Car selection was a tricky matter in those days. Automotive loyalties ran deep. Affordability wasn’t the only factor in the equation. There were Ford families, Chevy families, AMC families, and Plymouth families. You had no choice in the matter. You were born into your brand, and switching from one to the other was not done lightly.
When my family washed up on the shores of Danville in 1957, we owned a Plymouth Belvedere, fondly referred to in family lore as the Batmobile. It was sky blue and aqua, sported tail fins a mile long, a formidable engine, and not one seat belt. My father would drive, my mother seated beside him, we five children strewn across the back seat, flung about like bowling pins whenever my father would brake or turn a corner.
While an aqua car seems unusual now, it was par for our course. My father actively sought out ugly cars, cars that had sat for long months on Nort Watson’s car lot, cars so peculiar no one else wanted them. Orange, purple, and aqua cars Nort Watson sold to the desperate and blind. My father would settle his sights on a car, then spend months negotiating its purchase, hauling me to Nort Watson’s, where we would listen to Nort extol the virtues of the AMC automobile.
“Now you keep an eye on these Gremlins,” Nort would confide to my father. “They’re gonna sell like hotcakes. There’s not a finer car made today. Period.”
Nort Watson ended every other sentence with the word period, a verbal exclamation point to hammer home his point.
Dad would wander over to the apple green AMC Pacer he’d been considering, standing back a dozen feet to admire it.
“You better get that car today,” Nort Watson would say. “I had a man in just yesterday looking at it. Said he’d be back today to buy it.”
It was a bald lie, and my father and I knew it. No one ever lined up to buy the kind of car my family would own.
Bad cars ran in our family. We were flops when it came to car selection and would, with unerring instinct, select the one automotive disaster from the hundreds of models available for purchase. Our family reunions were a veritable smorgasbord of failed transportation—Edsels, Vegas, Pintos, Corvairs, and Gremlins. One cousin had a Ford Pinto that had the amusing habit of bursting into flames at odd moments. Another cousin’s Vega broke in half while he was crossing railroad tracks. That’s right, broke in half, as in two separate but equal pieces. It was said of Vegas that they began rusting on the showroom floor. My family drove them in droves.
My grandfather Quinett owned a station wagon whose top was made almost entirely of glass, but because he was cheap he didn’t have air-conditioning installed. He did, however, order power windows. A not-yet-perfected innovation, they soon failed with the windows in the raised position, leaving my grandfather with a terrarium on wheels. The sun baked the car’s interior, water condensed on the inside, running in rivulets across the glass, dripping onto our heads. One August, I rode with my grandparents from Danville to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Seven hours on the broil setting. I arrived ten pounds lighter, basting in my own juices, mad with fever.
“Would you look at that blue sky!” my grandfather said every other mile, peering up through the glass roof. “What a car this is! You don’t get views like this with just any car.”
This was another family trait concerning automobile selection—we were so determined not to acknowledge our error that we would buy the same model of car over and over again, rather than admit we had made a mistake. Had they been available, I have no doubt my grandfather would have ordered glass-topped cars with broken windows for the rest of his life.
My father deviated from his usually cautious car-buying only once, with disastrous results. We were eating at the Dog N Suds Drive-In one Friday night when my father gazed across Main Street toward Dugan’s Chevrolet and saw a brown Malibu, a red pennant tied to its antenna flapping seductively in the breeze. The spotlight hit the Malibu, the background music swelled, and my father swooned.
“Would you look at that!” he said. “What a car!”
He was nearing forty, with five children and two dogs, tilting hard against the windmills of middle age. As if in a trance, he opened our car door, walked across Main Street, straight toward the Malibu. An hour later, we were sporting new wheels.
My father loved that car, waxing it every Saturday under the tulip tree in our side yard. By then, his bug spray company made car wax and he became an evangelist for shiny cars. In the trunk of his car he carried tins of car wax, which he dispensed like a Baptist preacher passing out salvation tracts. He accosted total strangers on the street, pressing a can of car wax into their hands, urging them to polish their cars while there was yet time.
The Malibu glistened like a diamond, so deep was my father’s love for it. He would sit in it for hours at a time, touching the steering wheel, rubbing his hands across the Naugahyde interior. On Saturday nights, my brother Doug and I would join Dad in the car, listening to the Indiana Pacers on the radio. Slick Leonard was their coach, our state’s high priest of basketball.
One Saturday our family piled in the Malibu and drove forty miles west to Rockville, to Slick Leonard’s basketball camp, and met the man himself. Slick was seated behind his desk, a tall man with long sideburns, wearing a plaid leisure suit, the picture of Hoosier success. After years of selling bug spray, my father could converse with anyone. Mimes had been known to break into senseless jabber around him, so gifted was my father in conversation. But he fell mute before the great Slick Leonard. Dad’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged. We stood dumbly in front of Slick’s desk, staring across at him, slack jawed, while he autographed pictures of himself, then walked us outside to our car. As we neared the Malibu, my father’s spirit was revived and he found his voice.
“That’s my new car,” he said to Slick.
Slick Leonard studied the car, silently appraising it, then said, “I’m a Ford man myself.”
The next day, my brother Doug drove the Malibu to the Dairy Queen and scraped it against a telephone pole, creasing the driver’s door. When we got home and told Dad, he didn’t even cuss. If it had happened the day before, he would have frothed at the mouth, but Slick Leonard had already taken off the shine. A few years later, my father sold the Malibu and bought an orangey-red Plymouth Horizon, another high-water mark of automotive design.
Given this history of vehicular disasters, it was no surprise that after passing my driving test I began driving a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. It had belonged to my brother Glenn, who had joined the Coast Guard, sailed to Guam, and had written home to tell me I could have his car. This is a matter of some dispute. He claimed he gave me permission to drive it, while I was under the impression he’d given it to me. I forged his name on the title, sold it to Dugan’s for five hundred dollars and, compounding my error, bought a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle.
Owning a Volkswagen Beetle in those days was akin to joining a cult in which all reality was suspended. The faithful were continually boasting of the Beetle’s virtues, though keeping it running consumed all one’s time, money, and effort. But only its merits, which were few, were ever spoken about. Beetles were notoriously unreliable, hazardous, bitterly cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and had a knack for breaking down at the worst possible time in the worst possible place. The Beetle was Hitler’s brainchild, for God’s sake, and assumed every nasty trait that man ever possessed, inflicting cruelty after cruelty upon its owners.
My Beetle repairman was Warren, who lived in the town north of us, though it would have been more convenient for all concerned if he had lived in our guest room, so frequent were our visitations. I began every day by driving the nine miles to his shop, knowing I would end up there eventually that day and wanting to save myself the trouble of having to guess when. He would labor underneath my Beetle, calling out encouragement, stoking the myth of Beetle superiority. “Yeah boy, they sure don’t make them like this anymore. What a car!” After every repair, he would boast of the VW’s mechanical soundness by saying, “Why, I wouldn’t hesitate to drive it to California.” I h
ad no idea how people in California bragged about their cars.
Though the Volkswagen had many faults, its chief liability was an exhaust leak, which caused the passenger compartment to fill with noxious fumes. In the summer, this was remedied by lowering a window, but in the winter I couldn’t drive very far without being overcome by carbon monoxide. I would find myself getting woozy, the Beetle would careen from shoulder to shoulder, oncoming cars would speed past in a honking blur. Eventually, I would lose consciousness, slow to a stop, and come around a few minutes later, the VW tilting into a ditch. The fog would lift, and I would resume my journey, undeterred. Had I been raised in a normal-car family, I would have been alarmed, but danger and mayhem seemed to me the natural course of things when men and cars got together, and I never gave it a second thought.
Chapter 22
The Blizzard
On January 25, 1978, a few weeks shy of my seventeenth birthday, a blizzard barged into Indiana, dumping twenty inches of snow on Danville. Temperatures dropped to below zero, and with wind gusts of fifty-five MPH, the wind chill hit –50°. The snow fell two days, the state was declared a disaster area, and every road in Indiana was closed. That this should happen so early in my life was providential, providing me the opportunity to say at every snow afterward, in a dismissive, old man voice, “Huh, you think this is bad, you should have seen the winter of ’78!”
My father was on the road peddling bug spray, stranded in a hotel in Terre Haute, where he stayed five days and four nights, dining on filet mignon and shrimp cocktails, watching cable television, a rarity in those days, and whooping it up with other marooned salesmen. When the roads were finally opened, it took a crowbar to pry the salesmen from the place. My father phoned each night to report that he was still alive, his voice crackling and harassed over the wires, as if wolves were snarling outside his door. It took him twenty years to tell us about the filets and cable television.
We’d been sent home from school at noon, the first time our superintendent, Mr. Cox, had ever sent students home early. He was of the opinion that overcoming impossible odds was good for your character. I remember mushing my dog team through ten-foot drifts to get to school when every school in a three-state area had closed but ours.
Chick and Glenn had moved from home, which left my mother, my brothers David and Doug, and me to soldier on through the blizzard. I have forgotten how I spent our confinement, but suspect much of the time was passed fighting with my brothers, given our feral natures. Regular television programming had been suspended so the weatherman could tell us what we already knew, that the state was snowed in and no one was going anywhere. By the second day, matters had turned desperate. We were without heat and food, reduced to burning family heirlooms in our fireplace and eating a box of oyster crackers we’d discovered in the back reaches of the pantry.
Charley Williams, our chief of police, commandeered snowmobiles from Denny Grounds, who owned the Ford dealership. The policemen rode all about town delivering workers to the hospital, medicine to the sick, even transporting a dead body into town from out in the country. My mother called Charley to see if he could bring us milk, to no avail. We phoned in various emergencies—a possible ruptured appendix, a suspicious character wearing a face mask walking past our home, a car stuck in a snowdrift—suggesting that as long as Charley was coming our way, he might bring a gallon or two of milk, but he saw right through us.
For years, my mother had been after my father to wallpaper the kitchen, which the previous owners had painted a bright royal blue. She’d bought the wallpaper the previous summer and had stored it in the basement, where it had sat waiting for my father to be sufficiently motivated to hang it. He had never hung wallpaper and was hesitant about learning, knowing it would only lead to heightened expectations.
The third day of the blizzard, our next-door neighbors, Lee and Mary Lee Comer, came to check on our welfare. My mother greeted them at the door, wan and listless, faint with hunger, her fingers blackened with frostbite.
“Can we do anything for you?” Lee asked.
My mother brightened. “Do you know how to wallpaper?”
Mary Lee did the paste work, Lee hung the paper, and my brothers and I watched, enthralled. It was the first time we’d seen a home improvement project done without the accompaniment of fervent swearing.
Lee was masterful, a wallpaper virtuoso, cutting the wallpaper with mathematic perfection, butting up each piece of wallpaper to its neighbor, the pattern matching with a flowery precision. My mother was beside herself, in a full-blown state of elation, first gluing a section with Mary Lee, then helping Lee hoist a piece into place, an orchestral conductor, directing her personal Ode to Joy.
Eight hours later, the paste cleaned up and put away, the ladder stowed in the basement, we stood in the kitchen, marveling at the transformation.
“What do you think?” Lee asked.
“Now if we only had milk,” my mother said.
The Comers came back the next day to play Monopoly and listen to the Statler Brothers on our bug tape player. I was, and remain, a notorious cheater when it comes to the game of Monopoly. I appointed myself treasurer, swiped five-hundred-dollar bills when no one was paying attention, and won the game, though the only properties I owned were Baltic Avenue and the Water Works. When my theft was discovered, I was jailed for five turns, but managed to oversee my criminal enterprises from my cell and came out richer than ever.
Midway through the day, word arrived at our home that the Kroger had reopened. The Kroger was a mile and a half from our house, the roads were still closed, and it was bitterly cold, but I volunteered to walk to the grocery store to get milk, wanting only to appear virtuous for volunteering, never dreaming my mother would actually let me go.
“Get some Oreos while you’re there,” she said. “And eggs too.”
I didn’t have winter boots, so I wore two pairs of socks and bread bags over my shoes. I pulled on long johns, then two pairs of pants, three shirts, an extra coat, and my father’s Green Bay Packers hat. My little brother, David, circled around me, jackal-like, sensing vulnerability. “If you don’t come back, can I have your bicycle?” he asked.
I had long dreamed of doing something heroic for my family, of killing an intruder with my bare hands, or some other dramatic display of bravery. Fetching milk hadn’t occurred to me, though it would do, no other opportunities for valor having presented themselves.
It took an hour to reach the store, cutting through the woods to U.S. 36, which was still closed. There were a few snowmobiles out and about, policemen whizzing here and there, dozens of kids sledding on the hill behind the school. I pressed on, the bread bags leaking, my feet growing numb with cold. Down Main Street past the Phi Delts’ clubhouse, which several men had succeeded in reopening and were lubricating themselves against the wintry chill. Up the hill, past the jail and the Waffle House, where more police snowmobiles were parked. I saw the officers inside, ghostlike through the steamy windows, eating doughnuts, a sight comforting in its familiarity.
The Kroger sat next to the Waffle House. The lights were on, and a few people were moving about inside. The manager—I won’t mention his name because he is still alive and I’m still mad at him—met me at the front door to tell me they were closed.
“Closed? How can you be closed?” I asked. “It’s the middle of the day. I see people buying groceries. All I need are milk, eggs, and Oreos.”
I began to shiver, hoping to soften him, but he didn’t budge from the doorway. “Nope. We’re closed.”
“The baby’s puny,” I told him. “The doctor said he needs milk or he’ll die.” There hadn’t been a baby in our home in fifteen years, but my parents were Catholic, and I was banking on him thinking Catholics had either just had a baby or were making plans to have one.
“Come back tomorrow,” he said, shutting the door in my face.
I beat on the glass window, tears and snot freezing on my face. “Powdered milk,” I yelled. “
How about powdered milk?”
Walking home was a misery. The wind cut down Main Street, knifing through my coat. I took a shortcut through the woods, crossed the creek and fell through the ice, the water poured into the bread bags. By the time I reached home, my feet were iced-up blocks. I propped them in front of the fireplace, warmed by the last remnants of heat generated from burning the family photo albums.
“The manager wouldn’t let me in,” I told my mother. “He said they were closed and for me to come back tomorrow.”
My mother, normally a calm, unruffled sort, wove a rich tapestry of invective against the Kroger Corporation, starting with its president and working her way down to its lowliest stock boy, reserving her most colorful language for the local manager, a man who “by God, attended church with us and knew us and should act like the Christian he claims to be!”
If it is true that difficulties reveal a person’s character, my father rose to the occasion. Serving at the time on the town board, in charge of the street department, he was seventy miles removed in his town’s darkest hour. But he phoned the town workers each day, in between his steak dinners, urging them to greater heights, stirring their civic pride.
Unfortunately, my father’s civic commitments had had a way of expanding my own obligations. Previous snowfalls had resulted in dozens of phone calls from widows whose driveways had been filled with mounds of snow left by the plows. I was assigned the task of digging them out, so they could go forth onto the ice and fall and break their hips.
The first time this happened, I came home with pocketfuls of money, which I showed my father. He frowned. “We do not take money from widows. I want you to give it back.” There was no arguing with my father, this being in the olden days when children obeyed their parents, or else.
I Love You, Miss Huddleston Page 14