1/6/23
Newsletter #211
The Crack of Dawn
When I was a little kid my Grandma Olga finally got her driver’s license at the age of 60. My parents bought her a used, chocolate brown, 1960 Rambler American, which still remains the ugliest car I’ve ever seen.
The Rambler is one of the oldest models of automobile in the world, and was originally a brand of bicycles manufactured by the Jeffery Co. Thomas Jeffrey built his first automobile in 1897 and named it the Rambler. He commercially manufactured Ramblers from 1902 to 1914, then sold his company to the Nash Motor Co. Nash was known as a maker of trucks, and was the largest supplier of U.S. military trucks during WWI. Now Nash had a popular automobile, too. Nash then purchased the Hudson Motor Co., then Willys-Overland that produced Jeeps, and with the combination of the four companies formed American Motors, whose president was George Romney, later the governor of Michigan, and the father of Mitt Romney.
My grandmother managed to get so many tickets and into so many accidents in ten years that by the age of 70 her driver’s license was revoked forever. For the next 25 years my grandmother would remark bitterly, “Driving was my one joy.”
Once American Motors was formed, the name Nash was dropped, and like so many American automobile brands before it, such as Hudson, Studebaker, Packard and Willys, Nash automobiles disappeared. Over the course of time as they all got junked. Finding a Nash automobile became almost impossible. A Nash car in any kind of shape was a collector’s item.
On Oct. 23, 1929, a cargo ship crossing Lake Michigan sunk with 238 brand-new Nash cars on board. Seven sailors died. Due to the extremely cold temperatures at the bottom of the lake, the cars were almost perfectly preserved. In 2005 the ship and the cars were discovered. In 2016 the cars were recovered. This is the largest collection of Nash automobiles in the world.
Other interesting artifacts found at the bottom of the Great Lakes were a 1916, WWI German U-boat – the only submarine to ever sail in the Great Lakes – that was hauled around the Great Lakes for years after the war as a tourist attraction, that finally just sunk. Also, 75 Douglas fighter planes that were used as target practice during WWII. Archeological divers are still finding bits and pieces of ships from the War of 1812.
My grandmother’s ugly brown Rambler sat in our driveway decomposing for years after Grandma Olga had her license revoked. Early one winter morning when I was 14 years old my father woke me up and told me to pump up the four flat tires on grandma’s Rambler. In the freezing cold I inflated all four tires with a bicycle pump, which is no mean feat. Meanwhile, my father and his good buddy Gene, who owned a hardware store in downtown Detroit, were hastily selling the Rambler to a drunk, middle-aged black couple who had wandered into Gene’s store and asked, “Have you got a car for sale?” Gene said, “I’ve got just the car for you.”
I finished pumping up the tires as the weaving drunk couple took possession of the car. My father, Gene and I stood in the freezing driveway watching the brown Rambler drive away. I was completely soaked in sweat – pumping up four flat car tires in the cold should be a Winter Olympic event. Dad and Gene had idiotically smug looks on their faces. They’d just hustled a drunk couple out of a few hundred dollars for a total clunker, weren’t they the pirates of Wall Street.
The brown Rambler, meanwhile, got to the end of our street and stopped — at least the taillights worked. Instead of turning right on the one-way, major 50-mph road, the car turned left and immediately got into a head-on car accident. My father and Gene’s smug smiles transformed into horror. Thankfully, nobody was hurt. But since my knuckleheaded father had not yet had the pink slip notarized, he was responsible for all the damages. Schmuck.
And thus went the way of the Rambler.
A fine day to one and all.