390,000 miles) and now our Subaru Impreza. That adds up to a lot of cars for one person. Good grief!