I hadn't driven very long before the transmission on the DeSoto wouldn't shift up from low gear until it got warm, nearly half way to my destination. Along El Camino Real the 7 miles or so from my apartment to Stanford’s Engineering Corner where I parked and walked past Ken Kesey's psychedelic painted Morris Minor every day. I stopped at a shop on El Camino, and they claimed to fix it for $35. A month later, in November 1966, the transmission was acting up again, so I was in the market for another car. Looking in the newspaper car ads, I found one that seemed to be exactly like the one I had. I had to go look.

At the dealership was a 1957 DeSoto exactly like mine, without the faded paint and rust. I couldn't believe it! It was only $250 and with my old DeSoto as a trade-in for $100, I had a nearly new looking car for $150. The interior was as nice as the exterior with chocolate brown seat covers. I swapped tires, putting my good ones on the car, and drove off.  The first quarter break was rapidly approaching, and I planned a trip to visit relatives in Livermore and Stockton, and then, head for Yosemite, and other parks like Sequoia and beyond all the way down to Los Angeles and back over the long Christmas holiday break.

The car was pinging upon acceleration, but I continued to put in regular gas like I had with my other DeSoto, thinking it was all right. On the first day of the trip, I had to drive up a canyon road to get to the Central Valley where I was going to spend the night at Livermore. I thought I would try out my like new car's power as I drove up the canyon. The hemi engine responded well, although pinging more than usual, until it suddenly gave out a loud "bang," and I immediately pulled over. I figured I had blown a piston. The engine may have been overhauled to higher compression or may have just required premium gasoline all along.

I kicked myself for not having changed gasolines, got a ride to a phone and a tow truck to take the car to a Plymouth garage in Pleasanton. My second cousin's husband came and took me to their home in Livermore. sympathetic to my situation. They even gave me a Christmas gift when I had nothing for them. Finally, the father got angry and told me to leave. I had outstayed my visit, and was using his mother-in-law’s garage bedroom to sleep. He angrily made me sleep that night on a cot in the breezeway between the house and my great aunt’s room.

Going to work the next morning, he dropped me at an intersection where I could hitchhike back to that dealership in Sunnyvale where I bought the car. I bought back my old car for $100, luckily still there, and drove it, on the terrible tires, back to Pleasanton and had the engines switched. While the engine was being pulled out, I sold the power steering for $50 and paid $75 for the swap, so didn't do too badly getting back on the road again. I went back to my apartment and spent the rest of the holiday without a road trip and with my school budget badly damaged.

My three roommates and I were in entirely different majors and we weren't getting along at all. So I threw in with a sophomore transfer student in an efficiency apartment down the hall who was a wrestler and the son of a wealthy lawyer and judge family from Oklahoma City. Jim had a silver gray 1965 Chevy convertible with red interior. We had a double date together in San Francisco for Chinese New Year that was a lot of fun. He was underage, but the two roommate Stanford nurses we took out and I were over 21, so we were served in a bar without any questions.

No one asked Jim what his age was, 19, I think. He acted like it, a rather spoiled rich kid who wanted me to take care of the apartment for him. By the time I entered the third quarter, I had enough of him and moved in with a couple of alcoholics on the third floor sharing a bedroom with their 14-year-old son, Darryl, with a nerve damaged right arm. Although his mother hoped my being there would help his attitude. It didn’t, and certainly not, my schoolwork. He was gone much of the time to stay with his hippie married sister in Mendocino County and hang out with, he said, "The Doors."

I started working at LenKurt, GTE (formed by two Stanford graduates using their first names) as a quality control engineer in May, 1967. I continued to date one of the nurses, Donna Eason, from Saskatchewan, after she and her roommate moved to a different apartment and I got an apartment in Redwood City. In August, the plant shut down for two weeks every year. I offered to drive Donna to her home in Saskatoon, but she declined, telling me we couldn't travel there together while unmarried.

One of the techs at work, Nick Hordin, told me he was driving to see his mother in Rochester, NY, attend Expo 67, go to Boston, New York City, and maybe, Washington DC, in a nearly nonstop drive across the United States and back. Did I want to go along? I jumped at the chance. But thought his itinerary too ambitious and driving nonstop foolhardy.  Said he’d done it before without sleeping.

Donna didn't have a car, so I left the DeSoto with her and we took off in Nick's 1961 Austin Healey Sprite. The car had seen a lot of miles and the top was coming apart. By the time we stopped at a bug filled phone booth in Nebraska so that he could call his girlfriend back in the Bay Area, I had been wondering why I couldn't see very well. My glasses were covered with bug debris from bugs coming through a gap between the top of the windshield and the top, peeling off gradually.

We stayed over one night with my parents in Wisconsin and the next day drove through Sault Ste. Marie and into Canada. Stopped for rest a bit in Ottawa and then stayed in a fraternity basement with a cot for two dollars a night for two days at Expo 67 in Montréal. I stopped in an amphitheater to dance with a girl to a steel drum band, putting my camera with pictures in it down while we danced. Someone stole the camera and my pictures. So, I have none of the trip or after that until Darryl's mother gave me one nearly identical to the one my mother had given me, a Kodak bellows camera that I could operate and change the film in, vintage 1940.

Nick went to see his mother in Rochester and a friend of mine picked me up to stay with him and his wife in Painted Post, NY. When Nick arrived four days later, the Sprite had no top. It had ripped off on the way down from Rochester. The sun blistered my face during the day and the cold wind on the back of my neck at night was tough after that, but that was just the beginning of our troubles.

We had a little rain in Western Pennsylvania. When we stopped to eat in Cleveland, the waitress took pity on me, I looked so bad. But after coffee, we drove on to my cousin's place near Dayton to his surprise late that night. We didn’t stay. Driving across the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, the next morning, a pin dropped from the hydraulic clutch and Nick couldn't shift gears except by synchronizing. We stopped at a parts shop and got a repair kit, but continued on without installing it, with a makeshift fix that worked.

In Western Nebraska, water hit the windshield, and we overheated, exiting the next exit where there was a shop. It was the heater hose connection gasket blown. Without a replacement gasket, Nick blocked off the heater with a cutout piece of tin can. We had no heat. Not finding any shade in Denver we started out of town on I-70. While climbing into the Rockies, the pin dropped out of the clutch again and we limped to a shop. This time, Nick installed the replacement kit for the hydraulic clutch. But he decided he didn't want to drive further into the mountains. We reversed course back to Denver, and then north, to I-80 where the going was easier, losing nearly a day.

Beaten by sun and wind, we stopped at a Sears in Salt Lake City and bought some canvas and duct tape. Taped a new top on the metal struts that were left from the old top. Going out across the flats south of Great Salt Lake, I literally stood outside the passenger side window and held the tape down on the windshield to keep the sun's heat and the wind from peeling it back. That makeshift top stayed on the car for several weeks after the trip.

We drove way into the night several times. Nick stopped at a cowboy bar and wanted to go in. I couldn't sleep in the car, waiting, dead tired, so we moved on. Much later that night on US 50, we eventually stopped in Dayton, Nevada. There was no grass to sleep on, anywhere. At a ballfield, I slept on some rolled up wire fence. When I think about it, there could've been a rattlesnake under that spongy wire bundle. The next day, we made it home, getting the best mileage of the whole trip coasting down out of the Sierras.

Donna had left the lights on the first time she drove it, so the DeSoto was sitting there with a dead battery that Nick jumped for me. One day at a car wash I frequented, I lost my gas cap when the attendant didn't put it back on. I came back and they replaced the cap. It was coming up on Thanksgiving and I wanted to take that trip I had missed when the engine failed. This time with Donna. Before we left, I had the car tuned with points and plugs.  This time, I dropped off a gift for the girls in Livermore and we didn’t stay.

Everything went well as we drove into the Central Valley and to Yosemite. But as we drove out, the car was acting badly, missing. When we got to Fresno, it was barely running as we left each stoplight. I stopped at a shop where they had a computer analyzer. I was skeptical, but the DeSoto was running smoothly very quickly without hurting my pocketbook. We left and headed for LA. I think the guys that did the original tuneup, messed up. 

I was getting tremendous gas mileage and happy for it. But as we came down Grapevine Hill into Hollywood, the telltale sign of running out of gas, jerking, told me to exit on Hollywood Boulevard. I put the hood up, and shortly, a well-dressed, German accented man stopped in a Mercedes. When he took me to get gasoline at a quaint looking 1930s style gas station, he told me that he had been stranded in the middle of the freeway for a couple of hours and no one had stopped.

The gas tank had collapsed because the gas cap I was given as a replacement was not vented. At speed, the fuel pump created enough vacuum to collapse the tank. After that, I had to fill the tank every hundred miles because the gas gauge always read half full and I didn't know when I would run out. Following that rule of thumb, I didn't.

We ended up in Venice for the night where I got two motel rooms according her request. We got out on the pier and she got her feet in the ocean, taking off her stockings, but it was cold and windy so we retired early. The next morning, we drove to Tijuana. But it was still cold and windy. We drove around, but she didn't want to get out of the car, afraid. There was virtually no one out in the streets anyway in that weather. By nightfall, we were back in Hollywood where I got two cheap motel rooms near Hollywood and Vine. We attended the premier of Grand Prix at the Cinerama dome theater close to Grauman's Chinese theater. Donna complained of losing her stockings at the beach and not having any. But it was Hollywood and people were entering with shorts and jeans.

After torrential rains near Santa Cruz where I had to drive through flooded streets, we arrived home in time for both of us to get back to work the next morning.

Over the Christmas holidays, visiting another second cousin in Stockton, I left one cold morning early to go to her sister's house in Oakdale. A block way, I stopped at a stoplight with no other traffic in sight. But I saw a pickup pull up behind me rather than alongside--strange? When the light changed green, my cold engine stalled because of that missing choke. But the driver behind me accelerated and ran into the back of my DeSoto, bending one of the tail fins without breaking the three taillights. He had his young daughter in the truck and was going to church, he said, so I let them go.

I had been saving my money anyway, thinking of buying a newer car. I didn't fix the DeSoto, but soon began looking for a good used car that would take me a long way. There were Mercedes 300 SL Gullwings available for around $3000, but they were circa 1955 and most required some kind of restoration. A Ferrari would've been nice, but I didn't find any and didn't think I could drive one.

I found a Facel Vega in the San Francisco Chronicle but it evaporated before I could go look at it--remembering that Camus died in one with the speedometer stopped at something like 140 mph.

An exotic I did get to try was a gunmetal gray 1965 Avanti with a Chevy engine with blower and a red leather interior. There was a lag in acceleration that I didn't like caused by the supercharger, I guess. I was priced okay, but I passed on it.

I liked the Dodge Charger, so went to a Sunnyvale dealer and looked at some 1966 models. The salesman wanted to get rid of the light blue with a lighter blue cloth interior one that he offered for $1995. I told him I didn't like the look of the car--a woman's color. As I left the showroom he yelled out, "$1895," I kept walking. Yelled again, "$1795… $1695?" I was afraid he would make me an offer I would take, so I quickly left the showroom with him still lowering his offers.

Roaming up and down El Camino Real to all of the used car lots, I came upon a cherry, white 1965 Buick Riviera. Unfortunately, the salesman was a real potty mouth. I tried to ignore his gutter language. He let me take a drive. While the car had about 40,000 miles, it was very clean and had all of the knobs, emblems and other parts that most used cars seemed to be missing. It drove really smooth and was very tight for a hardtop. At $1595, I thought about buying it, but couldn't stand the salesman and wanted to look further before I made a decision.

In a lot very close to where I lived, there was an eggshell white 1957 Chrysler 300C with a tan leather interior. For $1295, it was in very good shape and a real steal. But I hesitated changing my DeSoto up for a better model of the same thing. I took it for a drive out on 101. The Chrysler was way more powerful than the DeSoto and reached 80 mph effortlessly. When I let off on the gas, it rumbled in a way that told me I would be picking up police wherever I drove. Got two warnings earlier when I lost a muffler on my DeSoto. Like some of the other cars I looked at, today, that car would be worth a great deal, but I passed on it wanting something newer.

Roaming Van Ness Avenue in the City, I saw a Tucker in a showroom I couldn't afford. I dropped in on a Mercedes dealer and found a beautiful chocolate brown 280 SL roadster in the showroom. It was new and its leather smelled it. At $8200, the car was nearly a year's salary, but I could afford it with my savings to put down and a payment plan. Unfortunately, I was dressed in corduroy jeans and an old sweater. They wouldn't  let me try it, thinking I couldn't afford the car by the way I looked. I was unsure of my ability to drive the car, even with an automatic transmission.

In the Sunday SF Chronicle, a full-page ad offered an introduction to Mercedes at the Fairmont Hotel. I attended and had champagne, caviar and flaming clams on the half shell, viewing a Mercedes in the carpeted ballroom circa 1893 as well as the latest models without the 280 SL. No salesman talked to me and I wasn't sure I wanted to talk to one. But I looked and listened.

My boss, Wilhelm Hemminghaus, overheard me talking about going there to another engineer, and said, "Why don't we go together this next Sunday?" Bill was in the German Navy during WWII and had immigrated through Canada, working first at Honeywell in Minneapolis and then came to San Carlos with his wife and daughter. A great guy, but still a bit prejudiced, overseeing about 30 divorced women who worked as inspectors in the plant.

With Bill with us, we had no problem talking to the salesmen. He spoke to them in German. When I told one salesman about my treatment at the dealership. He apologized and told me to come again and they would let me drive the car. He said they would also come down to Redwood City where I lived, pick up the car once a month, and service it. I began to think in my frugal mind what that would begin to cost me and decided not to buy a new Mercedes.

Bill was going back to Germany during the two-week shutdown in August. He told me that he would pick up a new car in Germany, drive it through France so that it would be labeled, “Used," and then ship it back to the States for me. I thought about what it would cost me for a car I might not like or be able to drive, and passed on the offer. Instead, Bill brought back a Volkswagen for his daughter. In 1984, my twin brother went to Germany and brought a 1980 Mercedes sedan back at well under market USA cost. A buy he never never regretted. I got to drive it one day and found it easy to drive.

But there was a better car available in the paper. I had to see it. I found the car in an interior garage in the City. The blue coupe 1967 Corvette 427 435 hp with red line tires, side pipes. a black interior with had  power everything, including steering, brakes antenna, antitheft switch and automatic transmission….  Something that was undesirable in a Corvette, probably accounting for the attractive price--$4000. 

The car had been driven across the country to the East Coast and back. One trip--6800 miles on the odometer. It showed it… Immaculate and smelled new. When I took the beast for a drive, I found that it drove very loud, rough and acted like I could easily lose control as those three carburetors kicked in and so did its tremendous power. I decided to pass on the car as attractive as it was. I needed a daily driver, not a show car. Today, it would be very attractive to have. It wouldn't have survived my driving.

I found a good compromise across the Bay in Richmond at a dealer. A 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado 425 cid 4 bbl carburetor. Dark green with a dark green cloth and vinyl interior. The car had 59,000 miles on it and was filthy from the salesman owner smoking cigars, but the nicotine stains cleaned up nicely and the seats were like new. The car was heavy, but with about 390 hp turned out to be both a very good drag car as well as a high speed runner. The Toronado was $3000, but I got a little bit for the DeSoto when I gave the salesman a ride in it.

I had many adventures in that Toro, as well as car trouble and wrecks that I didn't have repaired for lack of money. But that's another story. Finally, in the spring of 1975, the transmission developed the same problem of having to warm up before it would shift out of low gear at 153,000 miles, and I traded it in on a 1973 black Monte Carlo for $3000 that I drove until 1995 over 300,000 miles.

In the DeSoto and Toronado combined, I gave rides to many hitchhikers. I will tell you about them in the next chapter. Those stories are my reason for writing this book, postponed from 1971 when I started it in handwriting, only to lose the original manuscript after many moves.

Copyright 2020 © Ronald W. Hull

5/28/20