OK, I admit it, I killed several VW Bugs back in the 60′s and 70′s. The fire dept had to extinguish one in Holtvill, Calif. and I still managed to drive it to Dallas before it gave up. In Dallas I patched up the poor thing and limped it back to Washington, DC where it died in front of my girlfriends house a smoking hulk. The best of the VW stories happened one Saturday night in Virginia. I was coming back from a coffee house where I played guitar and sang other people’s songs. Yep, I was a folksinger. My buddy Carl had come along that night and we were just getting the Bug up to speed when I heard Carl click his seatbelt. We were just cresting a hill and doing around 45 mph when I saw four head lights lined up across a two lane road. That was all she wrote. Things went real fast for the first split second. The girl driving the GTO on the wrong side of the road, over the double yellow lines, on the hill, on the curve, doing 65 mph in a 45, managed to lock up her brakes and swing the rear end of her car around like a giant baseball bat. I had managed to just miss her front grill. She swatted me deep into center field. Both front tires of the VW laid down right where we hit and the front of the Bug went away. One minute I was going south at 45 and the next I was headed north at about the same speed. We took out a small billboard and began to roll down a small embankment. I don’t remember just how many times we slowly rolled down it, I just remember Carl saying he’d had enough of it and opening his door to stop the next roll. The next thing I recall was this girl with her face at my window screaming. She hadn’t killed me in the wreck so now she was going to scare me to death. Almost worked. When I got back up on the road I could see her car was in two pieces. There sat the frame and engine and next to it was the body with two people sitting in the front seat. Except for the two people it looked like something you’d see on an assembly line in Detroit. The fact that all the cars came apart most likely save our lives. We went to a near by farm house to call the police and she called a wrecker service. I didn’t listen to her conversation but I did catch that her uncle was the wrecker driver. When the wrecker pulled up to the scene a guy gets out with a rubber mallet in his hand and looks at the two halves of the GTO, right away goes to his knees laughing. We he regains his composure he tells the girl, “I think you’re going to have to tell your dad”. When she called she had asked him to come fix the car so her father wouldn’t know about the accident. I wasn’t in much better shape myself, I had borrowed my sisters car and was going to have to tell her it didn’t exist anymore. I carved one more notch on my drivers license.
Killing VWs
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