(Slide 1) Dad loved cars. If Mother would have let him—and that’s a key statement right there—he would have had a new one every two years. In my memory, there was the Chevrolet. It looked something like this (Slide 2) . . . in fact, I think this might be the actual car. It’s a 1954 Bel Air, if memory serves. Then he bought the 1960 Volkswagen Beetle (Slide 3) so that Mom had her own car. In 1962 he traded in the Chevy for a beautiful blue Buick LeSabre convertible. I couldn’t find an exact match, but (Slide 4) this is a 1963, and looks pretty close.
On Sunday afternoons, if the weather was nice, Dad would suddenly say, “Let’s go for a drive.” For you of a certain age, I’m sure you’ve heard of the “Sunday Drive.” Well, we used to do that. Mom would tie a scarf on my head so the wind wouldn’t blow my hair into a snarly mess, she would don her scarf as well, Dad would put the top down, and off we’d go. They liked to look at new construction houses, so my memory of these drives seems to include doing that. Then Dad would start driving around, taking roads through other neighborhoods and subdivisions near our home up on Lake Michigan, and I would get antsy and start asking, “Where are we going? What are we doing?” Dad always said the same thing, “You’ll see.” We’d wind our way here and there, but always, always, ended up in the same place. At the Dairy Queen. (Slide 5) Because that’s something else Dad loved. Ice Cream.
He traded in the LeSabre for a 1966 two-door Buick Electra 225 hard top. (Slides 6 & 7), but was unhappy with the two-door, so traded it in for a 1968 four-door Buick Electra 225 (Slide 8). Then Mom got a new car. In 1970 Dad traded her Volkswagen in for a 1968 Camaro (Slide 9). He didn’t like old cars because he didn’t like to work on them, and he didn’t like paying to have them worked on, so he preferred to trade them in. Mom always bemoaned the loss of her Volkswagen, and mentioned this many many times over the years. The Camaro eventually became the car I drove, but that’s a few years off at this point in the story.
Mom put her foot down about a trading again in 1970, so Dad waited until 1972 to get his Oldsmobile 98. (Slide 10). He loved to tell the same story over and over about this car. It was pretty fancy, and one of the features was that there was a clock both in the front seat, and mounted on the back of the front seats for passengers to see in the back seat. John King, Dad’s boss at Clark Equipment at the time, and his wife Annabelle, were riding with Mom and Dad to some event. Mr. King, a quipster of the first degree, had been in the car for just a few minutes when he noted aloud, “Len, this car is so big, there’s a three-minute time difference between the front seat and the back seat.” Dad loved Mr. King’s humor, and this joke just cracked Dad up time and time again.
Dad’s real dream was to own a Cadillac, but I think that at this point, it was still a bit too pricey even for him. He never financed a car. Ever. He reasoned that a car was not an investment, it was a commodity. To finance a car that then immediately depreciated upon driving it off the lot, was a waste of good money. So he’d save up and buy his cars outright. And later, when credit card companies started offering incentives that paid you back, or gave you points for charges, he would buy a car on his GM credit card, pay it immediately off, but then reap the benefits of all those points he’d earned as a result. Smart.
The Cadillac dream was realized shortly after our move to Florida in 1974. I believe he bought it used, but I also believe it was less than a year old. It was either a 1974 or 1975 two-door Coup Deville. (Slide 11) But, the color was beautiful—a gorgeous shade of blue with a hint of metallic in the paint. This was Mom’s car, and the Camaro got passed to me at that point. Dad would cringe at the idea of Mom using her beautiful Cadillac to haul mulch or fertilizer, or whatever else she needed for taking care of her roses and orchids, and various other yard and gardening projects. “Jeez, Jan,” he would decry, “You treat that car like it’s a pick-up truck.”
After this point, my memory gets a bit fuzzy because I was off to college, and then got married and moved away. But I do know that, though they kept the Cadillac for a long while, they became van drivers. They both liked the space that was afforded by one, the amount of stuff you could haul around, and the party aspect in getting up to 7 in the vehicle for going to a Bucs game, or once grandchildren started arriving, packing everyone in together to go somewhere.
They started with a purchase of the Miller company van (Slide 12) that . . . seat belts? Who needs seat belts? Was a party van with banquette seating, a table with captain’s chairs for playing cards, and captain’s chairs at the helm. I use the word helm on purpose because driving the thing was akin to navigating around on a ship. The thing was huge!
After Dad retired in 1995, they decided they really didn’t need two cars. To go to the club to golf, Dad drove the cart (Slide 13) just a mile to the course, and they otherwise did everything together, or coordinated the use of one car.
When I asked one time why they didn’t get a Mercedes, or after seeing Mom swoon over a Jaguar (Slide 14), asked her why didn’t just get one, she told me that Dad would never own a foreign made car. He’d been in the truck trailer manufacturing business, believed in American manufacturing, and it would be impossible for him to own something other than American made. By this time, a lot of foreign cars were being manufactured in the U.S., but there was never any use in arguing with Mom. The other pet peeve she had about cars, was the color red. Though her Volkswagen had been red, she seemed to dismiss that as counting, she was absolutely set against owning a red car. Dad persisted in wanting one, but she consistently vetoed that notion. So, after Mom died, Dad was considering upgrading his van. His first declaration was that it was going to be red. He then set about doing some research. He started with G.M. products, but wasn’t happy with options, prices, etc. He then, to my surprise, started looking at . . . foreign cars! Hondas and Toyotas. And what he decided was that he was going to start leasing his cars. That way, he’d, at the end of a lease, just upgrade to a new model, and keep that going in perpetuity.
His last car was a (Slide 15) 2011 Honda Odyssey in blue.
Honda’s red was more of a maroon, and that was definitely not what he’d had in mind. He had wanted fire engine red, couldn’t get it, so he settled on the blue.
He was just six months into this lease when he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Honda was great in buying back the lease in late August when I finally faced the fact that Dad would never be driving the car again. Of course, they were getting the better part of the deal because Dad had put money down upfront, the vehicle was less than a year old, and demand for them was high. But, I was happy to be out of the lease with no further penalties or obligations.
Toward the end of his life, after he was already at Heritage Park, his caregiver, Tammy, told me that they’d brought an auto show (Slide 16) to the parking lot at Heritage. She took Dad out to see the cars, and said he then reminisced about all kinds of old cars. From what she told me, it sounded like he was talking about his father’s cars, maybe even his grandfather’s cars. I knew that cars had been important to Grandpa Anderson and to my great grandpa Stricker, too, so this didn’t surprise me. (Slide 17) I’m just glad that Dad got so much enjoyment out of the cars he’d owned throughout his lifetime.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2012
