My First Car

We lived a half mile south of the Cove store on the Westside Highway and our Grandma Ollie lived at Cove where the post office occupied the basement of Mrs. Anderson’s house.  I didn’t remember her name, so we’ll just call her Mrs. Anderson, because a lot of the people at Cove were Swede or Norwegian, it having been a fishing village before there were any roads.

Olive B. Corbaley was our Grandmother’s name, but we mostly called her Grandma Ollie.  One day she told us: “Oh kids, there was a terrible car accident by Mackie’s store and look what I found in the ditch”.   Us kids would often get off the school bus at Cove to visit with her and then walk the half mile home.  She pulled out a small white box and slowly removed the cover to reveal a bloody finger, lying on a bed of cotton,scaring us to death,  my sister Molly, my brother Mike and myself.

There wasn’t any accident.  Grandma had cut a hole in the bottom of the box   where we couldn’t see and spilled ketchup on her finger.

There was never a morning, that she wouldn’t sit on the edge of her bed and light up a Chesterfield.  It was her ritual as was a bottle of Olympia beer in the afternoon, which was my Grandmother’s undoing.  Mrs. Wigan lived across the road and you could see her pull back the curtain a bit to spy on Grandma drinking her beer.  Within minutes, Grandma’s drinking would be all over Cove and beyond.  We called Mrs. Wigan the Cove “newspaper” because we had a party line of 15 and she was always listening in to pick up the latest gossip.  We could hear her heavy breathing and knew it was Mrs. Wigan.   Since she was hard of hearing, you had to yell into the phone: “Mrs. Wigan, get the hell off the phone”.  Because she was a church going person, the expletive was needed to speed her departure, which ended with a bang as she slammed the phone down.

Grandma Oli had an old green Chev sedan which she couldn’t drive anymore because of her eyes being bad.  Mom borrowed Grandma’s car so many times that it just lived at our house where it slowly rusted away at the bottom of the peach orchard.  Because of being Vashon, Mom never took the keys out of the ignition and pretty soon they were frozen in there, which made it easier for Mike and me to borrow Grandma’s car at night.

We would take it down to the other end of the island to race it on the straight stretch called Wax Orchard road.  Mike and I would have to push the 1941 Chev to the top of the peach orchard to start it up, so Mom and Dad wouldn’t hear it in the house.

“Slow down, slow down”, my brother yelled at me.  “She’s going to fly off the road”.  We had hit 90 mph and the old girl was loping like “Galloping Gerty” , the Tacoma Narrows bridge which eventually came down in a high wind.  The car’s front shock absorbers were shot.  The old knee shocks were never much good anyhow, a victim of poor design.
But that wasn’t my first car, which was a 1936 Plymouth coupe with a rumble seat.  This one had cost me $25.00 from Jerry F. ; whose cousin was Sunny Jim, the Northwest’s smiling face on all those peanut butter jars.

It had no muffler, just a straight pipe that ended at the rusted out floor boards of the rumble seat.  This was very handy for when I was hauling friends to Seattle Prep;  as the Battery street tunnel was a great place to turn off the key and wait for the gas to build up in the straight pipe and then explode in a ball of flame that shot out the rear end, warming the feet of the guys in the rumble seat, a name that has been lost to antiquity, having been the spindly seat behind the carriage where the servant or footman rode.

I got bored with the Plymouth and sold the car to Tony Raab for the same price I had paid for it, $25.00.  My good friend, Dave Church told me the next day that Tony had taken my old car out to the gravel pit on Maury Island and jumped out at the last minute as he sent it over the cliff, just for the “hell of it”.  I was mad as a hatter when I saw my wrecked Plymouth lying upside down on the beach.  I headed for town to hunt Tony down and found him at the Dairy Queen.  Tony’s dad was the richest man on Vashon, having a car dealership, and Tony had the attitude that he could do anything he wanted, because his dad would pay for it.  Tony’s cronies had the same attitude.  I could see it in their faces when I walked up to Tony, jerked his jacket down around his shoulders and popped him one, right in the face.  “My dad is going to sue your dad”, Tony yelled at me for tearing his brand new suede jacket.  I didn’t care; he had wrecked my good car for no reason.

 It’s no sin; but I owned 22 cars between the ages of 16 and 22.

Sixty years later, the county removed several wrecks from the beach at the marine park.  I spotted where my wrecked Plymouth had been and found the master cylinder for the brakes and the bent distributor shaft which I made into a fire poker.  Both of which grace my fireplace.