My dad is a car guy

Last updated on: May 30, 2014 at 11:27 pm by Jane the Actuary

My dad is a car guy 2014-05-30T23:27:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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(Trying my hand at something different tonight.)

No, he’s not the kind of car guy that rebuilds a hot rod with his buddies in his garage. He’s more of a suburban middle-class kind of car guy.

My dad grew up on a farm outside of Denver — more of a hobby farm, with livestock. His parents grew up on farms in Nebraska but came to Denver during the depression, and his dad worked at the Gates Rubber Company, and they saved up enough money to be able to afford to buy some land. They raised chickens, mostly, and my dad (who’s known for telling the same stories over and over again) has told us multiple times the problem with cage-free chickens is that then they’ll nest in some hidden spot and the eggs’ go bad. Last Thanksgiving, looking at an old photo album, we asked about the picture of him as a preteen standing next to a dead dog, expecting to hear a story about the beloved family pet. It turned out that this was the neighbor’s dog, which my dad shot after the dog got into their henhouse and killed all the hens, putting a major dent in the family’s finances because of the loss of the egg money — the neighbor was angry enough to threaten to kill my dad, though he survived the incident.

They weren’t particularly well off growing up in the 40s. My dad tells the story of being sent to the store, losing the ration book and causing much unhappiness (which of course is an indicator of how children were given responsibility and independence at a much younger age than now — since he was 6 when the war ended). And the house was small. One of early memories is of being sick as a child, which merited the privilege of sleeping in the heated living room rather than the unheated bedroom, and watching the Christmas lights and worrying that the broken light bulb would cause a fire.

Later on, his family built a new house — yes, I mean literally that they built the house, out of cinder block, not that they engaged a builder to build it for them. And later still they sold the land profitably enough that my grandparents had a pretty comfortable retirement. But in the meantime, dad gained a lot of skills working with his hands.

One of his stories was also to recount the cars he bought as a teenager, old cars in poor condition that he repaired. And his knowledge paid off: he joined ROTC in college, was commissioned as a second lieutenant, was sent to Germany (post-Korea and pre-Vietnam), and at the age of 24 (he took five years to complete his engineering program and spent another year stateside before being shipped overseas), he was in charge of a vehicle repair facility, supervising soldiers and German civilians and competent enough at auto repair to evaluate their repairs.

Every year, the fifth graders at the kids’ school have the assignment to interview a veteran. I’m sure this is envisioned as a way to learn about the great sacrifices they made and the hardships they endured. Instead, my dad said, “I had a great time in the army” — and, let’s face it, a young, handsome American officer with plenty of money to burn travelling around the country when the economy, while improved, was still weak enough that living, and travelling, costs were low. For many years, he said that he wouldn’t want to go back because he has such great memories that he wouldn’t want them to be tainted by the real-world changes in Germany, but when my family had our own stay in Germany, he and mom came to visit and did go back to “K-town” and visited the base.

So he came back to the U.S., joined his army buddy in St. Louis, got a job as a foreman at the GM shell plant, met my mom, a company nurse at the factory, and after a couple years, after my sister made her appearance and just before I was born, was transferred to the Detroit area and the Tech Center, where he spent the next 35 years. And we grew up in the suburbs, in a fairly nondescript colonial in a nondescript subdivision.

But my dad — and cars: he acquired a corvette, a 1966 stingray, somewhere along the way, used. I don’t remember exactly when, but this was in the days before safety was so paramount; we kids would ride in the “back” of the corvette, a sort of platform behind the seats that doesn’t exist any longer. My dad even gave me stick-shift driving lessons, once when I was home from college, though we didn’t make it out of the subdivision. At some later point, he stopped driving it and ultimately sold it — I don’t know if it needed repairs, or if he just couldn’t get in and out of it any longer.

And then we kids were old enough to have our own cars — and dad picked them out for us from the classifieds, tested them out, did the repairs. After I totalled the ’78 Malibu that was a hand-me-down from my mother headed into senior year of high school in 1986 (the car was old enough that it didn’t take too much to total it, OK? And no one was hurt, besides, and Michigan has no-fault insurance), he bought an ’80 Malibu, and then another ’78 and my sister and I basically drove matching Malibus for a while — but they were aging, and, even though he did a lot of work on them, including rebuilding the engine, they didn’t last that long, so, when, in my sophomore year of college, I was allowed to have a car on campus, he found an ’83 Pontiac Phoenix for me, and again rebuilt the engine when it turned out to have problems.

And at around this point — I suppose this is what you do when you become an empty nester — he started taking the ASE certification exams, just to validate his skills in car repair. But by then I’d moved away from home, and my dad was no longer my on-call mechanic. And eventually dad was no longer able to do the repair work on his own car, either.

But here’s the clincher, how you know that someone is a true car guy:

I had mentioned in an earlier post that dad had a fall and hit his head. He’s now in a rehab facility, where three different therapists work with him to help him regain physical strength and mental focus. And mom described a test the speech therapist gave him the other day, naming objects in various categories. Fruits? He was stuck after apples. Vegetables? Didn’t make much headway there either. Types of transportation? Dad came up with “cow” and then started talking about riding a cow as a child. It was only after she asked him to name types of cars that he was able to list one after the next.

So that’s my story for the day. What are your stories?

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