Why I can drive anything Old School

One of the reasons I can drive just about anything out there is that my father was a mechanic.

When I turned of legal age to drive my parents put the 'under 25' insurance on my dad's car.

My dad always made sure my mother had a safe, reliable vehicle under her, the family flagship so to speak and he simply drove the crapcan of the month that he was able to score at work for cheap, seldom paying more than fifty bucks for it.

There were Plymouth Valiants, Ford Falcons, for a while a dog of an Oldsmobile 88, an old Chevy wagon with a straight six in it (gas on/gas off) and assorted others.

The Flivver (Ford Falcon) had a three in the tree transmission, the Chevy wagon had a slush pump tranny and the Valiant had a three on the floor.

It was a motley collection of whatever he could get his hands on and if someone offered to pay even $25 more than Dad paid for it, he simply sold it and got something else. This is one area where Dad truly didn't care. His car had one purpose and that was to get him to work and back.

Just about every single one of these rolling wrecks had idiosyncrasies that had to be dealt with. One of them had a wire throttle cable that controlled the distributor and had to be pulled out so far to get it to start along with having a manual choke. Once it caught when it was cold you had to push the choke back in and push the distributor cable in about halfway for a few minutes. After it warmed up a bit you'd push it in all the way and after it was hot you could start it using only half-choke the rest of the day.

The Valiant was hilarious because the three in the floor shifter broke and actually I was the one that figured out the Mickey Mouse fix as it had happened on my watch.

I removed the shifter and saw the two nubs with slots in them and simply put pieces of pipe over them, one of which had an offset bend in it. Neutral was both straight up. Step on the clutch and push the left on forward and you were in reverse. Pull it back for first gear. Put the left one in neutral and the right one forward netted second gear and pulling the right one straight back and you were in third. Actually, it was pretty cool.

When I reported to Dad that I had mickey moused the Valiant he simply walked out to it, looked at my handiwork, shook his head and said, "Hop in!" and we went to the Welch Company in Scituate Harbor for some kind of hardware. He drove the thing without a word about it as if he had been doing it his whole life.

I think we drove it that way for a couple of months before he got rid of it.

Needless to say, there were some of these crap cans that my mother would not even consider driving under any circumstances.

One of them was pretty nasty inside when dad got it and one Saturday morning he detailed me to clean it up as best I could. I hopped into it and drove it straight to the fire station, borrowed a hose and went at it. When I drove it home with water dripping out of a couple of holes I had knocked in the floorboards, dad gave me a dirty look. Everything in it was soaked but if I recall it was a hot July weekend. I parked it with all of the doors open.

My mother was livid, but dad settled her down. "I suppose it'll be all right after it dries out," he said. He shook his head, looked at it again and started laughing. I think he went out to go to work on Monday carrying a folded blanket to sit on, but said to me that night that he didn't really need it. It had dried out.

The Chevy wagon was fun to drive with the guys because it was such a dog. When you started off from a stopped position you would simple stamp on the gas. Someone would say, "Gas on!" and you would hear the air being sucked into the carb and it would hesitate a bit and then start rolling slowly until it managed to build up some sort of speed. When you hit the speed limit you would relax your foot and someone would say, "Gas off!" It was pretty funny. I actually drove that car home all the way from Vermont with no brakes except the parking brake after I broke a brake line on a trip once.

I immediately adjusted the emergency brake cable. Then I sacked out for a couple of hours until I knew the traffic would be down , planned my route and drove carefully, planning every move well in advance and although it was nerve wracking, I had no problems, and when I reported in to dad I got my ass blistered for taking such a chance.

He settled down a bit when I gave him a full after-action report, but I was still reprimanded. I did, however, get a pass for coming home late. At least I had showed some judgement in allowing for traffic patterns and waited.

The next day dad simply drove it to work where he fixed the broken brake line. When he got home he told me I had done an excellent job of adjusting the emergency brake.

As I write this I remember that there were a lot of these cars I learned to drive on that I drove long before I got my license because back in the day Dad would let me drive with him on empty country roads after dark. I think I was twelve when I first sat behind the driver's seat and drove us home from something or another.

By the time I got my license I was actually pretty squared away because I had enough experience driving junk so that I could easily get around driving whatever puss bucket dad would drag out from under a rock. I suppose that today some hippie type would say he was saving these cars from the scrap yard or some such thing.

I remember when a neighbor needed to borrow a car and my mom was out. He took one look at the shifter mechanism of the Valiant, looked amazed and said to my father, "You remind me of my grandfather. He used to buy horses that were on the way to the glue factory and get another year out of them!"

Actually, a lot of the neighbors respected him because of his ability to simply be able to deal with things like that without missing a beat. We always seemed to have a really nice car for Mom and a real crap can for Dad and while some people were amused with the wrecks he drove back and forth to work, they never slighted him for it.

I always got a boot out of my dad getting yet another crap can telling me, "Stomp on the gas five or six times and start it like it is brand new."

My mother heard him and asked him if he could fix it. He told her it would take maybe five or ten minutes and she asked him why he didn't just fix the damned thing.

"Why bother," he replied. "It starts like it's brand new if you stomp on the gas five or six times."

A couple of months later it wouldn't start so I checked it out. The automatic choke wouldn't set so instead of taking everything apart I simply hooked a control cable to the flap and we ran it as a manual choke.

I sure learned a lot driving those old beaters and the skills I learned have lasted me a lifetime.

One of the things I have learned from it is how to answer someone that says, "They don't make 'em like they used to."

My reply is, "You're damned right, thank God. They make 'em one hell of a lot better."

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