From scooter to sports car with a little help from dad

In my last post I told you about my scooter and how in the end it went to my mom's cousin to be chopped up for parts to make a motorized trike, and that my dad got a 1958 Mercury Parklane convertible in trade for the scooter.  So then in place of a scooter I was the proud owner of the Mercury convertible.  But there was one problem, I didn't want the big old convertible- I wanted a little sports car.  My older brother Bob had recently bought a red Triumph TR4 sports car from Joe Fodrocy and I was just nuts about it.  My dad was really in love with the Mercury and he thought I would like it too, but it just wasn't my style and so I reluctantly had to tell him that I didn't want the big beast, and that I wanted a little sports car.  He took the news rather well and so that started me on a hunt for a little Triumph.  I finally found one by snooping around the back fence at the local British Import dealer in Muskegon called E&B Motors.  Behind the fence I spied a little black TR4 that looked like nobody loved it anymore.  I called the service manager there and he told me it was a 1963 Triumph TR4 that the owners had brought in for repairs but he wasn't sure what they wanted to do with it since it was in bad shape mechanically.  He said it no longer ran.  A day or two later he called me and said the owners would sell it to me for $250.  That was great news but as a junior in high school, I didn't have a regular job and $250 was hard to come by.  Dad to the rescue! He said he would buy the Triumph for me if I gave him the Mercury, I didn't even have to think about it!  A few days later we towed it home from the south end of Getty Street to our garage on Central Rd.  It had no brakes and I'm not sure how dad managed to keep from hitting me as I was the tow driver and he was in the brakeless car behind me.  Regardless, we got it home and into our little garage and it fit right into that little space.  I was on cloud nine!  I'm not sure exactly what was wrong with the car- I was only 16, but dad was a pretty good mechanic and he said he would help me rebuild the engine.  He pulled the head off the engine; got underneath the little car and the next thing I knew we were pulling pistons out of the engine.  He took the head to old Amel Heinz to have the valves ground, and I think he changed the crank bearings and put new rings on the pistons.  I didn't know exactly what was going on, but I was out in the garage the whole time just dreaming of driving the little car.  Eventually he got it all back together and we started it up and it ran pretty good!  I was so happy!  I had a few things to finish up on it and spent many hours in the cold garage with a small wood stove giving off a little heat to keep me from freezing to death.  Sandy came over and did a pretty good job of making me believe she was also interested in the car.  Mostly she just watched me work on it and froze in the cold garage in spite of the small wood stove.  I think I spent more energy working on the car than feeding wood to the stove.  Eventually I got it all back together and licensed and insured.  I think dad paid for that too.  Old Joe Fodrocy relined my brake pads and shoes with a machine that he used to reline brake pads for auto shops during WWII.  Parts were hard to come by for a British car in the US at that time. The car was a blast to drive, it had a four-speed manual transmission, and it was so fun to shift gears, in fact, I liked shifting so much I not only shifted up all the gears, but I also downshifted all the gears which really made the little car rumble and pop when I downshifted.  The fact that I had removed the muffler and put on what was called a "cherry bomb" in its place really gave it that sweet raucous tone that I loved.  My older cousin didn't though, he lived right across the street from Sandy and he heard it every time I came and went with my shifting and downshifting ways making a ton of racket.  He said it woke up their babies at night, but I just laughed and took it as a compliment to my little car.  It was the excuse for Sandy and me to go on our first date, I was just sure she would love learning how to drive a stick shift car and so we went to the blockhouse with a picnic lunch and I showed her how to drive it.  It was a great success, she learned to shift the car and I devoured a picnic lunch fit for a king.  I didn't think it could get any better than that and so the dating began.  My brother Bob lived in Kalamazoo at the time and he invited me to bring the car there and spend a few days with him so we could fill all the rust holes with Bondo and make it look better.  We did exactly that and most of the car ended up with black primer on it to cover up the patches.  The car wasn't very fast, but it was so fun to drive, it was just like a little go cart and could zoom around corners like no other car I had ever been in before.  The American cars of that time were bigger, heavier, and had really cushy suspension for a soft but sloppy ride.  This little car was like riding a skateboard, it wasn't too comfy, but it would turn on a dime.  Getting in and out of it was somewhat of a trick, you had to squat down next to the open driver's door, stick in your right leg under the steering wheel, than slide your body onto the seat, once there, you would have to pull your left leg up as tight to your body as possible while still being able to shove it down under the steering wheel next to your right leg.  Once you were in it was fairly comfortable with your legs straight out in front of you because the seat sat almost all the way down on the floor.  It felt like your bottom was about 4 inches off the pavement.  I do think if I stretched a little I could reach down from the open window with my left arm and touch the ground.  It had a convertible top of course and I drove it everywhere I could with the top down.  In time the reality of not being able to drive it in the winter- too low to clear the snow on the road, and the fact it had a tiny heater, made me look for another more traditional car.  My brother Bob took the car off my hands and paid me what I had in it, I think about $350.  He did a great job of cleaning it up, fixing it, painting it and eventually sold it for a decent sum, I think over $3000.  He offered it to me when he decided to sell it, but by then I was a married man with children and it wasn't practical to own it any longer.  There was one more brief affair with a sports car, a little red Triumph Spitfire, but that came around the time we were married and it just didn't hold my interest too long, it needed a lot of work and I ended up trading it for the only truck I ever owned.  It was a gas sucking Ford F150, I think it was a 1966. The only thing I can say about that truck was that it moved us to Alpena shortly after we were married and I sold it pretty soon after that.  Then for some reason, babies started showing up every couple of years, and babies and sports cars don't mix well.  My favorite Triumph ever made was the TR6 and it is still a pretty good-looking little sports car after all these years.  But it was British made during an era when British made cars were not well made so it isn't worth owning, besides I'm not sure I could do that tricky manuever to get in anymore.

My Scooter

 I was once the proud owner of a 1958 Cushman Road King scooter.  It was two tone aqua and white and is a collectible item now.  But in its day when I had it, it was way out of style.  I had it in the late sixties and the cool bikes were the little Honda's, Suzuki's, and Yamaha's zipping around.  Years before this when I was a little kid my older brothers had motor scooters and go carts but I was too young to drive them. Then by the time I was old enough, my brothers had moved on to cars and I was left with an old frame of a scooter in our decrepit barn just sitting there with no wheels, no seat, and no engine.  It was just a metal frame with a wooden floor and rusty handlebars that I would stand on (no seat) and pretend to drive.  I started asking my dad if we could put wheels and an engine on it and he made the mistake of saying that he sometimes saw engines in the window at the Goodwill Store downtown in Muskegon when he would walk by it on the way from his shop he worked at to the bank to cash his check on payday.  So every payday I anxiously waited for him to come home from work hoping he had an engine for the scooter.  But it was always either he forgot to look, or he didn't go by the store that day, or he checked and they didn't have one, Things were not looking good for me and my scooter.  

One day my luck changed dramatically, my brother Bob was going to work at the Grand Haven State park for the summer and he was also going to rent an apartment in Spring Lake so he needed something to get him just the few miles from Spring Lake to Grand Haven.  He and dad had found the Cushman somewhere for $50 it was decided this would do the job and they loaded it in the trunk of the car and brought it home.  It was big and heavy so that says a lot about the size of the car trunks in the sixties.  I was mesmerized by it, it had a full body that was painted as I already said in two tone paint, a floorboard with a clutch and brake pedals and a shifter on the side of the body to go from first gear to second- that was it, two gears.  Top speed was about 45 mph going downhill on a paved road.  The plan was for Bob to drive it for the summer then I was to buy it from him in the fall for $50 from the money I earned working for Tony Grumet.  I was really excited about this and couldn't wait to get it.  It seemed like an eternity before the scooter came back to our house and when I gave Bob the $50 he said I owed him another $25 for parts he had to put into the scooter to get it running.  I knew nothing about the extra $25 and only had $50 so I insisted that was all I would pay.  Bob got really mad about it and he and dad talked about it for what seemed like a long time, finally it was decided I only had to pay $50 but Bob was still sore about it.  

I was instantly the hit of the neighborhood; I had friends like never before.  Four or five guys would just drop by regularly to ride the scooter.  I was pretty proud of it, especially at first.  Yes, it was old fashioned, but it ran well when I first got it and was a lot of fun to ride on the little road in the woods behind the house.  We soon found out it was no nimble machine though; it was made for blacktop and the dirt road through the woods was a challenge for it.  It was easy to spill over in soft sand and really heavy to pick up right again.  But there were almost always two guys on it so between the two of them it was not too hard.

In time though things started breaking on it and I was not any good at fixing them.  One of the problems was the twist throttle on the handlebar broke and dad said there were no parts to be had for it.  I eventually rigged up a string to pull to make the engine run fast or slow but it didn't work very well and eventually I would just ride it with one hand on the handlebar and lean over with the other hand on the carburetor trying to control the throttle which made it even trickier to drive in the sand.  It got harder and harder to start but the final straw was when the old barn collapsed on it from too much snow on the barn roof.  At first I thought my Cushman survived the collapse with flying colors and I was pretty proud of it.  (Unlike the fiberglass boat that someone had unfortunately stored in the old barn that winter).  But a new problem began to plague the scooter, whenever I would go over a bump, I would get a sharp poke in the butt.  I thought maybe a coil spring in the seat had broken in the barn disaster. and when I went over a bump it poked up from the padding and got me.  I looked and looked for something that was poking me and just couldn't find it.  Finally I noticed that the engine also sputtered whenever I got the poke in the butt.  This lead to see that the wooden bottom of the seat had been cracked from the barn collapse and that the seat would flex down over the engine when I hit a bump and on the top of the engine was the spark plug with an uninsulated spark plug wire which would contact the coil spring in the seat when it flexed down.  So I was getting a shock from the spark plug in the butt whenever I went over a bump.  That and the other problems pretty much killed the love of the scooter at that point.  Besides, I was getting interested in cars by then.  So dad made a swap with my mom's cousin Monte Beegle who wanted the scooter for parts to make a motorized trike, I think he needed the gearbox.  We got in the trade a 1958 baby blue Mercury Park Lane convertible with a huge continental kit on the back.  The thing was bigger than the Titanic and it was now my car.  The only problem was I wanted a little sports car, but that's another story.