The best rested guy in town

I’ve written before about how I’m not much of a sports fan. I don’t get sports, really.

Last night, Super Bowl Sunday, I went to bed at 10 p.m. I’ll bet I was one of a handful of people sleeping here in Indianapolis given that the hometown team, the Colts, played. Unfortunately, it didn’t go our way; when I awoke this morning the New Orleans Saints had won, 31-17.

I remember from the Colts’ successful 2007 Super Bowl that it’s really pretty cool to wake up in the city that’s home to the new champion. I shared in the joy of it with everyone else here. But no, I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, not in 2007, not last night. I didn’t watch a single game this season. And it’s not entirely because I don’t get sports.

It’s because I’m still not over the 1991 season.

From the time the Colts moved to Indianapolis in 1984, they stunk. On ice. In their first six years here, they had only two winning seasons. And then 1991 capped them all as they went 1 and 15.

Why do I know all of this if I don’t get sports? Because I worked for a little AM radio station in Terre Haute in 1991. We were on the Colts radio network, and the games pre-empted my Sunday afternoon shifts. It fell to me to “run the board,” which meant I sat in the studio at the mixing board, finger poised and ready to press a button to play local commercials as soon as the announcer said, “And this is the Colts <pause> radio network.” That meant I had to listen to the Colts lose, and often lose big, week after week after week after wee-hee-hee-heek.

I’m genuinely disappointed that the Colts lost. But it might just take one more Super Bowl victory before I can move past the trauma of 1991!

Radio is a cruel mistress, as I’ve written about here and here.

Das Renault

When I went to Germany in 1984, our family’s only vehicle was still that Chevy van with the unattached rear seat. Dad may have been content to let his children rattle around loose as he drove us around town, but something about a 120-mile Interstate trip from South Bend to O’Hare Airport made him think twice. Dad borrowed my grandparents’ car for the trip.

While I was gone, Dad decided it was finally time to buy a car. When I flew home from Germany, the family picked me up at O’Hare in this 1983 Renault Alliance.

This wasn’t just any Renault Alliance; it was the top-of-the-line Renault Alliance MT. The MT stood for Motor Trend magazine, as this car had been named the Motor Trend Car of the Year. The car had a little plaque on the dash that read “Motor Trend” and “1200″ – apparently Renault thought these cars were special enough that they numbered them. The Alliance MT had every option and was, by 1983 standards, totally tricked out. My favorite options were the AM-FM-cassette stereo and the three-way front seats. A clever “rocking” adjustment set the entire seat’s angle, making it comfortable for tall and short drivers alike. This was a very small car, after all – the rear seat was a torture chamber for all but the vertically challenged. My brother and I, at 5′10″ and 6′, knew that all too well. Mom is 5′2″; she loved the just-her-size Renault.

I'm older now than Mom was then

Just after I got my driver’s license, a friend from my Germany trip started her freshman year at Notre Dame and wanted me to come see her. So I borrowed the Renault and headed across town. As I came off South Bend’s only in-town onramp I managed to hit a low concrete divider, shredding the left front tire. I mean, that tire was destroyed. And then it turns out that Discount Tire had put one of the lug nuts on at a slight angle. Did you know that when you do this with a high-powered pneumatic lug wrench, the nut instantly fuses to the stud? I’ll spare you the details of just how beside-himself angry Dad was and skip to the part of the story where we drove the car on the rim to get it repaired. Discount Tire, at least, considered the flat to be covered by the road-hazard warranty. I never made it to see my friend.

Our dog always wanted to ride along

Just before my senior year in college, Dad sold the van and bought himself a Ford Escort. He told me I could take the Renault with me to school. But a few days before I was to leave, my brother had a minor accident that creased the front left fender. We were sure that Dad would put my brother through the grinder over it and probably make him get it repaired right away – and I’d never get the car. So we engaged in a bit of subterfuge. For the next few days, we parked the car at home in ways that limited Dad’s likelihood of seeing the damage. But when I had to load the car for the trip, Dad wanted to help. My brother thought fast and said, “Dad, just bring Jim’s gear to the door, and I’ll load it in the car.” It worked. When I got to Terre Haute, I put the car right in the body shop, and sent my brother the bill.

It was on the trip to Terre Haute that I learned another of the Renault’s great features: it got 45 miles to the gallon! Its light weight, 1.4-liter engine, and 5-speed transmission equalled top fuel economy. That was great news for someone who still thought $10 was a lot of money. I could drive approximately forever on a tank of gas! The tradeoff, however, was that the car was slow. I mean, this car was sloooooow. It had trouble getting out of its own way. One day, I took it out on a deserted highway, clicked a stopwatch, and punched it as hard as I could. It took 45 seconds to get that car to 60 miles per hour! If you think that’s bad, I had a girlfriend who also had a Renault Alliance, but hers had an automatic transmission – and it was even slower.

By now it was 1988. Alliances had been on the road for several years and were gaining a  reputation for poor reliability. Ours had only 75,000 miles on it, but it started to fall apart. The first repair was when a fuel injector failed, to the tune of $236.98. I’ll never forget that price because as a broke college student it shocked me to the core! Then the clutch failed. I had a rebuilt clutch installed for $400. One frigid day, the driver’s door handle came off the car in my hand when I tried to get in. The door wouldn’t latch, and I had to hold the door shut as I drove the car to a mechanic. Did you know that no matter how hard you’re holding onto an unlatched driver’s-side car door, when you make a left turn it’s going to open?

The cassette deck died that year, too, and I couldn’t afford to replace it. Because I went to engineering school, I had plenty of budding electrical engineers as friends. One of them said he thought he could fix it, so I removed it from the dash and handed it to him. Weeks went by. I asked about it, and he said he was working on it. More weeks went by. I went to his room to check on it, and found that he had un-soldered every last diode and capacitor from the circuit boards. Each bit was carefully placed and labeled on newspaper spread across his room. I thought my poor tape deck was a goner! But he found a single diode that had failed, replaced it, soldered the whole thing back together, and installed it in the dash. The cassette deck worked again! But ever after, turning on the radio also turned on the parking lights.

I had my first white-knuckled driving moments in that car. I’ve already written about the time I spun it halfway through the town of Fulton. Another day I was driving at night down a lonely state highway in a downpour when a semi passed me. Not only did the water pouring off its tail blind me, but the turbulence knocked me out of my lane. I slammed on the brakes and stopped inches from a farmer’s fence.

Then there was the day I couldn’t avoid a giant pothole. I shredded another tire and knocked the front end out of alignment. I was hopping mad about it and started making phone calls because somebody was going to pay for this damage and it wasn’t going to be me! The short of that story is that the Terre Haute city attorney determined that the pothole was in CSX Railroad’s right-of-way. It turns out that a railroad has to maintain the pavement within so many feet of a crossing. So I called CSX and, with considerable tenacity, got through to someone with the right authority and explained my story. He didn’t flinch; he cut me a check.

After I graduated and got a job, Dad wanted his car back so my brother could drive it his senior year at school. I bought a new Chevy Beretta and Dad and my brother came to get the Renault. My brother drove it that year and most of another. By this time the Renault was having more serious mechanical issues and didn’t always start. Dad wanted to sell the car to my brother for $1,000. My brother offered $500 but thought even that was too generous as he had put $500 into it just keeping it running. Dad dug in and they couldn’t negotiate a deal. My brother eventually decided to just pay Dad the grand, but before he could write the check a teenager in a beater Ford Maverick with neither insurance nor license plate ran a red light and T-boned the hapless Renault.

My brother wasn’t hurt but the car was a total loss. The insurance company wrote my dad a check for $1,500. My brother still gets mad when you bring up the story of how he could have broken even on the old clunker.

My goodness, I think the only car or driving story I didn’t link to here was the one about my Ford Pinto. And look, now I have.

The Iron Maiden

Writing about the Karmann-Ghia that got away and the frozen glue incident got me thinking about the cars that have passed through my life. I have always loved cars and have enjoyed the experience of almost every one I’ve driven. Some of them have left me with stories to tell, and I’ll be sharing them in some of my upcoming posts.

We had been comfortably cruising around in the coolest car Dad ever bought – a 1974 AMC Matador Oleg Cassini coupe – when he decided to go into business for himself making furniture. He needed to haul lumber and finished pieces, and so he traded the Matador for the uncoolest car he ever bought, a 1978 Chevy van.

This van was meant for hauling and so had only two seats. That wouldn’t do for a family of four, so Dad, safety always uppermost on his mind, got a back seat from some other van and leaned it against the side wall. We had a great view out the sliding-door window. But the first time Dad made a hard left turn, the seat slid across the van. My brother and I were lucky to have only banged our knees.

My younger readers are probably rightfully horrified by the risk Dad took with us. But automotive sensibilities – and safety laws – were different in 1980. Mothers usually carried their babies in their laps in the front seat. On the road, you routinely saw kids loose in the backs of station wagons and in the beds of pickups. Cars had gained front shoulder belts during the 1970s but rear seats still had only lap belts. Most people didn’t wear seat belts anyway, as laws compelling seat-belt and child-seat use were still years away. These were simpler, deadlier times.

We rode around untethered for four years. Remarkably, we had only one other close call, on a snowy day when Dad tried to change lanes and put the van sideways down the busiest street in town. “Hot damn!” he called out. Somehow, the loose seat slid forward only a foot or two and didn’t topple, and we managed not to hit anything as Dad wrestled furiously with the steering to put the van straight again.

When I said that Dad wrestled with the steering, I wasn’t kidding. The van had what we used to call “Armstrong steering,” meaning no power assistance. We also used to say that the van had “two-sixty air” – no air conditioning, but you could stay cool on a hot day if you rolled down its two windows and drove 60 miles an hour. The van’s only amenities were its automatic transmission, power brakes, and AM radio.

Dad’s furniture business never fully took off and so he got a job again. The regular income enabled him to buy another family car, but he kept the van. The new car got the prime driveway spot, relegating the van to being parked on the side street. One night, a young heavy-metal fan carrying a can of green spray paint stopped to paint the name of his favorite band on the van’s flank. Dad drove it around that way for a year before having it painted, and that’s how we all came to call the van the Iron Maiden.

I had my first driving lessons in the Iron Maiden with its super-stiff manual steering. Most other manual-steering cars I’ve driven steered easily after the car got rolling, but the Iron Maiden’s steering was difficult no matter the speed. I needed both hands even to change lanes!

Dad had a bad habit of driving on tires until they were bald. I borrowed the Iron Maiden one day to go downtown for something. Halfway there, the front right bald tire blew. It took considerable strength to keep the van straight while I looked for a place to pull over! I managed to turn onto a side street and bring the van to rest, but I dug that front wheel into the curb a little bit, making it impossible to get the jack under the van’s frame. I walked the two miles home to get our bumper jack – and rode back with it on my bike, because it was easy enough to carry the bike home in the back of the van after I put on the spare!

Dad used the Iron Maiden less and less and eventually traded it in on a hatchback. None of us were particularly sad to see it go.

We all still talk fondly about the Matador, though.

I also still talk fondly about my first car, an old Ford Pinto. Yes, I said fondly! Read about it here.

Agfa Isoflash-Rapid C

Until about the mid-1960s, no matter how simple a camera was to operate, loading film into it was a pain. Film came on a spool, which you secured at one end of the camera. You then stretched the film and its protective backing paper across the camera and threaded film and paper into a waiting takeup spool. If the backing paper slipped out of your fingers, it would curl and you’d have to try to stretch it back out while still holding the film and the camera. This required three hands. Making the task more exciting, you had to manage all of this in the dark to keep from fogging the film.

Kodak, always looking to remove the barriers to photography, finally made it trivial to load film in 1963 when it introduced the Kodapak, a sealed film cartridge. You might know the Kodapak better as size 126 film. To load a Kodapak-ready camera (Kodak called them Instamatics), you just dropped in a cartridge – in any light.

Because innovation usually breeds competition, rival Agfa introduced the Rapid film system in 1964. More accurately, it reintroduced and renamed its 1930s-vintage Karat film system. It improved on the spool system but wasn’t quite as easy to load as the Kodapak. The Rapid system coiled 35mm film into special metal cartridges. You dropped a full Rapid cartridge into one end of a camera, an empty Rapid cartridge into the other end, and closed the camera. When you wound the camera for the first photo, the camera threaded the film into the empty cartridge. As you shot the roll, the camera coiled the film into the takeup cartridge, which you then sent for processing.

I’ve been curious about Rapid cameras for some time, but never so curious as to lay out  money for one. But then my old friend (and copywriter and SEO expert) Mike, who shares my interest in vintage cameras, came across one in its box at a thrift store for $1.31. He scooped it up – and immediately placed it on permanent loan in the Jim Grey Camera Collection.

The camera inside looks to never have been used, though the spent flashcube inside the box suggests otherwise.

The Isoflash-Rapid C was first made in 1966, though I haven’t been able to find out when Agfa quit making it or how many were made. It sold for $14.95, which doesn’t seem like much until you consider that this is almost $100 in 2010 dollars. It shoots the 24mm square exposures typical of the Rapid camera family (although a couple Rapids shot 24×36mm exposures). Its fixed-focus Isitar lens operates at f/8.2; its Parator shutter has two speeds, “sunny” at 1/80 sec and “shade/cloudy” at 1/40 sec. So the biggest mistake you can make with this camera is to forget to set the shutter speed to match the sky.

The Isoflash-Rapid C’s ability to take flashcubes distinguishes it from the earlier Isoflash-Rapid, which used AG1 flashbulbs. A battery hidden under the removable bottom plate powered the flashcube. My camera’s 43-year-old battery was installed; I’m amazed that it never leaked! I can’t tell what size battery it is, but I understand that some people have successfully fired the flash after stacking four SR44 button batteries in that compartment.

The box also contained a roll of Rapid film that has been expired since 1968. Dig that crazy aluminum film canister! I wonder whether the film is exposed. I’m not sure I’m willing to have it developed to find out. I understand it’s possible to spool modern 35mm film into a Rapid cassette, but I’m not up for that. I think I’ll let this Isoflash-Rapid C sit on the shelf and look good.

Agfa’s Rapid gambit didn’t pay off in the face of Kodak’s muscle. Few manufacturers other than Agfa signed up to make Rapid-system cameras while nearly every camera manufacturer made 126-cartridge cameras. Agfa eventually decided they couldn’t beat ‘em, so they joined ‘em, turning out their own 126 cameras. The Rapid system was left to fade away, and Agfa quit making Rapid film sometime in the 1980s.

If you like classic cameras, check out my entire collection.

Frozen glue

When I was 19 I worked all summer for my aunt Betty’s delivery service. Her small company shuttled papers, packages, and parts for industrial clients all over northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan. She did a good business with maybe a half-dozen drivers and an assortment of cars, vans, and straight trucks. She issued me an old Ford Pinto for most of my runs, but I got some experience driving the vans, too. Most of her vans were new heavy-duty Fords tricked out for delivery, with rub rails in the cargo area and a wall behind the front seats. She had an older van, too, a used-up regular-duty Chevy that lacked the wall and rub rails. It sat idle most of the time.

Betty’s biggest customer was AM General, which designed and built the Hummer for the US military. They used a particular glue somewhere in assembly, and it was kept frozen until needed. Betty’s company delivered the glue from the supplier, a company called Artificial Ice. All the pro drivers were on other runs one day when AM General called so Betty sent me, the driver of last resort. And all the Fords were on runs or in the shop so I had to drive the unloved Chevy, the van of last resort.

I drove to Artificial Ice in downtown South Bend and loaded 25 80-pound buckets of frozen glue into my van. It was a hot day, and frost on the buckets immediately began melting into puddles on the van’s metal floor.

I headed out with my thawing 2,000-pound payload. Seven miles lay between Artificial Ice and the Hummer plant in Mishawaka. All of the drive was on the same road, a major artery with a long string of stoplights. It took a long time for that loaded van to get any speed. Stopping that much weight was a real problem, too, as I learned when a light changed to red as I approached and the van plowed through the intersection as if my braking were a suggestion. To be safe, I slowed to ten miles per hour under the speed limit.

I was treading very carefully across South Bend’s east side when, in the middle of a block, a little girl stepped off the curb right in front of me. This was the first time I experienced how time slows down in a crisis. I was able to think, “I’m about to kill a little girl, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” sink my foot into the brake pedal, and gasp as I watched her take that first step away from safety.

Unfortunately, the bucketed glue was still traveling at 25 miles an hour on a nearly frictionless surface. Wham! Buckets slammed into the back of my seat. As I felt the wind leave me, I watched the passenger’s seat pop off the floor, smack the windshield, and bounce around along the tops of some of the buckets.

I managed to get the van stopped. Still trying to get a breath, I hopped out to look for the little girl, but she wasn’t there. I even checked under the van, because with all the excitement in the cabin I wasn’t sure I would have felt it if I had hit her. She had simply vanished.

I sat for several minutes, shaking, until I was sure the urge to vomit had passed, and then I crept at ten miles per hour the rest of the way. To hell with the cars honking behind me.

The loading dock at AM General unloaded the glue. They laid the passenger seat on its side in the cargo area, but never asked me about it. Betty didn’t send me on any more runs that day. She never had the passenger seat reattached.

The most recent time I experienced time slowing down was last summer when I wrecked my car while on vacation.