Ode to a ’63 Buick

They just don't build 'em like that anymore...

Back when I was broke – a period that lasted from about 1960 to the late 1970s – I’d buy cheap used cars and drive them until something died, blew up or caught fire and the car quit running.

Didn’t fix anything; just went out and bought another car.  

During those years I drove a Ford Fairlane that had been rolled in a wreck and had to have the hood bolted down to keep it from flying off at high speeds, an old Chevy three-quarter ton pickup with windshield wipers that didn’t work, a Cadillac convertible with giant tailfins (a car I wish I owned today), a VW beetle with a rooftop luggage rack that resembled some kind of chicken coop and two sports cars – a Triumph and an Austin Healey.

But the best bargain I ever got was a 1963, four-door Buick LeSabre.

At first glance it appeared to be an old cop car because the bottom was a strange black-and-blue color – like a well-developed bruise – and the top was white, but there was something wrong with the paint on top because whenever it rained the white paint ran down the sides of the car, which made it look like Rodan took a giant dump on it.

(BTW: The car in the picture above was not my LeSabre – I got the picture off the internet – my LeSabre never looked that good.)

If I went on a date I had to inform some poor woman that the passenger door didn’t work, so she’d either have to enter the driver’s side door and slide across or enter a back door and climb over the seat.

The headliner had a rip in it and one of my less agile dates caught her foot in it and ripped it even worse, so the headliner material hung down like a half-raised stage curtain which I didn’t mind because it was behind me and didn’t block my view of the world outside my windshield.

I bought the LeSabre hoping to get six months out of it, but it ran for several years before dropping a transmission right in front of the Sutter Club in downtown Sacramento and I’ll get to that story before we’re done.

So I’m a knucklehead doing knucklehead stuff with my knucklehead friends and I’m driving an ugly-ass car I don’t care about, but no matter what I do to it the thing won’t stop running.

Those combined factors led to some stories and we’ll start with the beer keg.

The beer keg

I might have been low on funds, but was still high on creativity, so me and a friend decided to have a picnic/croquet tournament and got a keg of beer for our guests.

Previously, we had a big success with a beer-drinking-softball game where we put garbage cans full of ice and beer behind each base and every time you reached a base you had to pick up a can of beer and carry it around with you until you drank it.

Hit a home run and you were responsible for four beers.

If you couldn’t finish four beers before you had to play defense, you had to carry them with you to the field. It was a brilliant way to handicap the better players, level out the playing field and get a buzz on at the same time.

Frankly, I don’t see how we didn’t become Commissioners of Baseball, but some people have no vision. I’m pretty sure big league baseball would be way more interesting if the players were hammered by the ninth inning.

Anyway…

When the croquet tournament was over we had beer left in the keg and we weren’t giving the keg back to the liquor store until it was empty. Waste not, want not and all that.  

So we took out the back seat of the LeSabre and put down a bed of ice, stuck the keg in the middle of it, got some plastic cups and drove around with the hose and nozzle draped over the front seat, drinking beer and on one occasion offered a guy on a street corner an ice cold beer on real hot day, which I believe brightened up his mood immensely.

Did I mention we were knuckleheads?

The van Gogh incident

Depending on where you live in California, it’s possible to get by without air conditioning in your automobile which explains why a friend drove a green, fastback Mustang without AC.

For whatever reason – beer might have once again been involved – we decided it would be funny to drive around on a Sacramento afternoon, well over 100 degrees, roll up the windows and pretend we had air conditioning. Looking back, I’m not real sure what the point was except maybe making people who pulled up next to us wonder why we were sweating like Wayne LaPierre on his way to an IRS audit.  

Then we got the idea of going to the friend’s apartment complex and sitting in the sauna because driving around in a Mustang with the interior temperature of the Mojave Desert wasn’t hot enough.  

Amazing what drunk, bored people will do for entertainment.

Next, we decided to have a water balloon fight that ranged all over the apartment complex and I decided to leave the complex to get more balloons or beer (can’t remember which) and my friend was in the back seat when my older brother jumped out of the bushes, ran alongside the LeSabre with his head in the passenger side window. I think he might have been trying to climb in the car, but I don’t know for sure because I saw an opportunity and took it.

I hit the brakes.

I did not inform my brother of my plan, so he kept running with his head inside the car and when the car stopped, his progress was abruptly halted when he hit the passenger-side wind wing – those little windows the used to put on cars – with the right side of his head.

The metal edge of the wind wing caught him behind his ear where it attached to his skull and sliced the hell out of it. So then we had to go to the emergency room to get his ear stitched up and a when a nurse asked what cut his ear, we said: “A Buick LeSabre.”

The snow tires

Back then I used to go skiing at Lake Tahoe and driving a car with rear-wheel drive in the snow is not ideal. Same goes for lying down in the snow and putting chains on the tires when you reach the snowline.

So being a genius I bought studded snow tires – just what they sound like, tires with little metal studs sticking out – and being a lazy genius, kept those studded snow tires on all year round.

During the summer those studs would put little holes in asphalt if it was hot enough and during the fall those studs would impale leaves which would stick to my back tires which – from a distance – made those tires look fuzzy.

You could also hear me coming down the street because those studded snow tires made a whirring sound which I not only got used to, came to like. Screw the speedometer, you could tell how fast you were going by the sound the tires made.

The breakdown

The LeSabre would have been a good choice if you’d been a Mafia hitman because the trunk was big enough to store at least three bodies – four if you packed carefully or had access to a chainsaw.

With room to spare, I kept all kinds of stuff in the trunk including: a softball bat, glove and cleats, swim fins, a mask and snorkel, cans of Pennzoil for when the LeSabre ran dry, an oil can spout, various rags and items of clothing and on occasion, a set of golf clubs.

So I was driving down 9th Street in Sacramento, there was a giant clunk and the engine kept running, but it no longer seemed connected to the rear wheels so I figured the transmission had committed suicide and coasted to a stop by the right-hand curb.

Smack dab in front of the Sutter Club.

The Sutter Club has been around since 1889 – I’m going to guess it’s named after John Sutter, the guy who discovered gold – and has a pretty exclusive membership that includes people like governors, Supreme Court members and modern-day robber barons.

It was lunchtime and people were starting to show up to eat while I piled all my shit on the curb while waiting for a tow truck. Turned out it was not the look the Sutter Club was going for — homeless guy abandoning Rodan-shit-on cop car — so the Sutter Club doorman came out to tell me to move my car and I told him if he could get that pile of crap to move another inch, be my guest.

The tow truck showed up (driven by a younger brother because he was repossessing cars for living at that time) and hauled the LeSabre off to the scrap yard, but my ‘63 Buick gave me one final gift: I got extra money from the scrap yard because the LeSabre had so much metal in it.

They just don’t build ‘em like that anymore.