21 Cars 3 – Volvos

Cars 3 – Volvos

In 1965 in the Navy I bought my first Volvo car, a maroon 1964 4-door model, and joined USAA to get a loan from them for financing.  I drove this car in FL, and finally totaled it by crashing down an overpass after fasting for growth in my Christian faith at Whiting field, en route to church.  In the crash I suffered a fracture of my left thumb on the steering wheel, and was taken to the Naval hospital at Pensacola, where I was hospitalized for several days.  A flight surgeon repaired the thumb’s broken base with a pin protruding from the skin. The doctor’s pulling the pin out weeks later was very painful, but the thumb healed fine, and I was soon well (but I still have the scar).

That car, however, couldn’t be healed, so I replaced it, also in FL, with another Volvo, a white 1965 station wagon (I needed one to haul all my stuff); after we were married, Ginny damaged this car’s left front in a collision pulling out of our driveway going to her work as a Hospital Corpsman at Quonset Point.  Months later I further damaged this car, likewise on the left front, by sideswiping a car going over a rise on Exeter Road one morning driving to my new job at CTI; the car I hit was driven by a school committeeman, a lawyer, and we settled without involving our insurance companies.

As this car aged (not gracefully, I fear), a friend from CTI helped me find in a salvage yard another engine, which I installed using a “come-along” hoist and our children’s old swing frame in the back yard.  This bought the car a few more years, but eventually it died the death of most of my cars, and was towed to its final rest (a junkyard).

We replaced the station wagon with another Volvo, this time a 1974 “144” sedan, white, from a man who lived nearby (who was a used car dealer in the city).