Cars and Guitars

We all tend to get a bit "jaded" as we get older and that's a shame (albeit inevitable, I guess)... I'm thinking about how it felt to be 16 years old and have a car of my own... Sometimes I would sneak out at night and sit in the driver's seat just to look at the gauges and touch all the controls... Other times I would lay down in the back seat... I'm not sure why I found that so comforting. It probably reminded me of the late night trips home from Aunt Aggie's house during my early childhood. (That was in the days before seat belts.) ... But the point was that it was my car and I could darn well lie down in the back seat if I felt like it :-) ... I especially liked being out there during storms. The rain would hammer on the roof just inches from my head but the car kept me safe and dry. It was much better than any security blanket :-)

Here's a picture of me behind the house in Tyler with the 1963 Fairlane:


BTW: I really hated that haircut. Way too "foofie"... It was done by one of the "guru followers" who was a hairdresser... He used to chant really funny too. Instead of a nice quite "ohhmmm" it was a really loud "AUOMMM". It was hard not to laugh when meditating with him...
Also, I had totally forgotten that the owners of the house had the roof done while we lived there. The shingles on the ground are a dead giveaway... But I digress :-)

Actually, the Fairlane wasn't quite mine yet. There's a bit of a story there:
The car was from California and we bought it for $75 from someone Mom knew in the repo business. When we took the paperwork to the Texas DMV they told us we couldn't title it without a copy of the "chattel mortgage" (a loan security document). So we contacted the bank that had authorized the repo and were informed that chattel mortgages were not used for car loans in California. We reported that to the Texas DMV but they did not care. They still asserted that we could not title the car without bringing them the non-existent document...
So - I just went ahead drove it around with California plates that had expired during the Johnson administration :-) ... After well over a year of that I decided I was pushing my luck so I contacted the bank again and after a number of phone calls the woman I was dealing with took pity and offered to personally title the car in California and sign it over to me... She explained that she would be violating a whole bunch of bank rules (and at least one law) by doing that but she did it anyway (at no cost) - and the car was finally legally mine :-)

Now -the coolest thing about having a car (in my view) was actually getting to work on it. I had been reading magazines like Popular Mechanics, Hot Rod and Car Craft for years but it had all been purely hypothetical - I'd never actually touched a car with a tool in my hand...
Actually ... it wasn't until after we left Tyler that I applied my OCD to working on cars so I will hold off on all those stories :-) For the time being we were still at the mercy of a mechanic whenever the Fairlane needed repairs (which was quite often).

One of the car's more interesting quirks is that it would overheat if you cruised on the highway at more than 45 MPH. Yeah - that's when engines typically run the coolest - I never did figure that one out. So whenever we went to Dallas I always took the back roads... I remember breaking a fan belt on one of the trips and having to stop every mile to let it cool off before I finally limped it to a gas station (couldn't afford a tow). On another one of the trips I had to stop and get a tuneup at a garage in the middle of nowhere because it was barely running... And if you took it through a carwash it would die and wouldn't start again for 10 minutes... There was always something :-)

And then there were the drum brakes... That's one of those "rite of passage" things that younger drivers are missing out on... You see - drum brakes don't do much when they're wet. So when driving in heavy rain you have to remember to pump them a couple of times to dry them off before you actually need to stop... It's amazing how many prayers you can say while standing on the brake pedal watching a stop sign go by :-)

And that's enough about the Fairlane. On to the guitar:

I've mentioned that back when we lived in Escondido I traded my Vox Phantom XII Stereo guitar straight across for a 1953 Telecaster. And one day in the summer of 1970 Karina decided the guitar needed new paint. Here's the result (Click to enlarge):

I really wish this picture was in color because B&W doesn't quite capture it. Just imagine the wildest color combinations you can think of and you're probably in the ballpark. (The lower right was the stars and stripes.)
Over the next few years my sweaty left forearm took its toll on Karina's paint job and I ended up refinishing it in dark brown. And many years later (1989) I sold it to a working musician.

No regrets, but a couple of old Polaroids (and my memories) are all I have left of this little bit of Karina's whimsy :-)