My granduncle’s car saw the country, well after his death.
Tasked with writing about something “long-lasting” with regard to my ancestors, I thought that I had a compelling subject. In researching the essay, however, I discovered that the story I remembered was not the real story.
My granduncle James Williamson (1912-1981) died when I was a freshman in college. He never married and, thus, when he passed away, most of his few possessions went to his sister–my grandmother. His vehicle, however, ended up becoming my father’s.
and -grandmother,
my grandmother and James. (colorized photo)
As with all of his cars, James had purchased this car new and paid for it in cash. (Perhaps his eschewing debt had something to do with his Scots sensibilities?) As close as I can ascertain by browsing Google Images, I think the car must have been the 1973 Dodge Dart Sport. I remember a car that looked like the one below, only in blue.
The Dart eventually came to be my car. As a college sophomore, I was allowed to have a vehicle on campus. Thus, the Dart was loaded up with items for my dorm, and I drove it to Wichita State University–a five hour drive from my hometown in northeast Oklahoma.
I continued to make use of the Dart during my junior and senior years of undergraduate school. I used it driving around Wichita and also to make regular trips home–an almost 500-mile roundtrip–between semesters or on other occasions. While I have no idea what the odometer read when I graduated and left Wichita, I had to have put a sizable number of miles on the Dart during those three years, not to mention the miles my granduncle himself had previously put on the car.
Graduate school took me to Philadelphia. I had determined that, because I would likely look for an apartment in Center City, having a vehicle there would probably be more of a liability, especially considering the available public transportation.
(In retrospect, that proved to be sound thinking: I did end up living in an apartment in Center City with a doctoral chemistry student as a roommate. She did have a car. It allowed her to drive to the Temple campus in North Philadelphia as well as places outside the city, but I honestly lost track of how many parking tickets she amassed in the two years I lived there–many of them written because she missed moving her car out of parking zones by the specified time.)
For the two years I lived in Philadelphia, my parents made some use of the Dart.
The summer after I obtained my masters degree, I attended the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. A close friend from Philly also attending the festival met me in my hometown, and the two of us packed up the Dart and drove it to Aspen.
We made it almost the entire way without problems. Then, forty miles outside of Aspen, while climbing the steep inclines, traversing the narrow roads and tight switchbacks of Independence Pass, the Dart coughed, sputtered, and died. Several times. Then I remembered that I had two additional gears at my disposal. Putting the vehicle in overdrive proved extremely helpful dealing with the high altitude and thinner air.
Once in Aspen, the Dart took us to rehearsals and performances on the music school campus for all nine weeks of the festival. At the end of the summer, I drove it back to northeast Oklahoma. The drive to Aspen and back was 1,700 miles roundtrip.
Following the music festival came a turn of events worthy of a story of its own. I suddenly found myself needing to move to Pittsburgh very shortly after my return to Oklahoma. I had been offered a job playing in a woodwind quintet there. It seemed a good idea to have a vehicle in this city, so off I went in the Dodge Dart once again, driving about 1,000 miles. While I lived there, I also made regular 60-mile roundtrips to Wheeling, West Virginia, where I played in the local symphony.
After living in Pittsburgh for about ten months, I won my first audition for an orchestra job. The thrill of having succeeded in coming out on top for the first time competing for an orchestral job was quickly tempered by the realization that I was facing moving all the way across the country to the city of Spokane, Washington.
My father generously flew to Pittsburgh to help me pack my belongings in boxes and get the packages to UPS. With my father serving as another driver and a fine travel companion, we embarked on our journey, driving west on I-90. The able-bodied Dart was by now a 15-year-old car.
My father and I made a rendezvous with my mother and my maternal grandmother somewhere in Iowa–I’m guessing it was somewhere off of I-80, west of Omaha. The mother and daughter had driven due north from my hometown. This would have meant that my father and I–and the Dart–had driven about 900 miles or so.
And here is where the story I had remembered and the true story diverge.
Here’s how I remembered the story:
The long-lasting faithful Dart, in my memory at least, had driven my grandmother and me the rest of the distance to Spokane–an additional 1,400 miles. Upon our arrival there, my grandmother flew back to Kansas where she lived. I stayed, living and working in Spokane for four years. During that time, I drove the Dart around town and even took it to Seattle once during the winter, necessitating putting chains on the tires once I reached Snoqualmie Pass.
When I won my second audition in New York City and was facing moving all the way back East, I packed up the Dart and drove it from Spokane to my hometown. Knowing I planned to find an apartment in Manhattan and would not need a car, I left the Dart in Oklahoma with my parents. Later, it was passed along to my older niece for her to drive during high school and when she went away to college.
“What a great story this is!”, I thought. One vehicle, having been driving by four generations in my family!
In researching this essay, I contacted my parents and my nieces. I soon learned that I had actually misremembered several facts.
Here is the real story of what happened after the family meet-up in Iowa:
- The Dodge Dart did not take me and my grandmother from Iowa to Spokane. Rather, my father and mother drove the Dart back to Oklahoma, and my grandmother and I continued west in my parents’ vehicle: A Ford Escort.
- The car I drove in Spokane for four years was the Escort, not the Dart.
- My nieces never saw the Dodge Dart. In fact, my astute husband pointed out that, even if I had driven the Dart to Spokane, had driven it in Spokane for four years, and had driven it 1,900 miles from Spokane to my hometown before moving to New York City, my older niece would have been only five years old at that time! My parents most certainly did not keep that vehicle for 11 more years until the time she would have been able to get her driver’s license!
- My parents eventually passed along one of their later cars to my older niece. She drove it and took it to college. The Dart was used as a trade-in for a new car for my parents sometime after I left Pittsburgh.
While the story I thought I was writing would have been a more impressive one, the actual story is still an interesting one. The idea that my granduncle–50 years my senior–bought and drove a car; then his nephew–my father–drove it for a while; and, finally, his grandniece drove the car off and on for a period of six years, including some very long road trips is still quite remarkable.
However, in the future, I plan to corroborate stories of my own young life with others. This incident makes me wonder what other memories I recount aloud or in my mind that are fictional. As with many aspects of aging, a dose of humor is a welcome thing, I think.
“When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.” –Mark Twain
Written for the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge: Week 34-“Long-Lasting.” PROMPT: It could be a marriage, a career, a document, an heirloom – feel free to be creative with the theme!
