Monday, October 18, 2010

Baby you can drive my car

One of the sources of pain and laughs growing up in the McGhie family was the horrible luck that we seemed to have with cars. No doubt about it--we punished the cars we drove. If cars were people, then being bought by us would be like getting a sentence of 10-years hard labor in Siberia followed by the firing squad.
Who remembers the most tortured car in our history--the orange Monte Carlo with the black vinyl roof? I belive that one brother (no names) smashed in the driver's side door against a gas pump at the local station while he still had his learner's permit. Don't recall who put the dent in the front right side.
Then on our fated fishing trip to Horne's ranch in southern Utah, the lock on the trunk got stuck with all of our fishing gear jammed in it. Dad was working, so we were left to our own devices to solve the problem (and save a day of fishing). I won't name names, but in an enthusiastic but misguided attempt to free up our fishing stuff, a needle was broken off in the trunk lock. That night when Dad finished work, we went to the local car mechanic (nice guy in a brown jumpsuit with "Claude" on the pocket) who drilled out the trunk lock. For the next few years we carried a screwdriver in the glove box and opened the trunk by jimmying the screwdriver in the hole in the trunk until the lock disengaged.
The final straw was when we were shooting rifles at the rifle range. People were leaning over the front of the Monte Carlo or the back of the Monte Carlo and resting their rifles on the car while they shot. Then Grandpa Charlie leaned his rifle over the vinyl roof. What happened next will live on forever in the mind of anyone who was there. The muzzle blast from the rifle shot was powerful enough to rip a large hole in the vinyl and send tiny pieces of vinyl flying into the air. As Grandpa Charlie stood there speechless surveying the scene, Grandma Rosalie said "Now Charles, you pick up all those pieces so that Jerry can glue them back on." We did not glue the pieces back on, but we did spraypaint the hole black to match the rest of the vinyl.
I am not sure whatever happened to the Monte Carlo. Did it end up in the scrap heap? Did it suffer the same fate as the truck I drove throughout high school (traded for a couple fruit trees while I was on my mission)? Or did we give it to someone who had fallen on hard times with the request to show the same loving care to it that we had shown??

3 comments:

Kristen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kristen said...

This is from Dad: Seeings how I have no idea how to get on the blog ( I know that may surprise most of you) and Jeff wondered on the blog what happened to the old orange car, I will tell you where I saw it last.
I sold it to Dick Avinia and the last time I saw it was headed down the road at the IPP plant in Delta full of electricians headed for work. End of story.
Pops.

Brent McGhie said...

Correct, Dick Avina bought that car and loved it!! He obviously didn't read this blog before he bought the car!! :)