To this day, I have the creeps when I think about this car. I really shouldn't. After all, my father bought it from our minister. From what I remember, the minister came to dad and said that he was going to retire and that he wanted a smaller car. Dad found one for him and took the 61 Ford Fairlane on trade. The car you see above is almost exactly what it looked like. Since dad had taken care of this car for the minister for years, he figured that it would be perfect for me to drive back and forth to college. He was right, kinda.
In the early days of driving this car, it did indeed get me back and forth to Manchester College. It was dependable and useful. I was able to make a little money on weekends by bringing fellow Spartans home, and they would give me gas money. Well, if you read my earlier blogs, you already know that I worked for my gas, so the money was an extra! And this car could carry five students as well as me, so it worked out pretty well.
I was one of the few freshman who actually had a car on campus. Manchester didn't rule against freshman having cars like other colleges did, so I was popular for all the wrong reasons. Friends wanted to borrow it. I was usually able to invoke the "my father told me I can't loan the car out" excuse. So, upperclassmen would have me drive them places like a chauffeur. Friends would set me up on double dates so that they could go places. Yes, I was popular. That is until that night we were driving to Warsaw.
Now, I am sure that if you know anything about Manchester, you think of it as a good Christian college and all of the students are fine upstanding young men and women. Most of the time it was and still is. But, I lived in Calvin Ulrey Hall. If John Landis and Ivan Reitman needed a template for Animal House, Calvin Ulrey would have been perfect. I am pretty sure that the school was constantly wanting to shut it down. In fact, years later they did shut it down as a dorm and made it into the business building.
Anyway, somehow I became one of the major focuses of the initiation week at Calvin Ulrey. If you want some of the details you can purchase my book Along the Way from Amazon. It comes in both paperback and ebook. Self-promotion is not above me.
But I digress. After initiation was over, an upperclassmen whom we knew as "Sea Turtle" took me under his wing. He was a senior and about to graduate which would make you think that his tutelage would be a good thing. I guess if you call driving him to buy beer, playing cards with him until 3 in the morning, and covering for him when the dorm mother was trying to catch him doing something wrong a good role model, then Sea Turtle was fantastic at it!
How is he connected to the Ford Fairlane? Well, he is the one who wanted to load up my car with everyone who was staying at Calvin Ulrey that weekend and go to a movie in Warsaw. In itself, that didn't seem like a big problem. So we got all seven of us in the car. And it probably wouldn't have been as big an issue, if Sea Turtle hadn't insisted on going back roads. He was from Warsaw and, of course, he knew all the short cuts.
As we wound through county roads from North Manchester to Warsaw, I realized that I hadn't really had the car out at night during the whole time that I had been in possession of it. It started with a flicker. At the time I figured that something was loose and didn't really pay any attention to it. Then, when we were deep in the middle of nowhere, my headlights stopped working. My passengers were busy making jokes at first, then Sea Turtle yelled at me, "This isn't funny! Turn the lights back on!"
What he didn't realize was that I had been trying to turn on the lights, but they wouldn't come on. At this point everyone in the car was either yelling or laughing hysterically (some had been drinking). I was panicked. I pulled over. I turned the lights on and off. Nothing. I tried the brights. Nothing. I tried turning the car off and then on. Nothing.
Then when I was just sitting there with the car running and the lights on, they came back on. There was a lot of cheering, and I was told we still had time to make the movie. Eventually, we made it to the movie without another occurrence. To this day, I have no recollection of the movie. I don't even remember the name, because I was worried about going home.
Sea Turtle suggested going 30 to 13, and I was more than happy because we would be on a highway. It was a good thing, because as we passed Pierceton and the lights of the small town were in the rear view mirror, and the headlights went out again. The tumult in the car began again, and I tried everything again. This time, nothing worked. Now common sense among young men is sometimes blurred in tense situations, but in this case by now all but me had been drinking. It was decided to go forward without the lights after we found a car to follow. So we did. And it worked until that car turned on a side road. It worked again when we tailed another car, at least until the state trooper saw us.
Thankfully, he only talked to me and verified my story by testing the lights and popping the hood to see if he could find a way to fix the problem. Because he couldn't find the answer, he said that he would escort us to Manchester. I promised to him that I would go, during the daytime, to have my father check out the problem. My friends were like little children seeing the troopers lights flashing the whole way to Manchester. When the trooper left us, I was finally able to laugh at the whole thing with the rest of them, but really I was so relieved to have made it back safely.
Dad never found anything. He even had Automotive Electric check it all out. They had it for two nights and couldn't recreate the problem. Because I didn't want to recreate the "no lights" problem again, I seldom drove it at night. But there were times that I did drive at night, and invariably it happened again.
There was still no answer when dad replaced the Ford Fairlane with my new car in my sophomore year. Was it divine intervention left over from the minister? Was it a ghost haunting the lights? All I know is that it was the only car that I have owned that I was happy to say goodbye to!
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