Memoirs of a Tracy Kid
Alan Hubbard
One of my most vivid memories from my youth, as with most young men, was my first car — not the first car you regularly drove, but the first one that was all yours.
I never had my own car while in high school but I was sure envious of my friend, Dick Drackley, who had several cars while in high school.
His first was a ‘48 Ford coupe, flathead V8 which had a 3-speed transmission and a 2-speed Columbia rear end. He paid a whopping $50 bucks for it but it ran, albeit without a heater which meant driving with the windows down in the winter to keep them from frosting over on the inside. Dick, my friend Randy Vogel and I spent many hours in that old coupe touring the streets of Tracy during our junior and senior years of high school.
I didn’t get my first car until I was in college. During my freshman year, I used my motorcycle to get around Ames, Iowa, where I was attending Iowa State University. This sufficed but wasn’t so great during the winter.
I finally got my first car at the end of my sophomore year when I was 20 years old and it was a beauty — a 7-year old 1962 Oldsmobile 98, 4-door hardtop with a big 394 Sky Rocket engine. My dad found the car at Salmon’s Chevrolet in Tracy and we split the cost of $500, using money I had saved up from my summer job the year before.
It was a one-owner car with 75,000 miles on it, which meant I would probably be its only other owner since cars from that era were seldom able to go much more than 100,000 miles before being junked.
This car was at the top of the Oldsmobile line, which was just below the Cadillac in the General Motors lineup. It was fully loaded with every option you could get except air conditioning. It was in great condition, but as with most cars with that many miles on them, it was starting to use a quart of oil every 1,000 miles which soon became every 500 miles by the time I passed the 100,000 mile mark.
The only downside of this car was its terrible gas milage. With a four-barrel carburetor, it was a gas guzzler and could only get about 15 miles a gallon on the highway and even less around town.
Being an engineer, I was determined to do all the maintenance on this car myself. Fortunately for me, my roommate, Ron Swank, grew up on an Iowa farm and had the experience to train me on the finer points of the mechanics’ trade.
The first thing I did after driving the car back to Ames was to change the oil, which I had only done before on my motorcycle. Ron and I drove to the nearby football stadium parking lot and parked the front of the car over a storm drain. We crawled under the car and Ron pointed out the drain plug at the back of the oil pan which I carefully removed with my trusty socket wrench.
We then watched the oil drain into storm drain without giving it a second thought. You might be appalled even thinking about doing this today but you have to remember back then, used motor oil was sprayed on all the Lyon County gravel roads during the summer months just to keep the dust down. This was considered “recycling” before the days of recycling!
I then screwed the drain plug back into the engine oil pan and Ron showed me how to replace the oil filter. Then after I added 4 quarts of new oil, we were back on our way until the next oil change in 2,000 miles.
As the miles slowly accumulated on my car, the mechanical problems started to become more challenging. But as I became more confident of my abilities along with my trusty Chilton repair manual, I would tackle each new challenge with enthusiasm as long as it didn’t involve the transmission, which fortunately never had a problem.
The first problem was a leaky radiator. While most people would have just taken their car to a radiator shop to get the radiator repaired, I fixed it myself. I had to re-solder the top of the brass radiator where a crack had developed between the radiator core and the top cover. I already had experience in soldering which I first learned in my THS shop class and perfected over the years building radios.
Many people today would be surprised at the thought of a repair shop just devoted to repairing radiators. Yes, back in the middle of the last century, there were repair shops that just dealt with radiator repairs. And there were muffler shops and shock absorber shops.
People today expect their vehicles to go well beyond 100,000 miles before needing any serious repairs and their tires to last 50,000 miles or more before needing to be replaced. Before the days of stainless-steel mufflers, it was not uncommon to need to replace a rustedout muffler every few years at the local Midas Muffler store — especially if you lived in the northern states where salt was used for snow & ice removal. When your shock absorbers wore out after about 25,000 miles, you’d head to your nearest Monroe Shock Absorber store for new replacements.
And before the day of radial tires, bias ply tires ruled the day and you were doing well to get 15,000 miles out of them before going to your nearest Goodyear, Firestone, or Sears tire store for replacements.
But I digress, so back to my “Merry Oldsmobile.” The next problem that arose was a knocking noise coming from the engine which is never a good sign. The worst case is when it’s from a bad crankshaft or piston bearing. Fortunately for me, with my roommate’s help we traced the noise to a faulty valve rod. Apparently, a cam shaft lobe had become worn to the point where it was no longer causing the push rod to rotate and it was wearing to a point where it rested against the rocker arm, thus causing the noise. Since it is very time consuming and expensive to replace the cam shaft itself, I just had to remove a few bolts on the rocker arm and simply replace the push rod, which only cost a few bucks. This became an annual affair which went on for the several years that I had the car.
Next, I tried to help improve the gas milage by plugging up two fuel jets in the back two barrels of the four-barrel carburetor. This did help improve the gas milage a bit, but at the expense of poor acceleration thereafter when trying pass another car at highway speeds. This was a heavy car that obviously needed a beefy carburetor.
Then there was the time when I was a newlywed and didn’t have enough money for a new set of tires which were badly needed. To save money, I went with retread tires which today are never used for passenger vehicles. The cheaper tires lasted for a few thousand miles before one of the treads separated from the rear tire while going from Ames to Des Moines, Iowa, to see my wife’s parents. When the tread came off at highway speed, it ripped the fuel tank filler pipe out of the fuel tank which necessitated finding a replacement fuel tank at a nearby junk yard. So much for saving money on “new” tires.
The last issue with the “Merry Oldsmobile” was when part of the exhaust pipe rusted through and fell off a few feet short of where it ends near the rear bumper. I was visiting my parents in Tracy with my wife at the time and I improvised with a couple of feet of rain spout from my parent’s garage strapped to the car frame with some wire previously used to bundle my newspapers when I was a Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper carrier.
Talk about a kludgy repair, it worked for the most part but we had to keep the windows partially open all the time because of the exhaust smell coming back into the car from the trunk.
I was able to keep the car going until it had nearly 150,000 miles on it. The final trip was to a junk yard in Peoria, Illinois where I left it and got $50. This being my first car, it was like attending the funeral of a close family member. But for the $500 purchase price and a lot of sweat equity over the 7 years I owned it, the 75,000 miles I put on it were probably the cheapest miles I’ve had on any of the cars that I’ve owned since. I replaced the Merry Oldsmobile with a new white 1977 Chevy Caprice 2-door hardtop which you might still see driving around the Tracy and Walnut Grove areas by my cousin Ron Kassel and his wife Betty on their frequent “date nights.”
Next month: When Rubinoff & the Harlem Globetrotters came to Tracy
