COMMENTARY

By

     Bob Ruckman  

5-06-2006

    April 1983, I purchased my 1968 Chevrolet Bel Air from the estate of its deceased 80-year-old original owner.  It had 23,789 miles on the odometer, and I intended to keep it, knowing that if I restored it and maintained it well, it would one day become a low-mileage antique.  But I was commuting from Arlington to Rockville to work, so I was delighted to get a phone call from my oldest daughter, Susan, that autumn, to the effect that her grandfather, my ex-wife’s father, wanted to sell his ’72 Dodge.  A deal with a neighbor to sell it for $1200 had fallen through, so he would take $1000 if sold to a member of the family.  I phoned him and bought it sight unseen, as I knew his reputation for keeping his cars religiously maintained at the local dealership where he had purchased it new.  It was like new, and had only 63,000 miles on it.

     Since I had already restored the older Chevy, I began commuting in it just one day a week, and the Dodge the other four, thus piling up many more miles on the latter, until my retirement in 1986.  As planned, the Chevy became an antique with less than 50,000 miles on it, but the Dodge had approached 100,000.  Both cars had proven to be completely reliable.

     In 1989, I heard of a local MOPAR meet in Mount Vernon, so I entered the Dodge, still only seventeen years old.  My previous (1954-67) AACA experience had taught me that an old car wasn’t eligible to be shown at a meet until it was twenty years old, but the meet organizer told me that I should begin showing my cars, since meets now allowed newer cars.

      Fast forward to the present, when the Dodge has 115,000 miles on it, but its “bulletproof” 318 engine still uses no oil, I am no longer healthy enough to drive to car shows, so the Dodge just sits under its cover.  I put only 80 miles on it in 2005.

     Tonight I received a very nice phone call from a gentleman in Bridgeport, WV, who had just sold his ’22 Ford and his ’42 Chevy, and had no more old cars, so he offered to buy my Dodge, and promised to

take very good care of it.

     The truly amazing part of this story is that my ex-father-in-law lived in Shinnston, WV, just the next town over from Bridgeport.  So my Dodge will be going home again!  Is this a human-interest story or WHAT?

     Its buyer is Bobfan Wilber McQueen, who is surviving even more illnesses than I have.  My ex-wife lives in Shinnston.  I’m letting her know that, if she thinks she sees her late father’s car driving around her neighborhood, she isn’t “seeing things”.

5-13-2006 

     This is truly an amazing story.  As I reported in my column of 5/6/’06, a gentleman named Wilber McQueen offered  to drive from Bridgeport, WV,  to purchase my 1972 Dodge Polara    4-door hardtop.  Yesterday, he and a mechanic friend left home at six a.m., thinking that the trip to my apartment in Arlington, VA, would take about four hours and ten minutes.  So Gail and I put some homemade vegetable-beef soup on the stove so that we could feed them some lunch assuming that they would arrive around 11:15.

     They arrived around three p.m., after encountering unbelievable traffic on the way.  After about three hours of labor, pulling my ‘72 Dodge onto a trailer with a hand-cranked “come-a-long”, they got underway around six p.m. on Friday.

     Today, Wilber phoned me to say that they got home at four o’clock this morning.  That’s twenty-two straight hours on the road!  His loving wife, Kaye, had stayed up all night, worrying about him.

     It was the flimsiest trailer for hauling a 5580-pound dinosaur of a car (18’5” long), and they stopped en route to move the Dodge forward on the trailer on the return trip, as it fish-tailed at any speed above 45 mph.  (That must have been a lot of fun.)

     In any case, they did make it, and discovered that the reason it could be jump-started and the engine would run, but when put into gear the engine would stall, was that the carburetor was all gummed up, because the car hadn’t been driven enough the past year or so.  After “boiling out” the carburetor, Wilber drove it ten miles and said that it ran fine.  So I trust   that he and Kaye will enjoy entering it in a few meets this year.  I hope so.

       Actually, my Lincoln had also suffered the same fate – hardly been driven.  I just tallied up its past year’s “Motor Record  Book” (I’ve owned it for twelve years), and it showed that I drove it only 123.8  miles, put a total of 9.4 gallons of gasoline in it, at 13.2 mpg, and its total expenditure of $24.00 (all for gasoline) came to 19.4 cents per mile.   (I do these calculations each year for all my cars.)  Now 29 years old, its odometer reads only 77,885.7 miles, which comes to only 2685.7 miles per year.  No wonder that my old cars last forever!

      I went out today and started and ran my 1968 Chevy Bel Air, after uncovering it.  It has sat all winter, but is still reliable!  I’ve owned it since 1983, and it always took me there, to old-car shows, and brought me back.  “They don’t build ‘em like that anymore.”