The Grover Wheel

This post is a combo of two cars owned by my father. The cars are both Saabs, and his story flows from one to the other so intrinsically that I felt they belonged together (and I only was able to find photos of the second Saab). He always called them his “Saab stories” with a grin on his face. I hope you experience the same joy reading them as he always had telling them.

Saab Story Part One: 1960 Saab 96

This one’s interesting. I believe it was 1967 or so and getting late in the year towards the winter

The car was a 1960 Saab, faded red. It’s a very radical design. Or was… Still is, I guess. it seemed, as I envisioned it, the engineers might have had a brainstorming party (accompanied by lots of beer) to introduce features like front wheel drive with rubber doughnuts instead of U joints. A window shade over the radiator hooked up to a small chain for cold weather to allow the engine to retain heat.

A three cylinder, two-cycle engine (with two-cycle oil can rack under the driver’s seat, more about this later), equipped with a freewheeling lever to lessen the engine wear due to engine braking. This was rather exciting going down hills if that freewheeling gear wasn’t working. It also had a camping kit option, allowing cut-out pieces of plywood to transform the front seats to face the rear seats, making a sort of level sleeping surface.

How did I end up with this car? Roman Spytech [Editor’s note: I have no idea how this was a real person. I cannot believe any human ever had a name like that, but both my parents swear he was real] owned it. He studied landscape architecture with my friend, Walt Rogers, and me. Drafting at UMASS’s Wilder Hall transitioned to ten cent drafts at Barcelona’s local pub, which led to a road trip where I expressed to Roman how I was impressed with the car. He says “you want to buy it?” I said “no money.” He said, “how much can you spare?” I said, ”how about $35?” He said, “deal.”

Fast forward to last class Friday morning and had hopes to drive to Medway for a weekend. The temperature was around zero. I needed to top up the gas tank for the trip. The attendant said the two cycle oil went in the tank slowly, like glue. I should have altered plans, but was anxious to get home. I drove almost to Belchertown when the car ran out of premixed gas in the line and began cold, unmixed, gas (the glue didn’t mix) and seized. I had AAA and this was, I think, the second time I called my agent. Being that cold, there were a lot of cars that needed help starting that morning.

So finally, after waiting a while, the unhappy AAA driver towed the car to Belchertown, a few miles further. He said it was the best he could do, and he dropped the car roughly in the center along the common. There was no garage there either. He said it was too busy to haul to Amherst. So I stopped in a bar that just happened to be across the street and had a glass of wine to warm my insides for the trip back.

That was a bad idea. I had to thumb a ride to Amherst, back to my apartment. I was shaking quite a bit until I was picked up by a passing girl with Jeep. I had one roommate where I was living that year, in my senior year of College, and he said we could use the ‘53 Chevy that I sold him when I bought the Saab to tow the Saab back 20 miles from Belchertown with a nylon strap. Dave was a military man and a masochist (luckily). He said “okay. I’ll steer the Saab back with no heat, in the dark with temperature around zero.” Still, the Chevy wasn’t much warmer. The heater struggled to keep a hole in the ice on the windshield about eight inches wide. In the end, we made it back to Amherst. Thank God.

Once there, I drove to Medway in the Chevy, stopping occasionally to thaw my toes. The ‘survived’ trip ended in the evening. It’s normally a 90 minutes trip. My day had started out at 9 AM in the morning and I arrived that day in Medway somewhere around 9 or 10 PM.

Saab Story Part Two

Having an intimate knowledge of the Saab’s two-cycle engine sensitivities, you would think I would avoid another. But it was quite safe for its time, with shoulder belts, roll cage (of sorts) and vanguard front-wheel-drive. After all, it was made in the land of the Volvo! And besides, we had a wealth of spare parts with Saab number 1 resting in Medway. Dad says “I know a guy at work who might have one for sale” and, sure enough, he did. The owner took me on a hair-raising test drive, proving the merits of front-wheel drive and leaving me anxious to own another one (all for a bit over $100!).

Must have been late winter of 1967 and 1968. At some point, as I opened the hood to check something, the strap broke and the hood fell onto the ground, disconnecting the headlight and flasher wires. I managed to repair the strap and re-connect all the wires (red to red, etc.) but from then on it would blow a fuse when directional were activated. History suggests the prior owner’s past wiring ‘Micky Mousing’ (where red does not necessarily go to red) when the headlight began to flick off and on instead of the directionals.

In the beginning Spring semester, I began courting Donna. The desire to be with her led me to drive the beige 1960 Saab to where she lived in Plainville. After classes at UMass one Thursday evening, and since the Saab had the previously-described bed kit, I slept in her driveway. It was a pleasant discovery Friday morning as she was on her way to school. Maybe it was the cool car [Editor’s note: I doubt it], but our romance grew and led to a proposal that meant we were to be together. Rather than grow separately, we were married to allow us to grow together.

The ceremony was held on July 20th, 1968, in Ellisville, Massachusetts in a grassy meadow at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. After the ceremony, the Beige Saab transporting us first to a condo in Stow, Vermont belonging to Walt, our best man, and then towards Bar Harbor, Maine for the night at the coincidentally-named Sibley Pond, New Hampshire. Disappointed with Bar Harbor, we headed up Route 1 to discover Edgewater Cabins in Sullivan, Maine. A magnificent place on Frenchman’s Bay with a cabin for $6 a night.

After our honeymoon road trip, we stayed in a farm house apartment in Norfolk, MA. Roughly a month after we were married Donna bumped something with our little car. Then the red Saab number one got to contribute a new hood to the otherwise-beige Saab number two, giving it the new name “Little Red Riding Hood.”

During our time in Norfolk, I worked in Boston at Whitman and Howard mostly circulating or calculating cut-and-fill. I asked Donna if she would mind me returning to UMass where I would return to acquire a Master’s in Landscape Architecture (where I could also avoid cut-and-fill calculations as a profession). She, and admissions, said yes.

We searched and found an inexpensive three-room apartment in North Hadley for $80 a month. Many stories about that place. Maybe some other time.

The Saab had an extreme aversion to moisture and would run badly (or not at all) when confronted with it. It would foul spark plugs, thus requiring Donna to remove and remove and install a spare plug in order to get to her work at as a waitress at the Stables restaurant in Hadley while I was in classes. Once, I made the mistake of entering a car wash, forgetting the car’s moisture sensitivity, and ended up pushing it out of the building’s exit to dry.

Since Donna was 18, we planned a trip to Albany from Amherst where she could celebrate the legal purchase of a glass of wine. Heavy rainstorms on the way almost stalled the engine on the Mass Pike but revving the engine saved the trip. In one of life’s continued ironies, I got carded but she did not. Again, the bed kit saved us from lodging expense, but parking in the dark landed us on Government Reservoir property where an early morning tap on the frosty window from a neighbor awakened us to the need to exit quickly before we were arrested by The Man. Donna’s wedding ring was hoisted above the covers to attest to our recent bond of matrimony and justification for our camping together. The scramble to leave began. Dress, throw bedding in the back seat, leave Saab warmth, into a frosty field, turn and dismantle the bed kit and re-install the seats before jumping back in and gambling that the car would start. Thank God for a good night’s rest and a successful escape.

Otherwise, the car was relatively trouble-free until a trip returning from Medway to North Hadley when we began to lose power around Belchertown. Since it’s only about 20 miles, I thought maybe I could just use 2nd gear. I got to a large hill next to Amherst college when the second engine seized. Not from cold this time, but not getting enough gas and thus not enough lubrication. Finally learned my two-cycle lesson. Enough already. That was the end of my Saab Stories.