From what I remember of Mr Kuhn I’m wagering this was a very difficult day for him. I’m sure a lot of fuel pretty much instantly became explosive vapor and it lit off. A fuel line had failed and sprayed fuel all over the hot air cooled motor. “Bob” that’s my dad, “there’s a problem with the vw”. One day we got an urgent call from Mr Kuhn. My dad, the resourceful guy he was had an opportunity to rent the extra car on a monthly basis to one of his teacher buds for a little extra income., A Mr. Not common in the 1970’s, at least not in our socioeconomic circle. Somehow we ended up as a family with an extra vehicle. What memories! Mom and Dad had a 1968 bug, Baby Blue, a pretty solid example actually. Somewhere in time a Royal Blue Karmann Ghia carrying a 10 year old boy with an ear spanning grin is pushing by that cemetery with that familiar staccato whistle exhaust ringing through his boyhood trying to find 3rd gear. They’re both on a rise overlooking county rd 87. the sounds, the sensations, the gear grinding! It hits me hard as I write this because I just now connect the memory dots in my mind with the fact that my dear dad is buried now on that road in a little church cemetery at the 4 Square Church of God in Boonsboro. I don’t expect you’d know much about Boonsboro Missouri.īut let’s suffice to say a ten year old driving the Karmann Ghia up and down the road with his dad at his side was no threat to animal, mineral, pedestrian, farm implement nor passenger conveyance. Dad would actually let me, a 10 year old boy, sit in the driver’s seat and run the ghia through the gears up and down old county rd 87 thru Boonsboro Missouri. You know, I just caught a whiff of leaded gas, hot oil and mildewed seats as I write this. As I write this I can see the car and the road and my dad as vividly as if they were presented before me at this very moment. It had some bondo here and there I’m sure and I vaguely remember him painting the car in Royal Blue Krylon or Rustoleum or the 1973 equivalent. My earliest and also as I think of it, some of my fondest memories of air cooled engine adventures began in my dad’s 1963 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia coupe.
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