Last month, I wrote about the sale of Bertha, the 2002 I bought in Austin in 1984 shortly before Maire Anne and I returned to Boston. The buyer (Craig Bennion) flew in to drive the car to MidAmerica 02Fest, so my immediate concern was that he and the car make it there without incident. They did, and as the MidAmerica photos began to roll in, I loved seeing how Bertha, which had spent most of the time since returning from its trip to The Vintage in 2019 in storage, was frolicking with its 2002 siblings.
Craig taking Sam Smith for a ride in Bertha at MidAmeria 02Fest and trying to turn that frown upside down. (Photo apparently by Sam Smith’s right hand)
But a second part of the synergy of the sale was that Craig lived in Austin, which meant that Bertha was going home. To briefly recount those Austin years, Maire Anne and I moved down there because her job running a herpetology lab (lizards and snakes) at Harvard moved. We left in her rusty VW bus with no heat on a frigid New Years Day in 1982, and arrived in Austin several days later during a historic snap of cold and snow, so we got to witness the glorious spectacle of people in jacked-up pickup trucks who didn’t know how to drive in snow sliding into parked cars.
The funky young couple hitting the road on January 1st 1982.
We found an apartment in an L-shaped triplex at 101 West 35th street (the corner of 35th and Speedway), down near the University where Maire Anne worked. The apartment was far from swank, but at least it had a carport under which to work on cars. The first major repair was an engine rebuild and swap in Maire Anne’s bus, as it was so rusty that a floor jack went through the frame. I found a ’69 Westfalia camper with a seized engine, did a quick rebuild on the bus’s engine while it was out, and swapped it in.
Camper and bus positioned for the transplant.
Obligatory photo of me rebuilding the engine in the kitchen (or how you know the woman you’re living with is a keeper).
But once the 2002s began rolling in, they did so fast and hard. The first one was a ’71 that I describe as one third Colorado orange paint, one third surface rust, and one third bondo. As the photo below shows, I’m not kidding.
Right?
This, my first 2002, had a whiny transmission due to being out of fluid. I filled it, drove it, and the whine was gone. I was almost beside myself with the success of my diagnostic skills. Of course, in the morning, I found a giant puddle of transmission fluid under it because fluid doesn’t simply evaporate from a closed transmission. It turned out that it had a cracked transmission end cover. No problem, I thought—I pulled the box with the intent of replacing the end cover, and learned that the guts of the transmission are suspended from it (the case is really the “cover”), the level of dismantling to swap it is about the same as rebuilding the transmission, and special tools are needed for the job. I learned that Terry Sayther’s shop “Phoenix BMW” in South Austin was the place of expertise, and decided that the thing to do was to load the transmission into Maire Anne’s bus, park it in front of Terry’s shop, and run inside and ask to borrow tools as if this was reasonable. Terry and I still joke about it. After I got it fixed, I had the car painted for $800 at Biebrick’s in South Austin (ah, those were the days). I have no doubt that the amount of bondo on it roughly doubled, but it looked great.
The no-longer-ratty 2002 looking fly.
But then I found a ’73 Malaga car that had air conditioning, the prospect of which made Maire Anne very happy. I bought it, sold the Colorado car, and began working on the ’73.
The first two 2002s and the woman I would marry in a few years. There would be many more. 2002s, not women. Oil stains from my residency can clearly be seen in the street.
Actually, that’s not quite true. Maire Anne and I were planning on taking her just-reassembled VW camper on a backpacking vacation in the Weminuche Wilderness in Colorado. About a hundred miles out, it began running badly. We limped it home, unsure of what to do.
Maire Anne asked me about taking the Malaga 2002. I balked, saying that I’d just bought it and that it was unproven.
“What’s actually wrong with it?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “The giubo’s cracked, it burns oil, it’s got no spare tire. A thousand little things.”
So I bought a case of Castrol and a can of Fix-o-Flat, babied the accelerator pedal so as not to stress the giubo, and we made to to Santa Fe the first day and Durango the next. For decades, this became the gold-standard experience for me for what’s so good about 2002s.
The Malaga car at the trail head. Unknown to Maire Anne, there was an engagement ring in that backpack. And now I look at that paint and think “Why didn’t I buff that out?”
Of course, at this point, a ’73 2002 was only a 10-year-old car. Every 2002 on the planet now has another four decades on it since then. Both their age and mine make it so I no longer jump into unproven 02s and knock off 2000-mile round trips. But I digress.
Somewhere in the middle of this was the 2000CS that I wrote about here.
It was actually a 2000C, but what’s one carburetor among friends?
Soon after, I began sorting out the Malaga car, and mission creep got the better of me. I began doing my first engine pull and rebuild. But with Maire Anne and I engaged, and our families both being in Boston, we began planning the wedding, and realized that the next likely steps were to dig in and buy a house and start a family, and that raised the prospect of moving back home, and if we were going to do that, I actually wanted a big-bumpered 2002 to survive Boston’s demolition derby, which was how Bertha entered the picture. So the freshly-rebuilt engine from the Malaga car went into Bertha, and Bertha’s engine went into the Malaga car, which I then sold.
And so it began.
I’ve scoured the archives, and the only photo of Bertha in Austin I can find is this one taken just before we began the long drive back to Boston. You can just make out the car attached to a tow dolly behind a packed-to-the-gills U-Haul. (And yes I removed the half-axles for the drive.)
That’s a guy who Maire Anne and I played with in a band on our left, and his roomate.
About a week later, Bertha was mobile again and driving us off from our wedding.
Shaving cream and cans were speed accessories not available from Roundel advertisers.
The point in all of this is that a lot of wrenching went down in the carport, the driveway, and the street in front of that apartment. It was really where I became Hack Mechanic me. Plus, it was the first place that Maire Anne and I lived in together by ourselves. For those reasons, it always held a special place in our hearts. But it was kind of a junky apartment in a little triplex in what was a desirable neighborhood back then due to its close proximity to the university, and I couldn’t imagine that it had survived. But a few years ago, due to the wonders of Google Maps, I looked it up, and was stunned to see that not only was it still there, but it looked exactly the same.
Unbelievable.
What’s more, although it wasn’t currently for sale, Zillow had some interior photos of the place that showed that, unlike the exterior, it had had a freshening-up. I showed the photo of the kitchen to Maire Anne, and she burst out laughing. “They didn’t replace the cabinets!” she said. “They just painted them white!” She was, of course, correct.
They did replace the floor. I’m sure it had drag marks from that engine on it.
So, for all these reasons, the fact that Bertha was going back Austin had a lot of resonance with me. I talked with Craig about this, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before she returned to the literal scene of the crime. Shortly after he got home, Craig sent me the first pic of the car in Austin at the recently-closed Lammes Candies, just two miles from the apartment.
A bittersweet homecoming. (photo by Craig Bennion)
The next sighting was from Facebook friend Paul Goldfine who messaged me “I read your article about selling Bertha a couple of weeks ago. Last week, on a rare foray into Austin, I drove through the intersection of 38th and Speedway, and saw this.” Not only was this cars and coffee just three blocks from the apartment, but that’s none other than Terry Sayther on the left.
Almost full circle.
A few days ago, Craig sent me the money shot of the car in front of its old haunts. It hit me in the feels.
Bertha, back where it began. (photo by Craig Bennion)
Tom Wolfe famously wrote “You can’t go home again.” Tom never met Bertha. Despite 42 years, three engines, smaller bumpers, and countless other changes, there she was, tearing up her old neighborhood.
And I know she’s leaking a little transmission fluid out the selector shaft seal, so I have no doubt that she marked her territory.
Thanks, Craig. Thanks for bringing Bertha home.
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s newly-expanded book The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 40 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies (including the new Best Of) from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com/books.