(Trying my hand at something different tonight.)<\/p>\n
No, he\u2019s not the kind of car guy that rebuilds a hot rod with his buddies in his garage. \u00a0He\u2019s more of a suburban middle-class kind of car guy. <\/p>\n
My dad grew up on a farm outside of Denver \u2014 more of a hobby farm, with livestock. \u00a0His 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. \u00a0They raised chickens, mostly, and my dad (who\u2019s 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\u2019ll nest in some hidden spot and the eggs\u2019 go bad. \u00a0Last 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. \u00a0It turned out that this was the neighbor\u2019s dog, which my dad shot after the dog got into their henhouse and killed all the hens, putting a major dent in the family\u2019s finances because of the loss of the egg money \u2014 the neighbor was angry enough to threaten to kill my dad, though he survived the incident.<\/p>\n
They weren\u2019t particularly well off growing up in the 40s. \u00a0My 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 \u2014 since he was 6 when the war ended). \u00a0And the house was small. \u00a0One 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. <\/p>\n
Later on, his family built a new house \u2014 yes, I mean literally that they built the house, out of cinder block, not that they engaged a builder to build it for them. \u00a0And later still they sold the land profitably enough that my grandparents had a pretty comfortable retirement. \u00a0But in the meantime, dad gained a lot of skills working with his hands.<\/p>\n
One of his stories was also to recount the cars he bought as a teenager, old cars in poor condition that he repaired. \u00a0And his knowledge paid off: \u00a0he 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. <\/p>\n
Every year, the fifth graders at the kids\u2019 school have the assignment to interview a veteran. \u00a0I\u2019m sure this is envisioned as a way to learn about the great sacrifices they made and the hardships they endured. \u00a0Instead, my dad said, \u201cI had a great time in the army\u201d \u2014 and, let\u2019s 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. \u00a0For many years, he said that he wouldn\u2019t want to go back because he has such great memories that he wouldn\u2019t 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 \u201cK-town\u201d and visited the base. <\/p>\n
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. \u00a0And we grew up in the suburbs, in a fairly nondescript colonial in a nondescript subdivision. <\/p>\n
But my dad \u2014 and cars: \u00a0he acquired a corvette, a 1966 stingray, somewhere along the way, used. \u00a0I don\u2019t remember exactly when, but this was in the days before safety was so paramount; we kids would ride in the \u201cback\u201d of the corvette, a sort of platform behind the seats that doesn\u2019t exist any longer. \u00a0My dad even gave me stick-shift driving lessons, once when I was home from college, though we didn\u2019t make it out of the subdivision. \u00a0At some later point, he stopped driving it and ultimately sold it \u2014 I don\u2019t know if it needed repairs, or if he just couldn\u2019t get in and out of it any longer.<\/p>\n
And then we kids were old enough to have our own cars \u2014 and dad picked them out for us from the classifieds, tested them out, did the repairs. After I totalled the \u201978 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\u2019t take too much to total it, OK? \u00a0And no one was hurt, besides, and Michigan has no-fault insurance), he bought an \u201980 Malibu, and then another \u201978 and my sister and I basically drove matching Malibus for a while \u2014 but they were aging, and, even though he did a lot of work on them, including rebuilding the engine, they didn\u2019t last that long, so, when, in my sophomore year of college, I was allowed to have a car on campus, he found an \u201983 Pontiac Phoenix for me, and again rebuilt the engine when it turned out to have problems.<\/p>\n
And at around this point \u2014 I suppose this is what you do when you become an empty nester \u2014 he started taking the ASE certification exams, just to validate his skills in car repair. \u00a0But by then I\u2019d moved away from home, and my dad was no longer my on-call mechanic. \u00a0And eventually dad was no longer able to do the repair work on his own car, either.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the clincher, how you know that someone is a true car guy:<\/p>\n
I had mentioned in an earlier post that dad had a fall and hit his head. \u00a0He\u2019s now in a rehab facility, where three different therapists work with him to help him regain physical strength and mental focus. \u00a0And mom described a test the speech therapist gave him the other day, naming objects in various categories. \u00a0Fruits? \u00a0He was stuck after apples. \u00a0Vegetables? \u00a0Didn\u2019t make much headway there either. \u00a0Types of transportation? \u00a0Dad came up with \u201ccow\u201d and then started talking about riding a cow as a child. \u00a0It was only after she asked him to name types of cars that he was able to list one after the next.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s my story for the day. \u00a0What are your stories?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Trying my hand at something different tonight.) No, he\u2019s not the kind of car guy that rebuilds a hot rod with his buddies in his garage. \u00a0He\u2019s more of a suburban middle-class kind of car guy. My dad grew up on a farm outside of Denver \u2014 more of a hobby farm, with livestock. \u00a0His […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n