When I was around ten or eleven years old, my Dad got a call from a man who was restoring his 1962 Volkswagen and needed to have his engine rebuilt. He wanted to keep it stock, rebuilding the original 40-horse, if at all possible.
“Not a problem,” my Dad told the man. “We’ll get the car down to the shop and get it done.”
Only there was a small hitch in the get-along. The man wanted it trailered, not towed, and Dad didn’t have a trailer at that time. They threshed out a plan that Dad would come up to Chadron and drive the ailing VW down to his shop. The original engine was on its last legs. It had a terrifying rod knock and shocking endplay on the pulley end. But Dad figured he’d roll the dice on one last thirty mile jaunt on it before he tore it down and rebuilt it.
So Mom gamely loaded up the whole fam in her ’74 Dodge Dart Sport and we went up to retrieve the ’62. When we got to the customer’s house I just about lost my mind. There, parked on the driveway was a shiny, round car looking like a gigantic scoop of pistachio ice cream. It was the prettiest little car I’d ever seen. The body work, paint, and interior had already been completed and it looked as good as it must have when it stood on the lot in 1962. It was a color I then thought of as “Seafoam Green,” and later learned was L380 “Turkis”and I knew that when I was a grown up, I wanted to have a car that looked just like that!
Smitten, I obtained permission to ride in the back seat back to the shop, and accordingly away we went. The sailing was smooth, if slow almost all the way back down to Dunlap. Right up until the final descent into the Niobrara river valley. On the downshift from third to second, the beleaguered, clattering #2 connecting to cut loose and grenaded the bottom end. I remember a noise like “POONKH” and a stench of hot oil and an ominous silence. Dad pulled it out of gear and let it coast the rest of the way to our turnout. We had to push it the last 50 feet or so, but pushing a car is a skill you start to acquire in your tween years if you’re going to be a petrol head, so I was in no way upset about grabbing a bumper and giving a heave.