<VV> Steve Thompson's column from an old Autoweek - Very Corvair related

[Sethracer at aol.com]

>From Autoweek.com - From the May 1 issue. Funny read.
 
At about the time Lyndon Johnson was photographed holding his hound by the  
ears and reneging on his promise not to send American boys to fight Asian wars, 
 I was driving a '63 Corvair Monza Spyder _convertible_ 
(http://www.autoweek.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080513/FREE/547876201/1053/FREE#) . White 
body, white power top,  lipstick-red interior with boy-racer gauges in aluminum 
dash, four-on-the-floor,  turbocharger. Babe-magnet-wise, its only allure in an 
era when convertibles were  everywhere was, well, nothing. But my girlfriend 
liked it and seemed amused by  my obsession with its mechanical details. 

My girlfriend's father wasn't  as amused when, in a moment of hormone-fueled 
stupidity, I got it into boost on  the way out of the cul-de-sac where they 
lived and, while turning onto the  street, managed to spin the car in a perfect 
180. With the engine dead and acrid  tire smoke in the air, I glanced over at 
her father as he shook his head,  grimaced and closed the front door to their 
house. 

That Corvair suffered  other indignities in my hands, but, luckily for me, 
space limits listing them.  Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed killed the market 
for the car, so it  stayed in the family when I went off to college, 
eventually swallowing a valve  up in the Sierras while my father was driving it. It was 
dispatched out of  memory when I signed up to serve in uniform, and I never 
found out what happened  to it. 

In the intervening centuries between then and now, I didn't think  much about 
the Corvair, until recently, when an online ad by a nearby  fantasy-car store 
caught my eye. They had a '63 like mine, red, restored, on  sale for about 17 
grand. I had to go look at it. Soon I was standing next to it  with my friend 
and longtime colleague Dan Cozzi, engineer-writer. We stared at  it.

"Dangerous car," he muttered. 

Maybe so. And that's precisely  why it was so valuable to me. My father used 
it as a rolling schoolroom to teach  me what not to do and how not to do it, 
and I knew, every second in the driver's  seat, that it would bite back if I 
made a mistake. Today our cars are far less  "dangerous." Too bad the same is 
not true of today's drivers. Surely, there is  no connection there. Surely . . .
 
 
Probably copyrighted - So don't place it on a web  site!




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