<VV> Steve Thompson's column from an old Autoweek - Very Corvair related

[Marc Marcoulides]

Good thing I never did anything like that when a 63 Spyder was new...

-----Original Message-----
>From: Sethracer at aol.com
>Sent: Jun 2, 2008 2:56 PM
>To: virtualvairs at corvair.org
>Subject: <VV> Steve Thompson's column from an old Autoweek - Very Corvair	related
>
>>From Autoweek.com - From the May 1 issue. Funny read.
> 
>At about the time Lyndon Johnson was photographed holding his hound by the  
>ears and reneging on his promise not to send American boys to fight Asian wars, 
> I was driving a '63 Corvair Monza Spyder _convertible_ 
>(http://www.autoweek.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080513/FREE/547876201/1053/FREE#) . White 
>body, white power top,  lipstick-red interior with boy-racer gauges in aluminum 
>dash, four-on-the-floor,  turbocharger. Babe-magnet-wise, its only allure in an 
>era when convertibles were  everywhere was, well, nothing. But my girlfriend 
>liked it and seemed amused by  my obsession with its mechanical details. 
>
>My girlfriend's father wasn't  as amused when, in a moment of hormone-fueled 
>stupidity, I got it into boost on  the way out of the cul-de-sac where they 
>lived and, while turning onto the  street, managed to spin the car in a perfect 
>180. With the engine dead and acrid  tire smoke in the air, I glanced over at 
>her father as he shook his head,  grimaced and closed the front door to their 
>house. 
>
>That Corvair suffered  other indignities in my hands, but, luckily for me, 
>space limits listing them.  Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed killed the market 
>for the car, so it  stayed in the family when I went off to college, 
>eventually swallowing a valve  up in the Sierras while my father was driving it. It was 
>dispatched out of  memory when I signed up to serve in uniform, and I never 
>found out what happened  to it. 
>
>In the intervening centuries between then and now, I didn't think  much about 
>the Corvair, until recently, when an online ad by a nearby  fantasy-car store 
>caught my eye. They had a '63 like mine, red, restored, on  sale for about 17 
>grand. I had to go look at it. Soon I was standing next to it  with my friend 
>and longtime colleague Dan Cozzi, engineer-writer. We stared at  it.
>
>"Dangerous car," he muttered. 
>
>Maybe so. And that's precisely  why it was so valuable to me. My father used 
>it as a rolling schoolroom to teach  me what not to do and how not to do it, 
>and I knew, every second in the driver's  seat, that it would bite back if I 
>made a mistake. Today our cars are far less  "dangerous." Too bad the same is 
>not true of today's drivers. Surely, there is  no connection there. Surely . . .
> 
> 
>Probably copyrighted - So don't place it on a web  site!
>
>
>
>
>**************Get trade secrets for amazing burgers. Watch "Cooking with 
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