Author: Dan Brekke

Thom and I went out to the Oakland tow yard today, a place with which our Colorado-based insurance claims people deal so often that they didn't even have to look it up when they told us where we'd need to go. The place, on G Street and 87th Avenue, is a bit surreal. The property is surrounded by chain link and barbed wire. The main edifice looks like the former headquarters of an established manufacturing operation, combining some elegant deco details with a squat sturdiness. The building looks like it would stand up to a 2,000-pound bomb. The rest of the facility consisted of sprawling workshop buildings roofed with corrugated metal. One of them housed what looked like newer cars in decent conditions–maybe vehicles that had been towed for being illegally parked. Behind the buildings was an open concrete-paved lot littered with what I took to be stolen, abandoned, and wrecked cars. Our '93 Honda Civic fit right in. Whoever stole it left the body, engine and wheels intact, and except for tossing the interior contents around, didn't take any personal belongings. What they did take–the glove box unit, the stereo speakers, an electrical fuse panel, a door-latch assembly–seemed almost surgically removed. If we'd known they'd wanted the stuff, maybe we just would have turned it over and avoided the drama and incovenience of dealing with the police and the impound lot. An insurance adjuster is going to look at the car next week, and we'll decide whether we're going to fix it or let it be declared a total loss and–yeah, I feel a pang when I say it–just let it go. 

That's next week. Now here's the rest of our Berkeley household automotive history. I came out here in 1976 and was really a resident in early 1977. The first few years out here, I didn't own a car and on the comparatively rare occasions when I drove anywhere, I borrowed friends' cars. I got a job driving a cab in Oakland in 1980 and spent a couple years tooling around in beaten-down Ford Granadas. In 1983 or so a friend gave me her horrible old 1977 Ford Falcon–this was the era when Detroit thought the answer to the influx of small Japanese cars was to take its few compacts and make them bigger. That car starred in a few moments of career and romantic drama but eventually got towed and I never missed it. Then in 1985, just a few months before we got married, Kate and I bought a car together. And thus the life list resumes:

1985 Ford Escort station wagon. It was sort of a sturdy car of a silver color, with a 5-speed manual transmission, and we got about 145,000 miles out of it despite two cracked head gaskets and a penchant for becoming disabled at critical moments. We eventually gave it to charity. 

1998 Dodge Grand Caravan. This is the teal-blue vehicle that's in the driveway right now. It's got miles galore on it and bears the scars of backing into a tree or two along the way. Given our less than sky-high expectations, it's held up well and made 20 or 25 round trips up to Eugene while Thom was up in college there.

1993 Honda Civic hatchback. The little red car stolen earlier this week in Oakland. We bought it about six years ago from our neighbor, who was moving up to a BMW station wagon. The car had 133,000 miles on it and showed signs of a botched repainting job. But mechanically it has been great and still gets 42 miles per gallon on the highway. Thom learned to drive in the car, essentially, and to drive a stick, too. It's a little low-slung given the last decade's penchant for giant military-assault-style backwoods-adventure boxes, and the '93 does not come with a passenger's side airbag, which always made me a little queasy. 

2003 Toyota Echo. My dad's car, really. He just gave up his driver's license, and my brother Chris and I just drove it out here from Chicago. We'll see where this one fits into the family.

One of our cars–a red 1993 Honda Civic hatchback–was stolen earlier this week in Oakland. The police there called today to tell us it had been found and towed to an impound yard. The only word on its condition was the note that an officer read from the report: “damaged and stripped.” We’ll go see what’s left tomorrow. The incident made me think of the family cars I have known, from birth to today. Here goes (not listing my siblings’ vehicles; just ones that I remember having ridden in as a kid ones that I’ve owned):

Early ’50s Plymouth sedan. A big ugly gray thing. Mom and Dad owned this when we still lived in Hyde Park, and it came out to the south suburbs with us in 1956. In my dad’s life, it was preceded by a couple of earlier Plymouths, a Hudson, and a Studebaker. For whatever reason, he seemed to really detest this car.

1958 Ford station wagon. A two-toned red-and-white job. It had a three-speed manual transmission. I remember Dad taking Mom (and assorted toddlers and post-toddlers) out to a remote-seeming stretch of gravel road to try to teach her to drive it. I remember she let up on the clutch when Dad was walking in front of the car. Mom never learned to drive that car.

1963 Ford station wagon. A pale metallic green number that Dad bought used at Van Drunen in Homewood. It had an automatic, and this is the car Mom learned to drive and got her license in (November 1965 at the age of 36). Eventually the reverse gear failed and my parents managed for awhile without it–which required some planning when they were parking, etc.

1967 Chevy Impala wagon. It was gold and had a 327-cubic-inch V8 with dual carburetors. My dad still speaks fondly of this car, which sometime later wound up driven into a tree at the end of our driveway.

1970 (?) Chevy Kingswood Estate wagon. An unwieldy metallic blue beast with faux wood trim and a 450-cubic-inch gas-guzzling power plant. My brother John, newly licensed and driving in the snow for one of the first times, slid it into a light pole in Park Forest. Then a few months later he was at the wheel after school when another kid plowed into the rear end. The Kingswood was so heavy and sturdy that the other car took nearly all the damage. I think that accident marked its end as a family member, though.

1972 (?) Chrysler wagon. Metallic brown. All I remember about it was that it had very efficient air conditioning that my dad liked to keep on whenever the outside temperature was above about 62. Also, I got the car stuck in a bottomless mudhole on a local in the middle of the night and managed to ruin the transmission.

1966 Ford Custom 500 sedan. I’ll defer to my brothers about the exact model. This was a tan sedan with Ford’s small-block 289 V8. It was our first “second car” and the three of us drove it hard. Or maybe “into the ground” is more accurate. I totaled the car on Governor’s Highway in Homewood on a slushy day when I was cut off by a van with a “Hear the Reverend Moon” bumper sticker; I skidded into a car stopped to make a left turn into a high school parking lot, a collision which prevented me from drifting into two lanes of fast oncoming traffic or into groups of kids lined up to catch their school buses.

1960-something Oldsmobile sedan. Or maybe it was a Buick. It was horrible and dark green. It was the second card that replaced the wrecked Ford. It should have been vaporized by the Death Star instead of Princess Leia’s beloved Alderaan.

1974 (?) Volkswagen Dasher. A nifty, nimble little navy-blue thing that acquainted us (but especially Dad, who paid the bills) with the manifold mechanical frailties of the VW products of the era.

1975 (?) Volkswagen Beetle. A clumsy, loud little Miami-blue thing that further acquainted us with VW’s shoddy approach to assembling vehicles. The Fuehrer would never have tolerated such goings on.

1970-something Volkswagen Rabbit. Another light blue car, but actually much sturdier and more reliable than its stablemates. I really shouldn’t count this one because it came along after I moved away to California.

Next time: Cars–The Berkeley Years