My road to Beetlemania began in 1957 in my small hometown of Redding, CA. That’s when the VW Beetle caught America’s attention, especially mine. That’s also the fateful year my dad traded in my mom’s favorite car ever, a beautiful 2-tone, flesh and white, 1956 Ford hardtop with a high-powered V8 engine, for a new VW Beetle with a soft-top sunroof. She never forgave him for that.
My First Beetle
I loved that little car. So, naturally, I looked forward to owning one of my own someday. I finally got it a decade later, in my senior year in high school. It was 1966 and somehow I managed to talk my parents into trading the family car, a 1962 Chevy Impala, in on two used Beetles, one for me and one for them.
The one I got was a beauty, at least in my mind: a 1956 model, white, with 144,000 miles on it. I didn’t care how old or well-used it was.
And I also didn’t care how gutless it turned out to be. Its tiny 4-cylinder engine whose size was measured as ca. 1,000 cubic centimeters, whatever they were. It generated about 31 horsepower and went zero to 60 in a shade under 14 minutes. For comparison, about that time Suzuki motorcycles came out with the X-6 Hustler, which had 34 horsepower and could do a wheelie through all six gears. (Although I could get “rubber” in all 4 gears of my Beetle only if I was on a layer of road ice.)
I painted the hubcaps fluorescent orange. And I bypassed the main muffler baffles when I took out the twin tailpipes so everyone could hear the engine really rumble when I drove by. So cool, eh?
I even had it repainted at Earl Scheib’s for only $29.95. That was cheap even then. I realized just how cheap the first time I went to wash it and discovered that the paint came off in big patches just from spraying it with a hose.
Starting the Upgrades
That Beetle got me through my first two years of college, after which I made a considerable upgrade to a 1960 model, increasing all the way up to 1100 cc’s. A short couple of years later I jumped up even more, to a 1965 model, going way up to 1300 cc’s. It was more fitting for my newly exalted status as a first-year graduate student.
In my second year of graduate school I even bought a second Beetle. I was a two-Beetle family! Beetle Nirvana! It was a doozy, too. It was a pretty beat up 1963 model, had no engine cover, and had snow tires in the back, which lifted up the back end just enough to give it a stylish raked look. It was multicolored, too. Mostly oxidized red with one blue fender and a few big patches of primer paint showing here and there.
I paid $200 for it, kept it for about a year, and sold it for $225. Boy could those cars hold their value! Who knew that buying and reselling used Beetles could be an investment strategy?
Learning Auto Mechanics on the Fly
Meanwhile my 1965 blew its engine (i.e., broke a cylinder rod) during Spring Break, so my buddy Scott Brown and I got a Chilton’s manual on how to remove, disassemble, repair, and reassemble a VW engine. Hey, we were in college so we thought we were smart enough to figure out how to fix it on our own. We did have to rent a set of metric tools, though – back then wasn’t the U.S. going to adopt the metric system any day now? – and it took us only six days to do what would have taken a trained VW mechanic about 37 minutes.
Peak Beetlemania
That baby ran for another 33,000 miles before I traded up yet again. (That’s when I found out from the car dealer mechanic what a no-no it is to replace only one cylinder, rod, piston, and set of rings at a time. Who knew?)
Nevertheless, I finally reached the pinnacle of my personal Beetlemania. The acme of VW ownership. The piez de resistance of German engineering. I traded in that old self-repaired Beetle for my first brand new car ever. It was a 1972 bright orange SuperBeetle! Okay, it wasn’t quite new. It was a demo with about 500 miles on it, which brought the price down to a whopping $2,160 out the door.
Smokin’ deal!
Why orange? I was about to head to the University of Texas for another 4 years of graduate school, and I planned to become a dyed-in-the-wool Longhorn fan. I was ready to start bleeding orange, since the primary school color is burnt orange.
I drove that thing to school for four years. I drove it all over Texas and the southwestern U.S. on plant-collecting field trips, including a real scorcher one year to the bottom of Death Valley (in May!). And I drove it home for the holidays in northern California every year.
The Sad End
One dark and gloomy night I was doing some late night lab work to finish my dissertation research, when I got a call from the campus police. They wanted me to come down to the street outside the building where I had parked for the night. Someone had driven screaming around the corner near where I had parked, lost control of their car, and smashed full force into my poor little SuperBeetle.
As good as that car was, I always knew Beetles were constructed out of not much more than thick aluminum foil. It was totaled. It turned out to be my fifth and final VW Beetle. My personal Beetlemania had come to a sudden, sad end.
Moving Up
Why not get another one? It took five Beetles to get me through my college years. I was going to be a professor, and I felt it important to dispense with my cars of college and step up a notch in class and professionalism. So I really upped my standards and bought my first Volkswagen Rabbit.
That’s another story.
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