Cars, My Old Man, and Life

A few months ago, I posted a memoir about my father and what he taught me about cars. I have just submitted an edited (and much improved in my opinion) version to an on-line publication, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

In addition to the memoir, the journal requires the author to submit “A Southern Legitimacy Statement.” As the requirement states, “If you’re south of somewhere, you’re Mule material.”

Here is what I submitted.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Although I fled Oklahoma in my 20s, I carry a fine regional accent, and I will put my Southern bona fides up against anyone’s. For example, my birth certificate name is Tommy Leroy Chester, with my father choosing my middle name in honor of his favorite professional wrestler, Leroy McGuirk. In fact, I have a program of a wrestling match featuring McGuirk that my parents attended—on their wedding night.

Cars, My Old Man, and Life
In six decades of driving, I have experienced good times and bad over hundreds of thousands of miles, mostly driving a bunch of soulless examples of American mediocrity or Asian rice burners. Many of my attitudes about vehicles have come from my father who was a unique teacher on the subject, although I am sure he was not aware of his pedagogical influence at the time. Memories from my earlier years of driving—and particularly of him and his attitude toward cars—enrich me as I approach the age when I soon will be looking through the steering wheel, driving a safe and sane 35 everywhere, and leaving one turn signal on at all times.

My old man was a natural shade-tree mechanic, the sort of archetypal dirt-poor Okie who could keep a car running in almost any circumstances. He believed in the parts-car theory of automobile ownership, i.e., having a wrecked model of whatever beater vehicle he owned at the time sitting on cinder blocks in the back yard, from which he could scavenge repair parts. As is typical of his type, he did everything himself. I can still see him overhauling carburetors on the kitchen table on weekend mornings. His way of fixing flats was practical if unorthodox. First he would throw the wheel with the flat tire on the ground and then use another car to drive around the rim to unstick the tire (“breaking the bead” as he would say). Then he would use a tire iron to separate the tire from the wheel and free the inner tube—no tubeless tires for him; he was strictly a cold patch man. He changed oil himself, of course, and his idea of an oil filter wrench was a big ass screwdriver he would drive through the filter and use the protruding ends to unscrew it. My old man was a survivor. You get the idea.

My experience with cars began with a 1960 Volkswagen Beetle that my father happened to own at the time. His having a VW doesn’t make sense to me now because he was a diehard Chevy man, and the VW was the only foreign car he ever owned. It was an interesting vehicle, with a stick shift, of course, and a four-cylinder engine rated at 36 horsepower, but it got me around town for a couple of years in high school. In Volkswagen history, 1960 is notable because it was the last year that the company’s models did not have a gas gauge. Instead, there was a little lever on the floorboard just to the left of the clutch pedal. When the fuel in the tank, which held about ten gallons, reached the level of one gallon remaining, the engine would begin to sputter. At that point, the driver would simply turn the lever by foot clockwise a quarter turn, opening up a lower port in the tank to allow the last gallon to flow to the engine. The system was simple and worked well enough. It wasn’t foolproof, though, especially in my case. All too often I forgot to turn the fuel lever back to the original position after refilling the tank. I still recall the despair I felt when the Beetle was running out of gas and I reached down with my foot to flip the lever only to realize that I had not flipped it back when I had last refueled. Getting out of that situation before cell phones and AAA was tough. I had to find a way to call my old man and ask him to bring me some gas. When he arrived, he offered some interesting counsel. I still wince at the memory.

At the same time as the Volkswagen, he also owned a third-hand Ford Fairlane. He must have gotten what he thought was a good deal on it because he loathed Fords despite (or due to) owning a handful of them over the years. Not me. I loved that car. It was a lovely pale blue and white two-door hardtop. I remember the night I took a classmate to our high school prom in it. I washed and waxed the car to a high sheen before picking her up, meeting her father, and presenting her with the obligatory corsage. On the way home after the prom, we stopped on a back road to make out. The term for that in 1960s Oklahoma was “parking.” Back in those antediluvian days, the way many teenagers learned about sex, at least in Oklahoma, was by parking and by going to drive-in movies. Anyhow, we were parking, having a fine time, and I was busy trying to circle the bases to home plate. I was about to reach second base when a car pulled up behind us. It was a cop. Fortunately, we had just enough time to get our clothes in order when he walked up and shined a light in the window. I am sure he knew we were just teenagers making out, but the jerk wanted to hassle us and probably play the voyeur. Anyhow, he made me get out of the car and frisked me before telling us to get on our way. That was a disappointing end to what until then had been a fine, promising evening.

Given my family’s economic situation, I had to put myself through college. One way I did that was working as a roustabout in the Oklahoma oil fields on summer break, a job that paid more than my father earned. With those earnings, I bought my first car. Much to my old man’s dismay it was a damned Ford. To me, though, it was a thing of beauty, the epitome of 1960s American Steel: a bright red Galaxie 500 with bucket seats, a 406 cubic inch V8 with three 2-barrel carburetors, and a four-speed manual transmission with the gear shift lever on the center console. The car only got about 10 miles per gallon and took premium gas at that, but, hell, premium was a quarter a gallon. Being chronically short of cash, though, I tended to use regular, Conotane as Conoco branded it, because it was cheaper. With such low octane gas that 406 rattled like a couple of skeletons screwing on a tin roof. Nevertheless, I was a Wheeled American with a damned fine car for dating—except for the bucket seats.

My dad’s Curse of the Ford Gods continued with the Galaxie. One day when I was home, he decided that the car needed a tune-up. In those days before the advent of the electronic ignition, a minor tune-up involved changing the points and condenser in the distributor mounted on top of the engine, a repair that could normally be done in a few minutes. That was not the case this time. Murphy’s Law—Anything that can go wrong will go wrong—would be one way to describe what happened, but O’Toole’s Corollary is more apt—Murphy was an optimist.

The story is horrific. As he was installing the condenser, my dad dropped the tiny screw used to hold it into the bottom of the distributor. That was frustrating but no big deal. To retrieve the screw, he disconnected the distributor and lifted it off the engine. The rod connecting the distributor to the cam shaft pulled up with the distributor and then unexpectedly fell back into the engine, missed the cam shaft, and ended up in the bottom of the oil pan. By this time, the old man was adding new monosyllabic Anglo Saxon epithets to my vocabulary, which had already expanded greatly after two summers working around roughnecks and roustabouts. To retrieve the rod, he had to drain the oil and remove the oil pan. To obtain enough clearance to do that, however, he had to jack the engine off of its mounts. I remember little else of that day, likely having blocked it from memory the way people block traumatic events from their past.

Although my father had been unhappy at my purchasing the Galaxie, he was even more dismayed when I traded it and $100 for an Alfa Romeo Spyder convertible. When I told him, he replied, “You did WHAT??” The Spyder was a lengendary sports car, the dream of a young man about to graduate with a degree in engineering. My love affair with the Alfa only lasted three months, however, before the engine blew up due to a valve breaking and damaging a piston. My father arrived with a tow rope, certainly regretting his offer to keep my cars running while I was in college, and stoically pulled the Alfa, with me behind the wheel, back to where he lived. He was a man of few words that afternoon, damned few. Although he had never worked on such an odd and technically complex engine, he ordered the parts and figured out how to repair it. When he got it running, he only said one thing, “Sell that son of a bitch.” I did.

After I sold the Alfa my father gave me an old Mustang (another evil Ford) to use until I graduated. It was a beater he had picked up somewhere for little money—he never had much. There were two reasons he had gotten the car so cheap. First, it had been in a wreck that had caved in the right rear. My father had repaired it, more or less—actually less than more—with a hammer and plenty of Bondo, a sort of putty used for auto body repair. Second, and even worse, was that the car had begun its life in Wisconsin and suffered rust resembling a terminal case of melanoma. Moreover, the air conditioner never worked, a particular challenge a few months later when my new wife and I spent the summer in Houston. At least the rust holes in the floorboard offered some welcome ventilation. That advantage, however, disappeared in the fall when we moved to Michigan for school.

After I finished college and got a real job, the quality of cars I owned improved. I soon learned, however, the hard lesson about car payments and insurance costs. And I also learned one of life’s important rules, the Entropy of Automobiles. It is a version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that over time a system goes from a state of order to disorder. The application of that law to cars is quite simple: Over time, all cars turn to shit, a lesson I realize that my father had been trying to teach me. A car in a dealer’s showroom is a gorgeous thing, all shiny, full of promise, and redolent with the seductive new-car smell. With cars, however, there is a substantial difference between theory and reality, that the reality of car ownership is quite different than the theoretical fantasies of a young man in the showroom. That feeling of reality is similar to that of meeting someone in a bar one evening, going to bed with that person, and then waking up the next morning full of regret and remorse and, worse, unable to easily get untangled from the relationship.

I speak from experience—about buying new cars, not picking up women in bars. Over the next twenty years, I purchased four new cars, two of which were dogs, a Chevy Vega and a Dodge Grand Caravan. While I owned the Vega, I often thought of an expression my old man used when he was unpleasantly surprised by something, often having to do with Fords, “I didn’t know such a big bear could get into such a little hole.” The Vega was that little hole, and its mechanical problems were a damned big bear. Within a month after I drove the Vega home, I realized that it had the quality and reliability of a Fiat built on a Monday by union strikebreakers. After I moved to San Francisco, however, its small size was useful in parallel parking, but the engine quaffed oil and was so weak it could not power the car away from a stop light on one of that city’s steep hills. As my old man would say, it ran like a three-legged dog, another phrase he often applied to Fords.

The other disaster was a Dodge Grand Caravan. The choice of a minivan was a joint decision between me and my wife. When we realized we needed a new car, I suggested a used Toyota, while my wife argued for a new minivan. We compromised and got the new minivan. The Dodge was even worse than the Vega. It was so bad that I called it the Antichrist. It, too, had the build quality of a Fiat—or a Yugo. The transmissions were the most frustrating—I use the plural because that sucker was on its third when I finally got rid of it. I used to tease my mechanic that my repair bills on the Antichrist helped him buy a condo at Tahoe. One of the most frustrating aspects of owning the Dodge, however, was that I could not engage in the tempting game of married couples of “I told you so.” My wife was too burdened by guilt at insisting on buying the Antichrist—and by the pain of repair bills on our budget.

Things got better after that. I had a fine used Ford Ranger pickup that fortunately was not affected by the Curse of Ford. Also, having a manual transmission, it allowed me to teach my two daughters how to drive a stick—and in San Francisco at that. Of course, the stress of that experience took its toll. I look at least a decade older than my actual age, and my family doctor blames what I went through for three chronic health conditions that he thinks will significantly reduce my life span.

More recently, I have learned that Karma can be cruel. Just as my father helped me with my cars, so have I helped my daughters. I, too, have come out at all hours to jump start their vehicles. I, too, have brought them gasoline. I, too, have helped them when their cars have had mechanical problems, not by actually repairing the cars but by paying for the repairs.

There have been other vehicles in my life. In the last decade, they have included three Ford pickup trucks. If my father were still alive, I am sure he would be shaking his head, wondering how he raised a son so cross-threaded between the ears as to buy all those damned Ford trucks. Alas, though, he died in the early 90s—leaving my mom a fine vintage Chevy El Camino.

He was a good father who did his best. I miss him still, especially as I hear his words and sayings come out of my mouth and see him slip unexpectedly into the mirror when I am shaving in the morning.