I’ll talk about Mike right now. He was a fellow CO at Deaconess Hospital, starting about the same time I did. He was a pleasant fellow, smart, and low-key. He was fun to hang out with and playing with cars was his hobby. He knew a lot about cars and was a good person to have as a helper when working on cars. When I knew him, he owned a Porsche 912, a sweet ride. I believe he eventually got a degree in mechanical engineering. After that, I don’t know.
At this point in 1971 the VW van was gone, but I still had the motor. I thought: “I’ve got a perfectly good, almost new, motor, so why not find a car to stick the motor in.” Makes sense, right? And in this instance it did make sense. Mike and I set out once again to scour the junkyards of south St. Louis. We found the perfect candidate, a 1963(?) Beetle which needed paint and a motor. We gave it the once over and couldn’t find any major faults, so money exchanged hands and it was mine. Now I had to get it from the junkyard to the garage I was renting.
Mike and I thought about it and we came up with an idea. Not a good idea, but workable. He had a sturdy vehicle, so we got a long, stout rope and headed back to the junkyard. We tied the rope somewhere on his frame, not the bumper, and tied the other end to a sturdy part of the front of the Beetle. The theory was that he would pull with his vehicle, and I would sit in the Beetle and steer it while braking as necessary to avoid smacking the rear end of his car. Yes, we had tested the brakes on the Beetle, and surprisingly they worked. So off we went, creeping through the streets of south St. Louis to get to my garage in the Central West End. It took a while, but we got there with no mishaps, and pushed the car into the garage. Mission accomplished.
At one point Mike owned a 1950’s GMC pickup. It could have been the tow vehicle. It also could have been a 1957, as sung about by Jerry Jeff Walker, but I lean to it being a 1954. Of course it had no seatbelts. One day Mike and I were out tooling around, and as was his wont, he made a right turn too quickly. The driver door swung open and he headed out the door. Luckily he was able to hang on to the wheel, and I grabbed his shirt, and he pulled himself back in. No harm done. Did he slow down after that? Of course not.
So the car was in my garage, it was Friday, and I had to have it ready to drive to work on Monday. There was no bus stop near me, so it really needed to get it done. Mike called in his buddy Tim, a hard worker, and we set to work. Looking back, I’m not sure how Mike and I managed to get the same weekend off, but it happened. The weekend is kind of a haze, we installed the motor, changed all the 6-volt electric to 12-volt, hooked up the wires and cables, and did the other million little things that needed to be done to make it run. I don’t remember if we did the brakes that weekend or waited until inspection, but I drove it to work Monday morning.
That car became my daily driver and my play car for several years. I added a different exhaust, intake, carburetor, sway bar, camber-compensator, a Porsche clutch, and many, many more changes. The carburetor was a bit of a challenge. It was a Holly Bug Spray 200CFM made specifically for VW’s. Installed easily, ran good, but I noticed that it dripped gasoline from the accelerator pump. Not a desired feature. I took it back to where I bought it and showed the guy. He agreed that this was not good and said it must have been a factory defect. He gave me another carburetor and I hustled home and installed it. You have probably correctly guessed that it leaked too. They probably manufactured a whole slew of bad carburetors. I looked closely and saw that the leak was where the accelerator pump exited the carburetor body. An O-ring was needed around the pump shaft to prevent the gas leak. I cobbled something together and took care of that. The carb worked perfectly after that, except for the float sometimes sticking. That was fixed by whacking on the float body with the butt end of a screwdriver to unstick it. No big deal, but when it was 10pm and 20 degrees out with a wind, then it was a big deal.
The brakes were also a challenge. Other old timers will remember the days when cars had drum brakes on all four wheels. Drum brakes were a pain in the ass. You didn’t just slip the brake shoes into place like you do with modern brake calipers. Nope. You bought a bag full of springs, retainers, clips, and such. You needed a diagram of where everything would go, but this was before the days of camera phones. You might find an illustration in your Haynes manual, but the best solution was to pull off the brake drum on the other side and use that as a reference. Oh, and the rear brakes required an additional hookup of stuff for the emergency brake. Then you would get out your special brake spring tool because you had learned previously that vice grips didn’t cut it. Then you commenced, with much cussing and swearing and banging of knuckles, the removal of the old brake shoes and accompanying hardware and installation of the new. I suppose it would be easier if you did a couple of these a day, but that wasn’t the case, so you just bore down and eventually finished. One down and three to go. Luckily, front brakes usually wear out quicker than rear, so you would only change either the front or rear. I’m sure I’ll never have to work on drum brakes again, but I still have the tools.
This was the car I drove down to Florida, pulling a small trailer, and back to St. Louis again in a few months. It just kept running. Then in 1975(?) it required a rebuild. Mike and I removed the motor, stripped off things like the fan housing, and carried the short block up to the second floor of my Clayton apartment. It was heavy, but Mike and I were sturdy fellows back in the day. Thanks to a tolerant spouse I was able to rebuild the motor in the spare bedroom. Then back down the stairs, install the motor, and off I went. The landlord never found out.
Eventually I decided that it was time to paint the car. Earl Scheib advertised $29.99 for painting any car. I thought I could do better. I went to Central Hardware and bought a good brush and a gallon of red, oil based, enamel. It worked on metal and was a good exterior paint. One sunny day I set to work, masking off some of the car and painting the rest with the brush. After a couple of hours I took a break to admire my work. It looked okay,……..from half a block away. The closer I got the worse it looked. I should have given Earl Scheib their 30 bucks. I drove it anyway, always telling myself that I’d get it professionally painted, but I never did. It kept that lousy paint job until the end.
A couple more years went by, and the Beetle started showing that the end was approaching. It was rust, the destroyer of all things automotive. It started with a small hole in the driver’s footwell. I patched it with galvanized sheeting and roofing cement, but then got a hole in the passenger side. The rust spread, and it was time to get rid of the Beetle. I took out the motor and sold it to a guy who showed up in another Beetle to take it back to Colorado. “This is going to fit in your back seat?” I queried. The answer was yes, and it did. He happily headed off to Colorado.
I got rid of the rest of the car by sawing it apart piece by piece and putting the pieces in the alley behind my house. They were picked up immediately. When it was down to the floor pan I hauled it out and two guys in a pickup truck stopped and heaved it in the back. I hadn’t even gotten back inside my house. So the Beetle was gone, it had been a lot of fun and also a lot of aggravation. It was worth it though. Then family matters took over and I wouldn’t get another toy car for 20 years.