This fuzzy photo may be the only one I have of my 1962 Chevy Corvair. I snapped it – and college roommate Denny Dumler – with a cheap Kodak during a road trip from Kansas to the Mexican border. (Photo by Dave Berry)

“Youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.”

Thomas Gray

 

“Unsafe at any speed.” That’s how Ralph Nader described my first car — a 1962 Chevy Corvair.

I loved my sporty rear-engine, black over silver-gray, two-door Monza Coupe with souped-up Spyder engine and four on the floor. It was the first car I bought with my own money… and I loved it.

I guess I didn’t know it was that unsafe. Nader called it a “One-Car Accident.” Others called it a deathtrap. But, honestly, I wasn’t paying attention. It was the winter of 1968. I was well into my second year at Fort Hays State in western Kansas, riding a bored-out Honda 160 motorcycle (whenever there was no snow or ice on the streets). I desperately needed a heated ride.

I surveyed my financial situation… everything I had accumulated from working at the filling station, bucking bales for Glenn Weeks, plowing fields for Uncle Ray, mowing the Cross Plains Cemetery and spraying DDT on Johnson grass in the ditches for Fairfield Township. My work-study gig on the serving line in the dorm lunchroom would have to go for tuition and room and board, but I figured even without it I had enough to buy a car – if I cut a good deal.

Pickings were slim in Russell, so Dad and I drove south to Great Bend, where we looked seriously at a beat-up blue and white Chevy Impala. But I realized I knew its former owner, who had driven the guts out of it. I passed.

We explored east to Salina and found several car lots with models in my price range. My bank account registered just under $600, so I was limited. Most cars in my price range were tired old sedans, and I was getting discouraged until we spotted the newly painted Corvair.

It had been wrecked, the salesman reluctantly told us, and someone had been hurt. “Well, actually, he died… but hey, there’s new carpet, the seats have been replaced, the body is back in great shape… and look at this paint job! There’s not another one like it.” The Corvair had sold new for around $2,000 in 1962, and he was pricing it at almost half that much five years later. We haggled.

“What’s that knock in the engine,” Dad asked, his ear down inside the rear-engine compartment. “Sounds like the flywheel is coming apart.” The salesman said he couldn’t hear it, but Dad explained that the flywheel is actually two pieces held together by bolts, and if those loosen up… it can create a knock and eventually fly apart. “So, let’s talk about your asking price.”

My father was the mechanic in the family and could just as well have been expounding on “muffler bearings, blinker fluid or conuder valves,” but he was serious about the flywheel.

I looked again at my checkbook, knowing I didn’t even have $600, much less the asking price of $875. After conferring with Dad, I told the salesman I would give him $500 – that was all. After all, it’s been wrecked, and we’re going to have to take it to the shop, pull the engine and fix the flywheel. He argued, and we let him talk us up a bit… but just to $525. I drove it home.

When I asked Dad what we should do about the flywheel, he said, “Just drive it. It probably won’t be a problem, and if the flywheel falls apart, we’ll fix it.”

I loved that car. With its powerful air-cooled engine pushing me, it was sporty enough, and I felt good driving it. Sure, it had problems. With the engine in the rear, the front end tended to lift off the ground at high speed. I tested that once on old Highway 40 west of town, getting off the gas as I reached 100 miles per hour and realized I could no longer steer.

Yes, the individual suspension on each wheel and lack of a front stabilizer bar could have caused the wheels to “tuck under” in the event of a slide sideways… so I made a point of never doing that. It tended to oversteer, so you kept a light touch on the wheel… and I never again took it to the upper reaches of the speedometer.

I drove it four years – through college and into the Army. At Fort Benjamin Harrison, I was the guy with wheels, and my Corvair hauled three Army buddies and I around Indianapolis until the clutch began screaming at each stoplight. I nursed the clutch over the Missouri hills back to Kansas, and we decided it had given all it had to give.

By then, I had saved enough of my Army pay to think about a “new” car and picked out a white Torino at the Ford dealership. We agreed on a price, then haggled over the value of my trade-in. The engine wasn’t smoking, and the clutch was behaving.

Then the salesman asked, “What’s that knock in the engine?”

“That was there when I bought it,” I told him truthfully. He was a family friend, so Dad explained about the two-piece flywheel. The Ford guy said his mechanics would fix it, and he offered $875 as trade-in – $350 more than I had paid for it. I had orders to report to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but I was happy as I headed east.

Several weeks later, I heard one last thing about my beloved Corvair. In a letter from home, Dad wrote that his friend at the dealership asked, “Do you remember that knock in the engine?” He said his mechanics decided not to work on it, and “a few days later the flywheel came apart.”

As for Nader’s claims the Corvair was “unsafe at any speed,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a report in 1972 debunking his claims, saying that the Corvair “compared favorably” to other cars, “did not result in abnormal potential for loss of control or rollover” and is “at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles both foreign and domestic.”

I could have told Ralph that.

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Dave Berry is retired editor of the Tyler Morning Telegraph. His Focal Point column runs each Wednesday. We want to know about YOUR first car. What was it? What did you pay for it? Why did you love (or hate) it? Send to dvberry@tylerpaper.com. The best will find their way into a future column. And, if you haven’t already responded to our request to “tell us what you are reading,” it’s not too late.