LOOKING BACK: OUR 1973 VOLKSWAGEN BUS

After two ‘63 Ramblers, a 1965 Chevy Bel Air station wagon, a gas guzzling 1973 Ford LTD Country Squire Wagon, a Dodge truck, a Coronet station wagon, a white Rambler American, and even a Triumph TR-4 that sat in the driveway, my father finally brought home the car that would eventually serve as our family vehicle: a butterscotch colored 1973 Volkswagen Bus.

He had passed on the chance of getting a VW Bus once before, instead choosing a Dodge pickup truck purchased from Forge Motors on Route 18 in the small town of East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. “That truck had a crack in the engine and always overheated. I tried to take it back, but Forge Motors would have no part of it. That guy was a crook,” my dad always maintained due to that experience. Roughly two years and three serviceable cars later, he was again presented with the opportunity to purchase a Volkswagen Bus, this time from a tiny dealership on Bedford Street in East Bridgewater, located between the old fire station and the Joppa Grille. In order to get the bus he traded a 1965 Rambler, “an extremely dependable car as long as it was not raining,” my father would later say, along with $900.00. “The VW Bus was very unusual,” my dad said thinking about the day that he first looked at it. “It had an automatic transmission, which was unheard of for a car like that at the time. It also had a Porsche twin-carburetor engine. I was really impressed by the Porsche selling point, but eventually the joke was on me. It would cost three times as much every time I had to have it repaired because it needed all Porsche parts.”

That Volkswagen Bus quickly became an adopted member of our family, and although we owned it for only five years, my memory of the VW Bus is as synonymous with my childhood as our old house on Pearl Street, our dog Daisy, my baseball glove, and my two sisters. “We did just about everything in that thing,” according to my father. “It had lots of room, was economical by standards of that time, and could go anywhere.” The Volkswagen Bus took us to Niagara Falls, made several journeys to Plum Island at the northernmost point of coastal Massachusetts, took two summer trips to Sebago Lake in Maine, traveled back and forth to Wild Harbor in Falmouth on the Cape, and made many trips to Horseneck Beach down in Westport, Massachusetts, usually followed by visits to Lincoln Park where I was convinced by my one of my sisters to go on the roller coaster even though I didn’t quite meet the height requirement. Coincidentally, that was the last actual roller coaster I have ever been on. We often drove the VW with the sliding side door open, giving the bus an adventurous Jeep-like feel even though it was one of the most ridiculous, awkward looking vehicles on the road. The bus took us on multiple ski trips, transported a piano to our house, and served as my father’s work vehicle. He moved the spare tire from the back storage area to the front copying the design of the older versions of the VW Bus for protection in the event of a front end collision, and constructed an extremely bizarre homemade roof rack built with a combination of old ski racks and wooden planks. The bus also had a distinctive “Go Fly a Kite” sticker on the back bumper from a kite supply store in Newburyport, Massachusetts, near Plum Island. It was a hard vehicle not to notice. Notorious for its lack of heat due to the rear engine, air-cooled design, my father engineered a floor to ceiling cardboard partition including a sheer plastic window between the front of the bus and the passenger section in the back in a futile attempt to maximize heat. “Once we were coming back from Waterville Valley after skiing and it was so cold in the bus that ice was forming on the inside of the windshield,” according to my father’s account. “Due to the wind-chill, it had actually become colder inside the Volkswagen than outside, which was already freezing.”

“We had lots of good memories with that bus. It was very utilitarian, very useful,” remembers my dad. “Everything could be packed into that thing including the dog. She had lots of room to roam around and make herself comfortable. She loved to travel in it. It was all good memories with that Volkswagen.”

By the time I entered the seventh grade, my dad had sold the Volkswagen Bus in favor of a sporty 1978 Honda Accord hatchback that he bought from a family across town that we were friendly with. It was also at this time that my parents informed my two older sisters and me that they were splitting up for good and moving forward with a divorce. Suddenly, it seemed, we were no longer kids. My sisters were now high school age and I had the intuitive feeling that the better years of my childhood had probably rolled away with our Volkswagen Bus. There was no longer any interest in the five of us traveling together on any family excursions, especially with the vehicle that took us on those trips now gone. Looking back, it seems like whatever feelings of unity that remained had somehow been kept intact by the continuity that our Volkswagen Bus provided and it was no longer there to keep bringing us together.

I don’t remember what eventually became of the bus, the person who bought it, or even watching it drive away. I was probably getting acclimated to the adult reality of learning to move forward.

It is impossible, however, not to look back and think of growing up without the presence of our 1973 Volkswagen Bus. In many respects, that bus became a member of the family. “It was my favorite car,” said my dad reflecting on the VW Bus decades later. “Not because of its inherent usefulness and it was certainly not my favorite car because it was cheap to fix. It was my favorite car because of the good memories we had with it. It was like our home on wheels.”

1. If you like my articles, please hit the “LIKE” button. It will help to let me know that you are enjoying my writing.

2. I welcome and invite you to COMMENT.

3. And please SHARE these posts! This gives added support to my Substack page and also helps to add new readers.

4. Thanks so much to anyone who is reading Journeys with Jay!