I want to provide some background for this article. When we were in the military, we purchased a brand new 1970 VW Squareback. It was the nicest vehicle we had ever had and we loved it. Eventually we left the military in 1971 and drove the Squareback to our eventual destination…San Jose, CA. After several years we purchased a nice Chevrolet Sedan for my work and the Squareback became our family car for Kathy and the kids. It was extremely reliable and economical to drive. Later on, we purchased a nice Oldsmobile station wagon and that left us with my work car, the station wagon and the Squareback. I guess Kathy’s parents saw this as an opportunity. They ask if we could lend them the squareback. I didn’t think it was for a weekend, but I did not believe that when we lent them the car, we wouldn’t get it back for years. I replaced my Chevrolet Sedan with the VW Bug Convertible. So, when we moved to Grass Valley, we had the Oldsmobile Station Wagon and the VW Bug Convertible. We were experiencing serious financial problems and the day came when they repossessed the Oldsmobile Station Wagon. An ugly scenario. This left us with the VW Bug only. Not a good situation. We contacted Kathy’s parents regarding the Squareback. We thought that they shouldn’t balk and they should make arrangements to bring the car to us right away. The day came when they brought the Squareback to us. Remember we bought this thing brand new in 1970. This was now 1981. I don’t know what our expectations were, but let’s say that Kathy and I were underwhelmed with what they brought us. The car looked like it had been in multiple accidents. There were all kinds of repairs that had been made to the exterior of the car. It looked like one of those cars that you see in demolition derby’s. For the life of me I don’t know how it got in this condition. Kathy and I didn’t even know what to say. Thank you for taking our car and turning it into a pile of junk. I look back to this day and cannot believe what they did to that car.
Let us move forward a bit. One day we are going to the store in Auburn and we take the VW Squareback. There is me and Kathy, Marti, Nanci and Jeffrey in the back seat. We are driving toward Auburn on Highway 49 and it is around 5PM. There is a lot of traffic on the road. As I approached the light where we would make a left hand turn to go to the grocery store, I felt a “clunk” and at the same time I saw a wheel go by the car on the driver’s side. I watched the wheel cross two lanes of oncoming traffic and roll into a vacant field where the grass and weeds were about 5 feet tall. The good news is the wheel didn’t run into any of the oncoming traffic and simply disappeared in that field. We came to an abrupt stop having only three wheels left on the car. It was really shocking. It just so happened that a good Samaritan was following us and saw the entire thing. He stopped his truck behind us and came up to my window and said that he was going to try to find the wheel and see if he could get it back on the car. I really didn’t know what to say. This guy went across the road and found the tire and brought it back to our car. It turned out that the lug nuts that are supposed to hold the tire in place had worked loose and the wheel came off. He did the best he could to get the wheel back on the car and told us to take it easy and go forward about ½ mile to a tire store where they could fix the tire. We did that and they were able to fix the tire and put new lug nuts in place.
Our feelings were all over the place. I was thinking how fortunate we were that we didn’t hit anyone and that the tire didn’t hit anyone or anything. That no one got hurt. We were just scared and confused. I was also eternally thankful that the fellow who helped us happened to be right behind us. What a fortunate thing for us. He was awesome, he got us on our way and we never heard from him again. It was unbelievable, honestly, I was looking for a silver bullet but never found one… if you don’t believe in a higher power this event would certainly cause you to at least consider such a thing existed. We have spoken about this on many occasions, laughed about it and feel extremely fortunate that things turned out the way they did. As bad as that Squareback was what we didn’t know was that in the not-too-distant future we would no longer have the Squareback and it would be replaced with the Jeep Wagoneer. Talk about a bad sequence of events. Out of the frying pan into the fire. Maybe we were not supposed to have a safe and reliable car for the family. It is amazing that we actually survived both the Squareback and the Wagoneer.
