Happy Anniversary, Bertha

[cover photo by Brian Ach]

I’m going to take a break from the FrankenThirty this week because, well, I’m taking a break from everything: Maire Anne and I are on vacation celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary up in Truro near the tip of Cape Cod.

And with that, it’s hard not to think about Bertha, who was there at ground zero.

I’ve technically had a longer relationship with Bertha than any car, although it was punctuated in the middle by a separation much longer than the periods of togetherness. I bought the car in the spring of 1984 when Maire Anne and I were living in Austin but knew that we would be returning to Boston. I had a rust-free Malaga ’73 2002, but actually wanted a big-bumpered car that would better survive the vagaries of Boston’s demolition-derby parking and traffic. I named the car Bertha because with those bridge-abutment bumpers, she was anything but dainty. In early August of ’84, we moved Bertha, Maire Anne’s 1969 VW Westfalia camper, and a U-Haul truck north. The truck towed Bertha, which seemed to make sense at the time (me driving the truck, Maire Anne driving her Volkswagen) except that it was blisteringly hot and Bertha was the only one of the three vehicles with air conditioning. Maire Anne and I got married in Ipswich Massachusetts on August 31st, and drove off from the wedding in Bertha, which our friends had festooned with the usual retinue of shaving cream and cans tied to the bumper.

The move back to Boston put us in a big old house that my mother owned. I instantly commandeered the house’s two-car garage, something about which I wrote in detail here. Soon after, while backing the car out of the garage, I caught Bertha’s driver’s side door on the opening and crumpled it. I ordered a new door (from BimmerParts, if memory serves me correctly), but it arrived damaged. This was a problem, as I’d already removed the bent door in preparation, and Maire Anne and I were planning on using the car for a short honeymoon trip. Directly across the street from us was a shop called McRay’s with a big sign saying “BMW Service and Parts.” The bay door was open, so I drove Bertha, sans door, inside. A cheerful young man named Alex said “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I need to borrow a door.”

“You… need… to… borrow… a door?”

It seemed completely obvious to me. I mean, the car was without a driver’s door, and I explained that I ordered one, it arrived damaged, a new one was on the way, but I needed to use the car for the weekend, so yes, if you had a door I could borrow for a few days, that would be right peachy. This was the beginning of a 40-year friendship with Alex. We both tell the story of how we met, but when he tells it, he implies that he was actually helpful regarding my door-related request, which he was not. I left doorless, and cajoled the original door back into place for our short trip.

When the replacement door arrived, I painted it in primer. I planned on getting the entire car repainted, but it never happened. The door is still in primer to this day.

Over the next four years, Bertha became a repository of much of my disposable income, and was used as both a daily-driver and a track rat. Nearly every modification available through the pages of Roundel magazine wound up in the car—dual Webers, hot cam, high-compression pistons, Koni suspension package, 5-speed, Sanden rotary a/c compressor, Recaro seats, Momo steering wheel, ADS speakers and power amp, big Cibie Oscar driving lights, even one of those Wink giant mirrors.

Although I didn’t drive the car up from Austin to Boston, Bertha and Maire Anne and I did have one big road trip together—we drove up to New Brunswick, took the ferry to Nova Scotia, and drove across to Cape Breton. It was spectacular. The only hiccup was coming back into the United States when a custom’s agent regarded the primer-painted door as an attempt to bring in a gray-market car with a missing VIN tag. The dual Webers didn’t help my case. Fortunately the EPA-required smog label was still visible under the hood.

In 1988, Alex got married, and he and his wife were planning a big western road trip for their honeymoon. Unfortunately, Alex’s 2002 wasn’t ready. I loaned them Bertha. They and the car bonded, and when they returned home at the end of the summer, I sold Bertha to Alex. Unfortunately, this was the start of Bertha’s long decline. Like me, Alex lived in Boston, but did not have a garage. The car got stolen and recovered twice. The second time it ran so badly that Alex suspected a bent valve. He begged garage space from his next door neighbor and drove the barely-running car inside.

We all know how sometimes things we do “for now” (like Bertha’s door in primer) end up sticking for the long haul. Other priorities took precedence in Alex’s life, and Bertha wound up sitting in his neighbor’s garage for 26 years. When I first began asking him about it, he’d cheerfully recite the litany of things he wanted to do when he restored the car, but as years turned to decades, it became a sore point—not in terms of our friendship, but a reminder to him of an uncompleted project.

In the early spring of 2018, I pressed Alex on Bertha. Without my seeing the car, we agreed on a price. Then I went and looked at it, I was horrified. The garage it had been sitting in backed onto a pond. Alex is a builder, and had stored insulation in a loft above the car. Some of the insulation batting had fallen onto the hood. It proved to be a vector for moisture coming off the pond. The hood was pockmarked with dinner-plate-sized rust blisters, and in the center of each was small tuft of insulation, sort of a forensic thumbprint of the crime of corrosion. Further, the car was surrounded by decades of accumulated 2002 parts that had to be sorted through before the car was unearthed.

But the big problem was that in the decades since the car went into the garage, a fence had been put up separating it from the driveway. There was no way to get a slide-back truck or even a tow cable down there. It seemed that the only way out was getting the car running and driving it across the neighbor’s backyard and up a narrow hill that went along the side.

Fortunately the house was rental property, so the owner himself wasn’t around to care. I went over there every day for a week, got the car running on three cylinders (140-140-35-140 is not a good set of readings), drove it onto the street (the video of which can be seen here), and had it towed home.

I’ve revived many long-dead BMWs, but Bertha was the longest and the deadest. The week-long sprint to get the car running well enough to drive it out of its tomb made me hope that I could continue the momentum and drive it to The Vintage that May, but that was too optimistic; the car simply needed too much. The head came off, the valve train got rebuilt, all the clutch hydraulics and much of the brake hydraulics were replaced, a myriad of leaking fuel and coolant lines were repaired, deteriorated giubos and rubber bushings were refreshed, and the stuck accelerator and shifter linkages were freed. The car’s heavily-patina’d appearance, though, was left intact.

When it was time to register and insure Bertha, there was an odd but pleasant surprise: For whatever reason, there was no record of Alex ever having registered it, so I was able to claim that I was re-registering a car that had simply been off the road for 26 years and apply for a duplicate of the lost title. It further added to the feeling that the car had karmically always remained mine.

Once it was well-sorted, I began driving Bertha with a good deal of abandon. In many ways, it was the perfect knock-around 2002. The hot engine I’d built in the 1980s still had nearly all of its oomph. It went like a bat out of hell. I ran errands in it so I could throw it around entrance ramps and mash the accelerator and hear the Webers and the cam roar, drove it to cars and coffee gatherings and sneered when anyone asked “So you’re gonna RESTORE that, right?” and attended events with the local Nor’East 02ers group. As was its original Austin-to-Boston lineage, I drove it and parked it where I wanted and didn’t worry about it. I even revived its air conditioning (you’re shocked, I know).

Later, I executed a chrome bumper swap, as it was something Alex always wanted to do, and I had a usable set of bumpers lying around. It did trim-up the car’s appearance, but part of me wishes I’d left it alone, as removing those big bumpers seemed to steal part of the car’s personality and mojo.

For at least a decade, I’ve owned a set of gold basketweaves that originally came on a late E30 convertible. They’ve been on half a dozen 2002s over the years. I was selling my Chamonix tii “Kugel,” decided that the silver basketweaves Bertha was wearing would give Kugel a better and less polarizing look than Kugel’s gold ones, and swapped them. I never intended Bertha to have that look of damaged paint with blingy gold wheels, but they wound up staying on the car.

Bertha had her coming out party at The Vintage in 2019. My friend Paul Wegweiser, who has a long history of pranking me at The Vintage, did a full-on gorilla-themed assault on the car, festooning it with bananas, Mardi Gras swag, and an actual gorilla mask, which I am seen wearing below as I drove the car onto the field at Hot Springs. I’d say you had to be there to understand it, but really, that wouldn’t have made you understand it any better.

Unexpectedly, the drive to and from The Vintage turned out to be Bertha’s only real road trip, although for a while, the car did see regular swapping trips back and forth to the garage spaces I rented in Fitchburg. When I lost the Fitchburg spaces, to move the four cars to the new storage in Monson, I needed to enlist several friends, giving Alex the chance to drive Bertha for the first time in several dog’s ages.

Unfortunately, with Monson being about a half an hour further than Fitchburg, and with me owning two other 2002s (Louie the Ran When Parked ’72 2002tii, and Hampton the 50,000-mile survivor ’73), plus the E9, the Bavaria, the Shark, the Clownshoe, the Z3, and the Lotus, once Bertha got moved out to Monson a few years ago, it largely stayed there. I try to keep it exercised, driving it the ten miles down to the Connecticut border and back when I’m out there, but when I did that this spring, the car ran badly, as if one of the Webers isn’t getting fuel, and I just haven’t had the time to deal with it. I had this fantasy of Maire Anne and I driving Bertha out to Truro so it could be part of our 40th anniversary, but the summer got eaten up doing other things (*cough*FrankenThirty*cough*) so I chose the bourgeois path and took the 2008 Nissan Armada, as it can swallow all our stuff and has a trailer hitch for the bike rack.

I have designs on Bertha’s gold E30 BBS basketweaves and rubber, as the FrankenThirty’s tires are too dry-rotted to drive further than around the neighborhood on, and as the gold weaves would look so 1980s against the E30’s ZinnoBerrot paint. On the one hand, a surgical strike where I put the E30 on the mid-rise lift, pull its ratty bottlecaps and junk tires off, throw them in the back of the E39, run out to Monson with them and a floor jack, swap them onto Bertha a wheel at a time, come back home, and throw the gold weaves and their tires onto the E30 makes sense, but although doing this “for now” is the zero-cost solution for getting the E30 drivable, Bertha has had so many “for nows” in her past that making her sit, undriven and needing repairs, in a warehouse 70 miles away, on tires on which she can’t safely be driven home, feels like consigning her to a fate of long-term dormancy. If she doesn’t get some quality time this fall, she won’t see any until spring, and it’ll feel even more like I’m repeating the slide of neglect that wound up entombing the car for 26 years.

The big epiphany here is that this is what it means to own too many cars, and Bertha has turned into the sin-eater for the bunch.

But happy anniversary, Bertha. We haven’t seen much of each other the last few years, but you are on my mind. Very few people still own the car they drove off from their wedding in 40 years ago, and that is something to be honored. In the BMW world, we say “Respect your elders.” Maire Anne had the idea of, once I get the car running again, driving it up to Ipswich and recreating the photo above, and the idea of that makes me very happy.

—Rob Siegel

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(Much more detail about Bertha can be found in Rob’s book, Resurrecting Bertha: Buying Back Our Wedding Car After 26 Years in Storage, which is available here on Amazon, as are his seven other books. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.)

 

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