In 1984 my mother got her law degree and set out to have a go at being a lawyer. With both parents downtown at work every day—dad’s own law degree dated back to 1966 or so—someone would have to look after my sister (11) and me (eight). Somehow or other, Laurie was found and hired, along with her cars.
Laurie was about 25 and drove what she could afford. When she first signed on to take care of us two overprivileged, mouthy kids, she had a 1963 Volvo P220—an Amazon wagon, that is. The body was straight, intact, unrusty, and (re-probably-re)painted a vivid sky blue. The grilles and other trim parts were missing, and I think I recall the red rear reflectors and their plinths hadn’t been reinstalled after the repaint. The Volvo looked, sounded, smelt, acted, and was radically different to any car I’d previously experienced, and I fell fast and hard in love with it. The differences between it and my folks’ ’78 Caprice and a ’77 Cutlass and their former ’70 Dart pretty much meant I got to discover “car” all over again.
For starters, its starter was very quiet. I now know the quietness was by design; the Bosch direct-drive starters Volvo used through the mid-late ’80s weren’t very loud. And unlike my folks’ cars with V8 engines and automatic transmissions, the Volvo had a manual transmission that sang harmony with the 4-cylinder engine, and a backangled shift stick that looked about three feet long. There was a cool chrome horn ring, too.
There were these neat front 3-point seatbelts that fastened by attaching a big chromed-metal clasp to a beefy metal hoop on the floor. There was a snazzy ribbon speedometer. The radio was wayyyyyyy over on the passenger side, and it always only ever seemed to play Huey Louis’ “If This Is It” and Jefferson Starship’s “Sarah”, mostly because that’s what KMJI (Magic one hundred point three!) always only ever seemed to broadcast. Wing windows! I hadn’t seen them since the Dart.
The speedometer worked; sister and I saw it touch 60 one day on the interstate and tattled to our parents about it because 60 is more than 55 (yishk…!) but the rest of the gauges didn’t. The original upholstery and foam were torn up under fuzzy seatcovers. Chunks of missing foam showed through the padded dashboard’s cracks.
Laurie called the car Jackson, and it soldiered along as well as it could. But no amount of “Come on, Jackson, I know you can do it!” cajoling would persuade it to start one night when it was time for her to go home. Plenty of cranking—slowly, with a worn starter fed through iffy cables by a marginal battery starved by a feeble generator—but no vroom. Not even so much as a putt.
I had very recently become interested in engines, starting with the one on my folks’ Craftsman lawnmower, which I had persuaded my dad to take in for its first tune-up, some five or six years after it was built. It had come back running much better, and one visible change had been the new air filter.
I just barely didn’t need tiptoes to see the Volvo’s twin SU carburetors; their pancake-shaped air filters were crusty like concrete—the same way the old one on dad’s lawnmower had been before the tune-up. No way could I reach to do anything about it myself; I told my decidedly unmechanical father he should remove them. He was “reluctant to fool around with parts of the engine”, he said, but I was persistent and Laurie really did have to get home, so eventually he compromised by getting the wrenches (five cheap and nasty stamped-steel end wrenches held stacked by a red spring-steel clip) and taking off just one of the air filters. The longsuffering B18 engine chugged to life at the key’s turn.
I don’t guess that air filter was ever reinstalled or replaced, and it’s a good bet the carburetor dashpots were bone-dry empty of oil, the points were badly burnt, the plugs worn and dirty. The radiator leaked. That neato chrome ring on the steering wheel was just for looks; the horn didn’t work. The brakes squeaked. The clutch chattered enough to shake the whole car. The rear axle howled. There was a hole near the top of the gas tank, and if it was quite full or the car was at the right (wrong) angle, well…good job Laurie wasn’t smoking. There was a panel of three Suntune gauges slung under the dashboard; engine temperature was one of them. I remember because the slightest uphill would cause it to climb fast enough to watch. “Ooh, lookit, it’s gonna get to 220!” I said one day near the top of a not-very-steep three blocks. Laurie wasn’t as amused: “Stop it! You don’t know what’ll happen if it hits 220! Maybe the engine blows up!” The car was a tired old hoss, always near the ragged edge of at least one kind of breakdown. With a job that centred round driving, I’m sure car failure was on a long list of fears constantly hanging above Laurie’s head.
The Oldvo managed to get the job done most of the time, and I thought it was the neatest car in the whole wide world. It had the first set of Cibie H4 headlamps I ever saw, one of which got replaced after a burnout by a sealed beam, because who knew any better? Those Cibie lights had probably been installed at least two owners previously.
Laurie lived 12 miles away from us, on a steep street named Xavier. One morning she started the Volvo, backed out, went to put the car in First, and the brake pedal hit the floor. The car carried on reversing until stopped by whatever she hit, losing a taillight and gaining some dents. She and her husband also had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle, and she started driving that while they saved up to do something about the Volvo.
The Beetle’s bright yellow paint was a bit dull and chalky, and it had some nose rust, but the car was reasonably clean and straight. This was the first VW I got to ride in, and it came at a perfect time: I’d just discovered and fallen (hard) for the “Herbie” movies. Here’s me with my Pinewood Derby Herbie:
Laurie’s yellow ’71 didn’t look or sound quite like the movie car (no exhaust whistle, and it couldn’t do the acrobatics and tricks), but it was close enough to tickle my imagination. It had fun details, too—another set of unusual seatbelt buckles in the back, engine sounds from the rear, trunk in the front, and why did they print the shift pattern with diagonal lines like that, when I could clearly see Laurie moving the gearstick only north-south and east-west? (that was to show the driver they had to push down on the shift stick on the way into Reverse).
Like the Volvo, the Beetle was mechanically a bit marginal. The exterior door handle triggers were stiffly all but seized; operating them required multiple hard squeezes until eventually the trigger would travel far enough to unlatch the door. The engine made alarming, loud PopPopPopPop! noises when accelerated from a stop; for this reason Laurie called it The Clunker, even after something was eventually done about the popping noises. I don’t know what they were—it wasn’t backfire or muffler explosions; my best guess is a large exhaust leak near the engine.
One day someone rear-ended the Beetle and stove in the engine cover. A light blue one from a later-model car was swapped on. Wrong colour, but it had the four sets of air louvers, which I thought looked better than the two sets on the original ’71 panel.
By and by the Beetle went away. I don’t recall the circumstances or the proximate cause, but its replacement was a 1971 Jeep Wagoneer. This was much more like my folks’ cars—column automatic, 360 V8 engine in front, power steering and brakes—but still a new experience, sitting up high like that. There were stretchy dark blue covers over the bench seats, and the armrests were a little crumbly, but the rest of the interior was in pretty good shape, including the nifty midmod instrument panel.
I loved the little green glowing circle that illuminated the driver’s gear selection on the clear plastic prindle perched atop the steering column. I was less enthusiastic about that weird sideways-pointing shift stick on the transmission tunnel, for the transfer case. Because my opinion on that mattered so much and stuff!
This would’ve been around 1985-’86, and at that time Wagoneers were very hot with the trendy Wendies. That crowd had fancy new ones, though; Laurie’s ’71 had been rode hard and put away wet, and would’ve been turned away with a scornful sneer by the valets at a country club or ritzy ski resort or wherever-all else that lot congregated. It didn’t have much of a muffler or tailpipe to speak of, it started hard and ran rough, it ran on when shut off, it was rusty, the gold paint was faded and dull, the grille was bent, and otherwise like that.
Its state of repair eventually grew bad (and loud) enough that repairs really could not be put off any more. I think my parents might have belatedly told Laurie to take it in and have the shop call them for payment, or otherwise helped out. I don’t know how much wound up spent, but the transformation was astounding! The Jeep had gone away a bellowing, coughing, sputtering thing, and it came back running like new. It started immediately, idled and ran smoothly and quietly; there was a new muffler and tailpipe, and an engine mount broken almost all the way in half had been replaced.
Moving parts everywhere had been lubricated, so door hinges and latches and locks, the ignition switch, dashboard controls, window winders, and other stuff worked without brute force. The transmission, a Turbo Hydramatic 400, still had a not-entirely-healthy whine in 2nd gear, but the overall effect was just marvellous.
Laurie was over the moon. The first time she took me somewhere in the rejuvenated Jeep, she said “Look, watch this!” She shifted to Park, switched off the ignition, and as the engine obediently cut off she said “Park! Stop!” She no longer had to switch off the key with the transmission in gear to fight the engine’s run-on tendency.
I don’t imagine feeding the big 4WD Jeep was very affordable, though, and when my folks decided to replace their cars, they sold Laurie the better of the two, the ’78 Caprice. It served her well, and sister and I got a close-up class in applied frugality. Yes, there were rust spots beginning to appear on the sheetmetal; no, they weren’t going to get fixed. The tailpipe fell, and Laurie clambered under the car with an unbent wire shirt hanger to lash it up again because shops cost money.
We weren’t wealthy, our family—not like a lot of the kids in our chichi school district. They had great big remote-controlled projection televisions; we got a 19″ rotary-knobs colour Zenith in 1986 when our 19″ rotary-knobs black-and-white RCA from 1978 went beyond repair—but there was never any worry (or if there was, it was hidden from us kids) of insufficient money for an unplanned expense, nor any necessity to drive a car past its best-before date; no constant worry of when and how it would next fail us, and no doubt that when it came time, the old car could and would be replaced by a newer, better one. Those privileges were out of Laurie’s reach. I hope my parents paid her as well as they could; she sure as all hell deserved it.
I long wanted a Volvo Amazon wagon like Laurie’s blue one. There was another one nearby, a longtime fixture at a house about a mile from ours, not far and across the street from the Happy Canyon shopping centre. It was a darker blue ’67, 4-speed with overdrive, in ziploc condition, and the (original) owner sold it about a year before I could’ve been in a position to buy it. If he hadn’t, certain upcoming COAL instalments might could’ve been very different! Fair number of stepstones before we get to those, though; next week I’ll tell what replaced the ’78 Caprice.
‘Wing windows’. Over this side of the pond, they are called ‘quarter lights’; a term I never did understand as they certainly did not light up. Those items, along with gutters running the length of a car’s roof, are two designs that should never have been deleted from a car’s manufacture. Now, with pretty much all modern cars, when you open the doors in the rain, its’ guaranteed that your door cards, your seats and your carpets will get a good hosing. So stupid.
As kids, the various Dads of the terrace where we lived would take turns to take a pile of us children to our school nearby. My favourite car was a British built mid sixties Ford Zephy with a horizontal strip for the speedometer. It turned red upon hitting 60mph and we enthuastically encouraged the father-in-charge in his attempts to reach that magic colour before having to hit the brakes for the school which, alas, was a mere 1/2 mile from our terrace.
Good times and another fine article Mr Stern.
I believe that in the UK, “light” in this context = window. A British motoring magazine would call a Volvo 122 sedan a four-light design: one side window per door. An NSU Ro80, with its extra windows behind the doors, would be a six-light design.
In the US, light also means pane of glass. An old house window with the muntins between panes would be called a “divided light window”.
I’ve heard the rear window of a car called the backlight.
Exactly.
That “light” terminology for windows bugs me, too, even though I’m enough of a word geek to know the problem is on the other side: those things that light up are actually lamps that emit light. The “headlight” is actually what comes from the headlamps; the “stop light” is what comes from the stop lamps (brake lamps), etc. It’s the informal misuse of “light” to refer to the device itself that creates the confusion with glass panes formally called “lights” whether or not they have wheels under them. But it still bugs me enough that I say “backglass” for what many people call the “backlight”.
I am totally onside with you about the demise of rain rails. Wing windows, too, subject to terms and conditions: they have to be thoughtfully designed (many of them failed to live up to the “No-Draft” name that used to be common for them in America) and properly built such that they stay where you put them and don’t cause wind noise or whistles or rain leaks.
Are you still in touch with Laurie?
I got back in touch with her in 2008, and we had some real nice conversation at that time. I’d like to hope we’ll get back in contact one day. From what I can see on the web, she’s well and doing fine as a regional manager for a major retail chain.
Presumably she can afford to buy and maintain a reliable car now.
Sounds like you liked her better than Calvin (as in Calvin and Hobbes) liked his babysitter Rosalyn.
We loved her. She loved us back. We could not possibly have asked for a better in loco parentis
I am sure that (and your safety) is why your parents had the Wagoneer reconditioned and gave her a good deal on the Caprice.
Fun car choices on Lauries part, even if the Laurie maintenance plan left much to be desired.
I already have a Beetle but I’d be pleased and proud to have an Amazon wagon or a Wagoneer
Well…fun for me, because I was a little kid who didn’t have to worry about what it cost to buy, insure, fuel, and constantly repair a car. There wasn’t much fun in it for her. I’m sure her maintenance plan would’ve been different if money grew on trees.
Driving low cost dungas, I can relate to that Ive owned many old bombs and driven them well past their scrapby date just fix whats ewrong the cheapest way possible and replace the whole car when it becomes terminal or mandatory inspection comes up, not any more though Ive got two that are disturbingly reliable, and enough parts for the old one to keep it on the road indefinitely.
An interesting selection, apparently “selected” as much as for their then-current availability and convenience as for their merits, as with many people not in a position to be too choosy. Conveniently (for us) this makes for a fun post with all of the vehicles being ones that most of us wouldn’t mind having a go in. Nothing boring in the bunch.
At least it appears that Laurie was handy and willing to get things done when necessary or able to figure out a field expedient solution to a problem.
Did people/drivers back in the day bitch and moan about the Volvo’s radio being way over in front of the passenger, perhaps for safety reasons to keep the driver from constantly messing with it as much as anything else? Now it’s quaint and cute, back then I don’t know.
I grew up in a family with a ’60s era 142. I can tell you the radio station never changed. That changed once my dad installed a Pioneer Super Tuner (OK Daniel – two posts where I mention Super Tuners!) KP500 with a special housing which allowed it to get installed to the left of the steering column above the driver’s left knee. This happened over a decade into the car’s time in our family. After that, the Sears AM-FM radio was permanently silenced.
Eric, I thought of you when I mentioned the Super Tuner in my ’77 Cutlass COAL last week. Hadn’t heard of the KP500—wow, big round dial. Funkatronic!
I had the KP5500 (like the one in your family’s car) in my first car – An Opel Manta. This was in high school until right before graduation when I was rear ended at the traffic light. At that point, I got dad’s 14 year old 142 for college duty. At that point I also inherited the KP500. I paired up with the SuperTuner speakers for the back parcel shelf. That was the ticket for blasting Bryan Adams on my way to school.
I can’t say what the general opinion was of Volvo’s radio placement. It proved too tempting for my sister, whom Laurie banished to the back seat for playing with the radio once too often. Or was that me? Both of us, maybe.
I didn’t think very highly of that radio placement in my own Volvo, but then I didn’t get to drive it very much. More in a later instalment. I share your guess that Volvo put it over there with the idea that the passenger (I love how the Germans say beifahrer, “co-driver”) would be in charge of it. Fine for Olaf and Lena, maybe, who always only ever used the car together, but not so great in places and times when single-occupancy vehicles were the norm.
When the 120 series Volvo’s were designed, Swedes drove on the left and thus the radio would be located in the ‘right’ position.
On the other hand, for a time prior to the changeover (’68 or ’69 if I have that right), Volvo’s were built with the steering wheel on the left in anticipation of the switch. (My 67 122 wagon had the steering on the left, the same as all others coming off the line).
That may, or may not, be the explanation.
Prior to Dagen H (3 September 1967, when Sweden changed to right-hand traffic) most cars in Sweden were left-hand drive despite that country’s left-hand traffic.
I don’t follow your logic on the radio location—it was clear all the way across on the other side of the dashboard from the driver. In LHD cars it was over on the right; in RHD cars it was over on the left. How do you reckon the traffic handedness factored in?
I’ve heard two theories as to why Swedish domestic market cars were LHD:
1. The first cars imported to Sweden were LHD, and domestic manufacturers followed suit although Sweden drove on the left.
2. The proportion of Swedish cars built for LHD export markets was so high that cars for Sweden were also LHD.
Your descriptive writing is highly effective. Having lived through an extended period of self-inflicted quasi-poverty and in and around others in the same state, I certainly can relate very well to these cars and their state of neglect.
Contrary to popular myth, car ownership at the bottom ranks was more expensive, unless one had considerable mechanical skills. There were just so many things constantly wearing out, if driven extensively. In today’s world, Laurie would buy a 12 or 15 year old Asian brand car, and it would be a dream in comparison.
I remember hearing VW’s popping like that under full acceleration. It was never the older ones, just the later ones. I’m not sure just what that was.
So true about the reliability of modern Asian cars. Coincidentally, today marks 17 years exactly since we purchased our 2004 Toyota Camry LE 4-cylinder. It was sold to our son in Brooklyn almost 6 years ago, and it’s still going strong with over 200,000 miles. Fuel injection, advanced rustproofing, and vastly improved engine oils make a big difference.
Here it is parked in front of his apartment building during last weekend’s big snow storm.
Thanks, Paul. Dependability is not on the long list of gripes with my own 14-year-old Asian-brand car. I was noodling on exactly this while writing today’s instalment: that Volvo was 21 years old when I met it. The Amazon was widely and rightly regarded as an unusually durable car, and it was still mostly used up. Today’s 21-year-old car is a 2000 model, and there are a whole lot more of those (as a proportion of original production) still in very serviceable condition than there were ’63 models in ’84.
That era of VW engine known for fasteners loosening. Torque on head studs would be lost, resulting in compression loss under load twixt cylinder & head.
That was the source of the popping.
Wow. Amazing it still ran…!
Excellent series Daniel! Love the photo of you at the Pinewood Derby with your Herbie!
Lead fishing weights for headlamps, taillamps, driver, and passenger. Plexiglas windshield (I used a green permanent marker on its edges for a touch of realism). It didn’t win any prizes; those all went to the cars very obviously built by Dadco. But it didn’t matter; I got kicked out the scouts years before that was popular. It was nothing to do with gay or atheist—I just wouldn’t keep my mouth shut about the dumb busywork projects and rote regurgitation of patriotic platitudes, and I didn’t get on well with the den mother, whose entire family (including the dog) had half a wit among the lot of them.
A very enjoyable article. I particularly like the VW shift pattern picture. I had an Austin 1800 which used the opposite approach to protecting reverse, you had to pull up on the gear shift, which is much more difficult than pushing down. As I remember there was nothing to show you that was what was needed, but of course, none of the controls were labeled in that car, and the heater controls were just levers underneath the parcel tray.
My folks went to France in 1995, and got stuck somewhere in their rental car because they couldn’t get it into Reverse; neither of them had driven a handshift car in decades, and reverse-deliberatisers hadn’t been a thing then, so it didn’t occur to them to try pushing the shift knob down, or lifting a collar just below it.
The knob with the flower is the Strangler.
I always knew them as vent windows, perhaps a regional thing. I was a little disappointed that our 74 Volvo didn’t have them since the 73 was the last year for Volvo. My personal favorite vent windows were on our BMW 2000 which were operated by turning a knob on the door panel rather than flipping a latch.
While I had some beaters and friends also had beaters I don’t recall anything as tired Laurie’s rides. Come to think of it our sitter in 2011 or so had a nicer Saturn SL2 than we did.
This of course brought back memories of my own family’s 122S wagon, which I learned to drive in, a 1964 which was probably identical to Laurie’s; the last real update to the Amazon family was in 1965, when the seats and exterior trim were refreshed, and the wagon FINALLY got front disc brakes. My mom drove ours until 1986, a year after she had the engine rebuilt after it expired shortly after the oil pump failed. I think this was around 200K miles. She sold for exactly what it cost new, $2600 US. To the point about improved durability of newer cars (even non-Asian), her replacement Volvo 240 was still going strong at 275K miles when she stopped driving in 2010. Of Laurie’s cars, I naturally like the Jeep. A great story … thanks.
I enjoyed this vicarious ride in all of Laurie’s cars. These were so unlike the cars I got to spend time around at that age – except for the VW, which were everywhere then. The Wagoneer would be a real treat, but then so would the Volvo.
Regarding the placement of the radio in the Volvo, the car was small enough that the radio could be easily operated by the driver. My first car was a 1961 or 1962 four door model, whichever year the engine was changed to the “legendary” B18 from the previous B16B. I thought I was buying the legendary engine, but mine was very non-legendary one. It was a good learning experience as a first car.
The seller of my car had installed a proper Volvo radio, but it was a later 12 volt model that only operated well on the native 6 volt electrical system when the engine was revving sufficiently. I installed a 6- to 12-volt inverter that solved the problem.
Wear the 3-point seatbelt, properly adjusted.
Reach the radio from the driving seat.
As I recall these are either/or, not both-and unless you happen to have a very long nearside arm.
That is not consistent with my memory.
The contemporary SAAB 93/96 had the radio mounted on the left hand side of the glove box. Directly in front of the passenger. The 93/96 was quite a bit narrower than the 122 so the reach from the drivers seat was near as bad.