LIFE WITH MY CHILDREN PART 10

I'll back up a little bit tonight..remember when I said I bought an old car for $50? Here's the story of how that happened.

Mom and Dad came up to Ypsilanti for a weekend over Memorial Day and took Tammy and Buddy back home with them. This would have been in 1962, so Buddy was not yet three and Tammy was four. My week's vacation was the week after the Fourth of July, so I took a bus to Indiana. A trip that took four hours by car was eight hours in a bus! The whole week I was there, I was dreading the bus trip back home with two little kids.

I really enjoyed the week. It was the longest stretch of time I had spent with my family since I left home when I was eighteen. Tammy and Buddy loved it there. Mom and Dad lived in the country and the kids could...and did...stay outside all the time. Besides that, my kids loved my brothers and sisters who naturally spoiled them rotten.

On Saturday night, I went to an auction sale with Mom and Dad. The kids and I were leaving the next day. Not long after we got to the auction, Dad, who had been hanging outside with some friends, came in and said he wanted to show me something. I followed him outside, and he showed me this car that was going to be auctioned off that evening. Dad and his friends had looked it over and said it was in pretty sound shape. I only had $25...just enough for bus fare home for me and the kids. Dad said he would bet it wouldn't sell for anymore that $25. It was a green Plymouth, ten years old and had over 50,000 miles on it.

Dad went in and talked to Mom and said if I could buy it for the $25 I had, they would come up with enough to get me back home. So when the car went up for auction, Dad bid up to $25 on it...and won the bid. On Sunday, I had to call my boss at home and tell him I'd be a day late getting back into town...because I had bought a car and had to wait until Monday to get the title transferred and license plates. This cost me another $20 plus $5 for a tank of gas.

The car seemed okay, but Dad still worried about me driving it 200 miles while we still were not completely sure of it. So, my brother, Jimmy, who was 17, decided to go back with me. He had been going back and forth for a couple of years anyway, spending a few months at a time with me, hitchhiking both ways.

We had no trouble getting home. The car ran like a dream...that time. I kept it for a year...when on the way home, on another weekend trip Indiana, it threw a rod. I was still able to coax it home, driving ten and fifteen miles an hour all the way from the Irish Hills to Ypsilanti...roughly a normal one hour trip, taking us over 4 hours.

The summer of 1963, just after I had coaxed that junker back home, I traded it in on a 1962 Chevy with 5,000 miles on it. I kept that car for a little over a year, trading it in on a brand new 1965 Chevy.

Oh, I paid Mom and Dad back the money they had loaned me to buy the little junker car, at $5 a week. I was really proud of that little car, even named it Bessie, and was sad to see it go when I had to get rid of it.