Corvair Blues

Life often takes us down roads to destinations we would not have chosen could we have seen the end from the beginning. Such was the case for my brother and me in the Abilene, Texas of the middle 1960s. My father, an aspiring History Professor, taught at Abilene Christian University while working on a doctorate in Latin American History. Eventually, we would spend two years in Fort Worth, Texas while he finished his Ph.D., but that is an entirely different story with a very different ending. As a junior member of the faculty at a small, but growing, private school, my father did not earn a particularly large salary. We lived in a nice house, ate plenty of good food, and enjoyed a good standard of living; however, my father drove older cars in order to stretch his paycheck as far as possible. For a time the family heapster was four-door Corvair. We cruised around Abilene and out into the country in this light blue auto. For a time, my father preached at a small church in Shep, Texas, just a smidge over forty miles from Abilene. In those days of looser attitudes towards safety, my brother and I often wrangled over which one of us would ride on the small dash in the back of the car as we returned to Abilene after the evening service at Shep. I always enjoyed watching the stars wheel and turn as we rumbled down 277, a two-lane state road.

Like any older car, our Corvair came with a variety of unique characteristics; one of which was a small hole in the rear floor-pan. I do not remember which one of us discovered this small aperture to the outside world from the back seat, nor do I know why looking at the asphalt rush past was so intriguing. But hey, who truly knows what goes on inside the head of six or seven-year-old boy, least of all that boy. We would clamber into the back seat and then wrestle to watch North or South first slip past at a scorching thirty-five miles per hour. Then we discovered a new game.

Again, memory fails me in the exact origins, but one of us would slip small bits of trash through the hole while the other one looked out the back window to spy some familial litter bouncing down the road behind us. This was great fun and we never had to pester Mom or Dad. We scoured the car for gum or candy wrappers to shove through the hole. Light colored items were best as they were visible against the oil-streaked asphalt of the age. We could not foresee the unhappy destination that awaited us. We just enjoyed our new game. We were not hurting anyone. Then one day, we made a precipitously bad, no horrible, decision.

My mother had to run a few errands. She gathered up her rather unruly bunch, secured her purse, applied a splash of lipstick, secured her hair under a fetching scarf, and headed out in our Corvair. Somewhere along the way her purse ended up in the back seat with Brian and I. In a brutal convergence of circumstances, we ran out of detritus to jettison at the same time. Which one of us was the dumper and which one of us was the spotter remains locked away in the deep vaults of the cave of my memory. It is enough to note that we discovered my mother’s purse to be a treasure-trove of items small enough to fit through our portal to the road; soon a string of lipstick, fingernail files, and other important ladies’ items were bouncing down South First…do not ask me why my memory is so clear on that point.

Eventually, my mother wondered at the levity and general party atmosphere emanating from the back seat. As any good parent would, she inquired as to the cause of such bonhomie. Logic and good sense rushed into our minds a bit too late, so we sat there, mute lumps oozing guilt. Ultimately under the harsh spotlight of a mother glare, we stammered out an explanation. My mother, in a move Mario Andretti would admire, whipped the Corvair into the parking lot of Burro Alley on the corner of South First and Willis where she soon discovered the absence of several small items. In very clear and unambiguous language, we learned that her purse was never to be used as source material for our game and we were to spend the rest of the outing sitting in the back seat with our hands in our laps. I do not remember being told to stop playing the game, just that her things were not viable candidates for ejection. Yes, that day, we discovered that the Corvair was truly unsafe at any speed.