I’m sure no one finds these old pictures as interesting as me, but here’s another one. It’s a scan of a Polaroid that had a lot of dust on it.
Me, with Jesse riding shotgun
This was taken in 1979. I was 29 and had only recently adopted Jesse. As you can see, my hand is on Jesse. Any time I was close enough to touch her, I had my hand on her. The VW is a 1972 bus, the best of a dozen or so that my friend Errol and I looked at in Atlanta. Jesse and I were getting ready to take a trip in this picture. We went up to New Kensington, Pa, to see my brother, and then out to Colorado and New Mexico to visit Errol’s brother Tom.
I’ll point out a few things of interest. Behind me you can see two foam mattresses. The lower was Jesse’s at night, and the higher one was mine. My father figured a way to span the gap between the third row seat and the driver’s seat with a bunk. It worked great. Jesse rode on the bunk during the day with her head on my shoulder. She was a good traveler.
You can see that there was a time that I had no gray hair in my beard, and I had a full head of hair. And no spare tire. For any runners, the shoes I am wearing are the great-grandfather of all modern running shoes, the Nike Waffle Trainer. I bought a pair of them in San Francisco in 1977 to train for and run in a marathon held near Carson City, Nevada. My knees worked in those days.
The Airstream trailer in the background was the one my parents used for several years to travel all over the country, and into Mexico and Canada.
The VW had the same old air-cooled four-cylinder engine that the Beetle had. It would do just about 60 miles per hour on the highway. It had no air conditioning, but if you opened the driver’s window and cranked the huge sunroof open a little, there was a smooth, relatively quiet flow of air through the cab. It was bearable even in the summer. In the winter, however, the pitiful little puff of lukewarm air that came through the heater vents was just about enough to keep frost off of your toenails.
Jesse and I spent a lot of nights in that old VW. We stayed in campgrounds, in rest areas and in parking lots.
There is really no context in which you can say that an old VW bus was a good car. It was slow and dangerous. On the front end there was literally nothing but a thin piece of sheet metal between you and the world. The rule was, if it looks like a car is going to hit you, lift your legs.
But I miss it.
When I say I would like to have it back again, what I really mean is that I would like to be 29 again.
You were a pretty cool guy, Mark; are you still a cool guy? I enjoy seeing the old images and reading your remembrances a lot, so, from my perspective, keep ’em coming.
My family owned two VW Beetles in succession. They didn’t produce any more heat in the northeast Ohio winter than did your VW van. Also, the first Beetle had no gas gauge; it had a 1-gallon spare tank. When the main fuel tank ran out of gas, you flipped a switch and you had one gallon’s worth of miles to find a gas station. More than once I completely ran out of gas when someone in the family forgot to fill the spare tank. The worst was on a Sunday evening almost in the middle of nowhere when I was out with my girlfriend (now wife); despite appearances of being in the middle of nowhere, there was actually a gas station about a half-mile away.
If I posted a picture of myself at 29 (maybe I will), I too, wouldn’t have gray in my beard (or on my head), and I very well might be wearing a pair of running shoes (though I never bought Nikes; they were always too expensive). I would not, however, have had a full head of hair since my hairline began receding pretty early in life. One day, when I was in graduate school, the department hired a professional photographer to take some publicity photos to promote the department’s ecological work. I was bent over a tray of aquatic invertebrates, sorting the bugs from the detritus. The photographer said to me (jokingly, I hope), “Scott, raise your head. The light reflecting off your scalp is ruining the picture!”
Scott – I never thought of myself as cool, but I feel like I haven’t changed (as long as I don’t look in the mirror).
Your old VW reminds me of the old motorcycle I had with a reserve position on the petcock. It had two petcocks, one for each side of the tank. I was riding it up to visit my brother in Pa and was running on fumes on the second reserve in the middle of the night in the middle of West Virginia. I felt really lucky to find an open gas station.
My brother went to grad school with a guy whose hair turned white at a very early age. He always said he had prematurely gray hair. Later on someone said, “I hate to tell you, but it’s not premature any more.”
I have another old picture I plan to post soon. It’s my wife with her car from about 30 years ago. I wish we still had that car.
I loved those old VWs (bugs and vans). My twin brother had a wonderful old van that the mechanic dubbed “oddfellow.” It was slow and cranky, but he drove it across country in 1972 and then we took it up to Portland, Or from southern CA. There was something about that era that so many of us were on the road in vehicles like this. I’m not sure it happens like this anymore. My first long-term partner and I had an old Chevy pick-up and a beautiful hand-made camper (that we made in 1974). We drove that thing from California to the east coast, then back west across Canada. I wish I had a photo of it.
I like these looks back. It’s good to remember the times that shaped us.
Mark is of course a cool guy. There was no question about this.
My parents started out with an airstream, way back in the sixties. It was a four digit number that I can’t quite get right – 9036? 6038? 9063? 963something? If there’s a name associated with something in that number range, and I’m sure it’s online, it would be hughes.
For quite a few years since 1973, I drove a 1964 robin egg VW bug, NOT the beetle, but the bug. It was the tiny cousin to your relative behemoth, but as much a death trap. I recall nearly passing out on a trip back to Athens from Tallahassee. The fuel line had a leak and it was dripping into the heating lines, the ones that barely warmed your toes. As I recall, I taped the hole with duck tape for a few months until I could get it fixed.
It had the ornate bumpers, rather than the boringly smoothly curved ones. It had the 40 hp sewing machine rather than the 36 hp of the 1963 and earlier. It was a sweet car, and I loved handing it over to the son of a custodian in our plant biology department. I believe I see it still tootling about, now and then.
Wayne, I think you’re lucky you didn’t end up with an engine fire. I saw an engine fire on a Beetle one day on an I-75 exit near Atlanta that ate up several portable fire extinguishers and kept burning until the fire department came. My friend Errol, who helped me find mind, lost his to an engine fire.
I went with my parents on one or two of their longer trips with their Airstream. I have some very fond memories of those trips.