Some things in life make no sense. My dad was logical and perceptive but for some reason in 1959-1960 he fell in love the the Corvair and decided it was his dream car.
Our family had never bought anything brand new but he took the entire family to an auto dealership in Stockton. After haggling for a bit of time, he purchased a brand new rear mounted air-cooled Corvair. Ours was the 4-door sedan and my dad adored the car which had been manufactured to compete with the Volkswagon.
My brother and I were teenagers so we discovered that my dad planned to do all the work on the car. These were the days when someone could actually work on his own car. From 1960 until he passed away in 2007, my father had a relationship with Corvairs. At one point, he had two in the garage, one in the backyard, and one in the front driveway.
The first thing that was discovered during the almost 50 years is that if anyone owned a Corvair, then it was leaking oil. I am not a mechanic; I left that to my father and brother. So I don't know the reason there was always an oil leak. I do know whenever I talked to someone who had owned a Corvair or worked on a Corvair the topic would be how to stop the oil leak.
As we approached the age when we could drive, we had the Corvair but my father also got and restored a beautiful 1957 Chevrolet. It was the best car ever. My dad would drive it and get stopped on the street with offers to buy the car. Those were the days when K Street was still a place to cruise in Sacramento. As I decided to set up my driving test, my dad suddenly took the steps and sold the Chevrolet. Suddenly there was no car for my brother and I.
Then my dad was transferred to Minot, North Dakota. I was not leaving California for North Dakota so I stayed behind and my brother stayed with me. After six months with the family in North Dakota, my dad said he would give us a car. Of course, it was a red convertable Corvair. We drove it from North Dakota back to Sacramento and it was one hot car - but it was a Corvair!
The Corvair was a small car. At one point my mother drove us to town in New Mexico to do some shopping. She was a reluctant driver to say the least. There was a part of her who truly believed driving was a plot devised by the devil. On the particular day, the wind was gusting at 20-30 miles per hour. As we drove down the freeway, suddenly our car was surrounded by tumbleweeds larger than the Corvair. My mother went weaving quickly through the tumbleweeds, away from other cars, screaming and yelling all the way pulled into a gas station to save ourselves from the 'Rolling Tumbleweeds.' We sat in the gas station parking lot for a long time waiting for the wind to go down.
During another voyage in the Corvair, she came to a Stop sign down from the railroad tracks. She had all of us in the back seat and we were going to the pool.. She started to pull forward but the car would not move. She kept giving it gas and nothing happened. Finally there was a knock on the driver's side window. It was the man driving the truck behind us. "Lady", said he, "You ain't going anywhere. Your engine has fallen out. The Corvair's engine was held in by three motot mounts and my mother's were broken. We were stuck.
I'm not sure what one does when a family member has such a strange addiction. It was clear that my father would always have Corvairs.
But during a visit by all three children a couple years before he passed away we had a talk. We told him that he could not die until he got rid of his Corvairs!" When he passed away he was down to just one.........
What was your strange addiction in life?
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