How I Recovered a Stolen Car

Not that it has much to do with my actual family history, but it makes a corker of a family story, and it's all true.  I know because I was there and experienced this stunning bit of serendipity.

It was the fall of 1965; I had graduated from high school in the previous June, and was a freshman at Florida State University.  I went home for my high school's homecoming game, and a friend who was a senior at the high school asked if I would give her a ride to the game.  She then asked if I would also take a friend and classmate of hers.  Of course, I was happy to do both.  More = merrier, right?

As I was getting ready to go, our neighbor across the hall in our two-up-and-two-down apartment building knocked on our back door.  When Mom answered the door, our neighbor, a young single woman, declared frantically that her car had been stolen.  We asked her to describe it; it was, she told us, a dark blue Volkswagen beetle. 

So I went and picked up my friend Martha, and we then headed over to her friend's house, which was only a few blocks from her own house.  When we got there, there was a dark blue Volkswagen beetle sitting in the front yard.  We went into the house, and I asked Martha's friend's parents if the beetle was their car, wondering why it was sitting in the yard instead of the driveway.  No, it wasn't their car.  Then the dime dropped:  "I think I know whose car it is."  Receiving the parents' permission to use their phone (we did not have cell phones in those days), I called Mom and asked her to ask our neighbor for the license number of her car.  I got that, and went out to the VW and checked -- the numbers matched.  After explaining the situation to Martha, her friend, and the friend's parents, I called the county sheriff's office, as the house was located outside the city limits at that time.  I explained the situation and told them where to find both the car and its legal owner.  We all, including the sheriff's deputy I talked to, concluded that some teens had swiped the car and used it for a joyride.  Having run out of gas, they sputtered to a stop in the front yard of Martha's friend's house, and took off on foot.

Then my friend Martha, her friend, and I went to the game and had a great time.  By the time I got home, our neighbor had her car back.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 29: Automobiles - The 1951 Packard

This week's blog prompt presented by Amy Johnson Crow, 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, is "Automobiles."

When I was about four years old, my family all trooped down to the Packard automobile dealership in Pensacola, Florida, where my father bought a brand-new 1951 Packard convertible.  It was turquoise blue, it was large, it was roomy, and it was the last car my father ever bought.  He died in 1954.

The car took us -- my mother, who drove the entire trip, my sister, my brother, myself, and our teenage cousin Rosanna -- from California, where we had been living, to Florida, where mom's mother and sister lived.  Mom needed the support of her family, and wanted to be with them in Florida.  We set out with not only we five humans, but also with my brother's green parakeet, Pete.  Rosanna, about 16 and a great joker, would try to teach the bird, that was not enjoying the trip, to clasp a claw to its forehead and proclaim, "I am not a well bird."  It never sank in to Pete; he was a bird of few words.

My mother had settled everything my father left behind, all the legal and financial fallout of a family member's passing.  She found a new home for our black Cocker Spaniel, Baby, but the man who took her gave me very bad vibes.  Then, as soon as school was out, we embarked upon our journey.  It was not as easy as the trip can be today.  For one thing, the route we took was U.S. 90, which was two lanes, not the four-to-six lane interstate highways we have now.  Rather than zipping along at 65 miles per hour or so, the speed limit was 45.

For another, we had to cross the desert, and the front of the car was decorated with a burlap-covered rubber bag of water decorated with the title Desert Water Bag, in case the radiator overheated.  I remember my brother and sister and me lying on the back seat with our feet out the windows.  We had all the windows down to bring in what breeze was created by the movement of the car.  Cars in those days were not air-conditioned.  We stopped the second night in Phoenix, Arizona, where the temperature that day was 114 degrees F.  The motel room was air-conditioned, fortunately!

In the desert and through much of the southwest, we slept during the day and traveled at night.  In eastern Texas, we passed through some very lonely territory, indeed.  My mother had bought new tires from our neighbor across the street, who ran a tire store.  He swore they were new, but we found out the hard way that they were recaps -- old tires covered with a new tread; he had charged new-car prices for them.  Not a kind thing at all to pull on a new widow.  We saw almost no traffic on U.S. 90 that night, when the car started making a sound that made us think the engine was going to end up on the pavement any minute.  Mom pulled over, shut off the car, and we sat.  Finally, a tanker truck approached, and seeing us sitting on the side of the road, he pulled over and got out to ask us what the problem was.  Mom told him, and that Knight of the Road turned that huge tanker truck around on that two-lane highway with not much shoulder and fences on either side, and headed back to the town of Snyder, Texas, taking time out from his trip to help us.  Finally, a tow truck came and took us into town.

The next day, my mother discovered from the tire man we consulted in Snyder, that the tires were retreads, and that the tread on one of them had come loose and was flapping against the tire well making the Devil's own noise against the metal body of the car.  The rest of the trip passed uneventfully.

The 1951 Packard lasted until the early 1960s.  It took us on many visits to my aunt and uncle in Orlando, and on countless trips to the beach.  One of those trips had consequences for my sister.  She and her high-school best friend were planning on a beach day, and my sister asked Mom for the car.  Mom allowed her to use the car with one strict order: not to take the car onto the beach itself, where salt would attack the undercarriage with corrosion.  A week or two after the beach trip, my sister went to the drug store to pick up her pictures of that day.  In those days, we had to take the film from the camera to a processor -- usually the local pharmacy -- to be developed.  You paid for all the pictures they developed, whether they were any good or not.  My sister was so proud of her pictures, she couldn't wait to show Mom -- but that eagerness got her grounded for something like a month.  There in the pictures was the car . . . sitting right on the salt-filled beach sand.

 

 

This is a painting I commissioned from a childhood friend, Michael Goettee, who is an accomplished artist specializing in cars and the Southwest.  He has won many awards, and his paintings are in the collections of many galleries across the country.  ('51 Packard, by Michael Goettee)