Motorheads

So you are a car guy. I have been one for most of my years, even before adult, thanks to my Uncle Bobby, my dad’s “kid brother,” who lived down the hill from us in San Diego.  He was a few years older than me, but not sure how many. He can refute it here if he likes, but the family history says he got his first ticket when he was twelve in an unauthorized spin around the block in Grandma’s ’46 Ford. He always had a few cars on the street in various stages of disrepair. His shoebox Ford, a 1950 or so, had some marginal exhausts on it, he had played with the timing, and every time he let off going by our house down the hill, it would make some raucous noise, usually attempt a backfire or two, and just sounded macho to my twelve year old ears.

After returning from Midway Island and preparing for my first year in high school, we stopped in San Diego to catch up on family, property, etc.  I was just turning fourteen at the time.  Bobby took me for a ride in his 1955 Ford.  Not your ordinary Ford, it had a 430 cubic inch Lincoln engine in it, a Carter four barrel, dual exhausts, hunkered down in the front, and it was a two door hard top.  It was ba-a-ad!   Then he asked me if I wanted to drive it. Now I had never driven anything besides a pedal car and bicycle. He coached me through getting the clutch engaged, while burning off about 5000 miles of rubber. From that point on I was hooked, a real car junky.

In Whidbey Island, Washington, there was a small two stall garage at the top of the hill leaving the Navy’s Wherry Housing. I stopped in there from time to time and asked the old fellow, Al Haukenson (doubt if I have that name spelled right,)   if he needed any help. He was a little gruff, and I was a little shy, but I kept showing up. Finally one day he stopped to talk to me.  “Kid, I would love to give you a job, but first, I would have to teach you everything, which takes time. Then I would have to check everything you do. Then I would have to do all the d___ paperwork the government wants, which means it just is not cost effective. I can hire a sailor with some mechanical training and get some stuff done knowing he already knows something about cars, then it almost becomes cost effective.” I was disappointed but could not fight his logic. I read about cars when I had enough money to by Hot Rod magazine, but did not really understand a lot about how things worked.  Then my mother got the family Buick tuned up at the Market Town Garage, and she told Al she had a son that would probably work for free just to learn a few things. He said “send him up.”

I walked up there after school, and said “Hi. My mom said you might let me work here.”

He looked at me and laughed. “Oh, its you! Well, you might as well learn the dirty work first, take this broom and clean up the stall so we can put the next car in here.”  Al tuned up model T’s for the North Dakota Highway Patrol. He knew more little tricks for making cars go better and faster, and most of them did not cost money. He had a number of old clunkers he used for “parts cars.” In Al’s terms, a parts car was not for parts, but used to go get parts from down town Oak Harbor.      I had just taken driver’s training in a “three on the tree” 1959 Chevrolet so knew everything there was to know about driving.  Plus I had a learner’s permit. Dad told me if I paid the extra insurance he would let me drive the family car, but we only had one so I could see that “driving the family car” meant I might get to drive the family somewhere,  which was not what I had in mind. Al just gave me the keys and said “go get the parts, I just called them in.”  He let me drive everything from a five speed hay truck to a Jaguar XK-140. There was one old Packard with a straight eight that would easily do a hundred miles an hour. That probably was not the smartest thing to be doing when the guy brought it in for a brake job.  The old Studebaker business coupe which just had one bench seat in it was my learning vehicle. I did an engine overhaul, brakes, anything that Al could think up. I learned fast and was getting pretty good. There were a lot of impressionable adventures there for a fifteen year old.

Then Dad got orders to California. I really wanted to stay. Al would give me five bucks a week out of his pocket, and I could buy every car magazine on the stand with that kind of money!  I would come home with grease up to my elbows every night and spend twenty minutes getting cleaned up before dinner. I was in hog heaven. But no, my parents did not want to leave me behind. I told Al, and we both cried. He told me he had a car lined up for me, an old Nash that some elderly lady had. Then I was really heart broken!  But now I not only had that wide eyed kid worship of cars, I knew more than almost anyone my age about how to work on them. I was somebody!

Basically I always had a few cars around if I had a place to put them. I bought the dealership’s V4 demonstrator from the Saab dealer in Pensacola, Florida, after I was commissioned. There were those who bought Corvettes. I liked beer too much to spend every cent I had on a car. I really like the BMW 2000 they had on the lot, but that is another whole story. Now I have owned 32 Saabs, and lament that they got bought by General Motors and ended my string of purchases.  For about fifteen years I had a small side business, Swedish Racing Development, that paid for my car fetishes, autocross fun, and got my own parts for wholesale. And I actually made a little money at it.

I had lusted after road racing, and then off road rallying, which is really racing through the woods in the middle of the night in the snow on forest trails. But as a young father and military man, even with the side business, I could not afford that level of expenditure. But parking lot racing was there, looked like a kick and I tried it a couple of times. I got hooked, but was worried about tearing up the family car, so bought back an old Saab 96 sedan from a guy I had sold it to that had blown the engine up, and commence to build a “race car.” I think the grand total I had in that car was about $800, which included a new engine.  We would win a class from time to time. My old slot racing buddy, Steve Spratt, for whom  our first born was named, helped me with  it and he and I would take it various places and had a lot of fun with it. Over the years I got more serious about it, and when I was in the midwest, in Omaha, Nebraska, I constructed a purpose built car that took me about a year.  It was a work in progress. I had an engine in mind, but the machining that was necessary was expensive and I had to wheel and deal to get the killer engine built as well as afford the parts for it. In the meantime I had built up the chassis and was running it in local events. One of my car buddies helped me paint it a Ford Grabber Blue. It was pretty! With yellow rims. Under the hood, I had painted everything, but paint was not high on my list of expenditures so when you opened the hood it was obvious that I used whatever was on sale. It looked like a package of Tutti Fruitti.  With a stock engine and just some carburetor, exhaust and timing work, I managed to get third in the divisionals, which  qualified me for the nationals.  I got the killer engine back from the machine shop, installed it, ran it up and down the street a few times, put it on the trailer behind the old Winnebago I bought, put my young son in the rack over the front seat and headed for Texas. Of course I expected big things, but due to the rules, I had to run in a modified class. This was a compromise. I could not find decent or affordable tires to run on fifteen inch rims which were the size I needed to run for the lower, less modified classes. So I built thirteen inch rims and ran Formula Ford takeoffs from qualifying, which were perfect for autocross. But that bumped me up into a new division, modified. It also allowed me to do almost anything to the car since it was basically a “run what you brung” class with just engine size limits. I was competing with Formula Ford Chassis with oversized engines, Corvair powered dune buggies, you name it.

The first day of competition it was obvious I had a serious problem with my new engine. I had stuffed the biggest carburetor on there I thought it could handle (and I got it cheap from a neighbor.)  But it didn’t handle it. It bogged out of every corner and I was losing seconds in a class where hundredths counted. After my runs were done for the day I worked all afternoon and half the night, and broke a few rules running around the paddock trying to get that carb to work. I finally got a pretty good solution, got a few hours sleep, and got in line again. The car ran famously, handled beautifully, if looking like a dog passing a fire hydrant, and got some great times. Unfortunately, one’s finish was based on the addition of the two days times. I finished eighth in the nation, pretty credible considering some of my competition had more money in their fuel injection than I did in my whole car.  The unusual stance of a Saab 96, careening around on three wheels most of the time, earned it a slot on the cover pictures for that year’s chronicle of events.

After retiring from the Navy, I still had that car, but thought it would not be competitive in California. While running a Saab 99 Turbo in showroom stock, I built up a Saab Sonnet and put all that fine running gear from the sedan to use. It was about that time that I bought my first civilian aircraft.

That was when I realized that although I was making pretty good money relative to my Navy salary, I really could not afford that many toys.  (A Black Day indeed!)  And I could not get a good price for the kids. So I wrote one of my Nebraska friends, Kevin Morrissey, who raced the sedan with me in the Midwest, and told him the Sonnet was a labor of love, and I did not want to sell it for parts. He took the hint and drove all the way to California in his Dodge Ram, which I summarily filled to overflowing with parts and put the race car on the trailer and sent it off to Nebraska with him.  I felt like some part of me was being extracted from my gizzard as it disappeared from the neighborhood. A piece of identity that had been with me for forty years. Okay, I guess now I am an airplane guy. ;o(