© Dan Sherman
I asked readers to submit stories about their favorite cars from their youth, and the car mentioned most was the Volkswagen Beetle, or 'bug.' In terms of all-time favorite German inventions, male readers ranked it just ahead of bratwurst, and just below Heidi Klum.
"My favorite car remains my 1968 VW bug which I owned for 21 years," writes Eddie Dell of Reno. "It could be fixed with duct tape and string and although I gave it up for dead many times, it always came goose-stepping back.
Once, when the accelerator cable broke in the Rockies during a blizzard, I reached under the car with a pair of needle-nosed vice grips and grabbed the wire, threading it through the floorboard. Then I propped up the vice grips with the handle of a broken screwdriver as a fulcrum and had a temporary accelerator pedal. It was temporary all right -- I drove it like that for about a year.
And when the heat gave up, I used candles on the dashboard as a defrost for two winters."
"My favorite car growing up in Ohio was my 1959 Volkswagen," says John Quinn of Santa Rosa, "in which you could, with your 1966 sawbuck (that's $10 for you Justin Timberlake fans) fill up the tank, go to the movies, and buy your girl a pizza and still have change. It was good in the winter unless it fell below 10 degrees in which case it would warm up only if you brought it into the living room."
Bugs were the first SUVs. "I used to borrow my parents' '69 VW Beetle and tool around the back roads of Pleasanton and Livermore, Calif. where I grew up," said Brian Crane, Sparks resident and Pickles author. " It didn't have a lot of power or 4-wheel drive, but it had a first gear that wouldn't quit and I took it through some pretty rough country."
Readers recalled muscle cars fondly. "We girls grew up wanting our cars to be bad, like our boyfriends," says columnist Adair Lara of San Francisco. "My first car was a souped-up pale yellow '66 Mustang convertible that I found at a used-car dealership in San Rafael when I was 19.
When I got behind the wheel of that car and headed down Fourth Street, for the first time I felt like a blonde, though I had been one for years. When the car conked out after five blocks, I was obscurely satisfied, as if that's what you got with a Bad Car: it was occasionally unavailable."
Clunkers were big favorites. "My favorite car was my father's Ford Galaxy 500," writes S. Jody Hyatt of Reno. "It was an enormous car with a huge engine. When you turned that sucker on, it had a distinctive powerful sound that you never hear today. I drove that car until the floor boards rusted and fell out."
Clunkers made great getaway cars, too. "I drove $50 junkers that had to be parked on hills, because they never fired up when you turned the key," writes Jo Beck of Missouri.
"Luckily, it was hilly almost everywhere within a fifty-mile radius of our farm, and we lived on a steep hill. When we parked the car, we put it at the top of the lane with a block of wood under the front tire so it wouldn't roll away.
This was a handy thing at night because it was a wonderfully silent escape. After Mom went to bed, we'd sneak out and tiptoe to the top of the hill, kick the block out, give the car a shove and coast to the bottom of the lane.
At the bottom of the hill, we'd let out the clutch and roar off in a great glorious cloud of dust and Marty Robbins music. There is something about that feeling -- having made a successful escape -- that is hard to match at any age, but teenagers seem to enjoy it the most. I know I did."
A clunker - German or Detroit. Freedom. And being young. With those three things you were king of the world.
Dan Sherman is a nationally syndicated columnist. His website is www.danshermanonline.com.
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