LTD (III)

My current car is now a beatermobile. It’s more than a decade old and I’ve put 407,000 miles on it. It’s hauled the family, dogs, and luggage; it’s hauled a different VB team when their bus broke down at our gym and they needed a ride to their hotel; I’ve hit various birds including a turkey vulture, rodents, and even killed two deer with a simultaneous hit a year ago–and it was still drivable. I still get 24-27mpg with it. God bless the Ford Taurus X

It made me think about My Beloved (No, not my wife–my first car), Immortal Beloved, that wonderful 1973 Ford LTD. Sadly, 1970s cars couldn’t really handle the salt and winter roads of the US Midwest well, so that by the summer of 1988, there was some rust on my car, visible and not quite visible.

One night driving down Harrison St. in Davenport, I heard the sound of metal on concrete–not a good sound when you’re driving 30mph. I stopped and saw that the right side of my rear fender had fallen off–the connector to the car frame rusted through. That’s a problem. You can’t drive around scraping half a bumper on the road. How do you fix it?

Well, in my trunk I had a tire iron. I also had a coat hanger. I undid the hanger, looped it through a rust hold in the middle of the bumper and then tied it in a knot to the tire iron, sticking the iron back in the trunk and then closing the trunk. The iron couldn’t get out and the hanger wire was secure. I was able to drive it home with no problem. …had to drive it that way for a week as well (shhhh….).

In the end, Pete took it over to his shop and welded the bumper to the car which defeated the bumper’s purpose in cushioning impacts, but made the car street-legal again. I’ve never known anyone else to use a tire iron and coat hanger to hold a car together. Call me Jim MacGuyver.