‘Man I still wish I had that car’

Hang onto that minivan, Ford Fairmont or Chevrolet Chevette. You just never know, but there could very well be a day when you say, “Man I still wish I had that car!” Frankly, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve said that.

I was cruising through Craigslist the other day and gasping at the prices some of the original VW Beetles are demanding. The Super Beetles especially were surprising. Wasn’t that long ago when the Volkswagen crowd shunned them with their constantly wearing-out MacPherson strut front end, perpetually-leaking wrap-around front window and oversized plastic dashboard. Ick. A used Super Beetle could be snatched up for a measly $500 (running and reasonably straight). Now I see them commanding thousands. When I was a young man I can recall picking up unwanted early 1950s-vintage Beetles for a couple hundred. Now I see a semi-decent vintage example can demand as much as $10K. And that includes the previously unloved ’64-’66 years.

A family friend used to come around in his father’s old ’56 Chevrolet. The ’57s were collectable and there is some interest starting on the ‘55s, but we all knew, of course, that nobody would ever want a ’56. So when on the days he didn’t drive it, he parked it out in the barn. For whatever reason he finally just stopped driving it and there it sat for years. One day one of my brothers went sniffing around to see if he still had it. He did, and they walked out to the barn and — there it sat; flat tires, covered in chicken poop with the interior destroyed by rats, cats, mice and who knows what else. It was too much work for my brother, so he walked away. A few more years went by and it was finally sold, chicken poop and all, for a ton of money.

I asked Dad about that as we were riding around one day. As we cruised down Beach Drive in Port Orchard, Wash., he pointed to a big bank that climbed up away from the road. “That used to be more level” he said, “but the county came in and filled it in order to build Hillcrest Road. But underneath all that dirt are a handful of old Model As.”

What? Really? Dad had a garage full of Model As when I was young and I loved them. But alas, the old Fords had been dumped back in the 1950s and early ’60s and were surely nothing more than rot now. Turns out Dad had scooped up the occasional four-door back in his day for nothing (nobody wanted them back then), sometimes for as little as $4. He bought them for the parts — fenders, doors, some of the fancier trim — and then would scrap the rest of the car. Who knew that within a few decades they would be commanding large sums of money?

And so it goes that I often think back to my old Mini Countryman (the original, not this nasty thing they call a ‘Mini’ these days), ’63 Beetle, Karmann Ghias, Jeep Scrambler, vintage Dodges, Plymouths — you name it and I probably had one. How often do I think, “God, but I still wish I had that rig!”

But most of those rigs are obviously worth a few bucks now. What about some of the other cheap, used cars I’ve had? Are those going to be new additions to the “dang it! Why did I ever sell that?” That two-door, DOHC Dodge Neon I had? My old 1989 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon? What about all those old AMC Eagles I see running around Alaska. (Man, we sold a lot of those up here, didn’t we? Nowhere else in the country do you ever see those anymore.) Currently, I get a lot of laughs for my old ’86 Jeep Cherokee. Absolutely nothing special about her. Everybody tells me to sell her (yes, she is a ‘her’ and I affectionately named her ‘Mallory’). But she’s straight, relatively rust-free, no cracks in the glass, no rips in the interior and dang it, I don’t care what anybody thinks, I love that old Jeep. And besides, I can dream of it being worth a vast fortune in the future, right?

It’s funny to think about some of these ridiculous cars we see nowadays and wonder if, in the future, they’ll ever be worth anything. “Dude! Where did you pick up that old Honda Element? Are you going to restore it?”

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.