In 1969 I was sixteen and working in a Shell Station on the corner of 28th and SE Sandy Blvd., Portland Oregon.
One day this guy pushes this little funny looking, yellow, 2 door station wagon, into the station. Apparently, it had quit on him out on the busy four lane street in front of the station. I helped get it into a parking spot and he asked if he could leave it there for a couple of days. He also said he was willing to part with it for twenty-five dollars. It turned out the little yellow 2 door station wagon was a 59 Borgward, from Germany. It wasn’t a whole lot bigger than a stretched out Volkswagen. It looked a lot like a Hillman if that helps you any.
Twenty-five dollars proved to be too much for a funny looking car that did not run and consequently, it did not sell. My boss wanted it gone. So me and my crazy buddy Mick started messing around with it, hoping to figure out what was wrong. I had Mick get in and try and start it while I looked under the hood. Back then we hadn’t had all that much experience with cars as yet so the chances of us actually getting the thing going were slim. But Mick turned the engine over anyway and I see gas pouring out of a threaded spout coming from the fuel pump. Well, that didn’t seem right. I got to looking at it and saw that the fuel pump had two spouts. One spout had a hose clamped to it and went up to the carburetor and the second, which must have been for a second carburetor, which this little car did not have, was simply spewing gas all over the place. So I took a pencil from my pocket, broke it in half and shoved it into the spout. That little Borgward fired right up. Now we had something. So when the owner came back around I offered him fifteen dollars for it, and it was mine.
Upon ownership of the little Borg Ward 2 door station wagon I sent one of the guys down to the hardware store for six cans of paint, of a variety of colors. Those of you who lived in SE Portland in 69 may remember it. I know if you ever saw my little customized Borgward you wouldn’t soon forget it. The car was already yellow, which was acceptable, so we set about doing the trim work. We painted the wheels silver to make them look like chrome and we painted around the wheel wells red to highlight the yellow and the top silver as well to match the wheels. I taped a shoe box to the hood to simulate a hood scoop and Mick painted AAA Fueler Hemi in forest green on each side in large print. I hooked a rubber radiator hose to the tailpipe where the muffler was supposed to be and wired it up and pointed it out the side so we wouldn’t die from carbon monoxide poisoning, which really wasn’t likely to happen because our eyes would burn so bad from the smoke inside the car that we had to drive with our heads out the window. A cool benefit of the radiator hose sticking out the side like that, besides keeping us alive, was whenever that little smelly and noisy car, and it was noisy with no muffler, came to a stop, it would blow large, well defined, smoke rings.
To add to its charm my crazy buddy Mick hooked the horn up to the brake. So whenever you attempted to stop the horn would honk. You could hear us coming a mile away, from the roar of that little unmuffled 4 cylinder and the constant honking of the horn. Also, if you were hard of hearing you could track us by the smoke that wafted into the air as we drove around town. I remember one of my buddy’s mom lamenting the fact that we were often roaring and honking around the neighborhood at all hours of the night and early morning.
That little Borgward had a few other questionable character traits. I had to clean the spark plugs every day just to keep it running. I also had to keep the idle turned up about as high as it would go so it wouldn’t stall. The brakes didn’t work very well either but it couldn’t go very fast anyhow. Then I discovered that the master cylinder for the hydraulic clutch didn’t work right so I began looking for a parts car. Yeah like there is going to be another 1959 Borgward in town just sitting around to use for spare parts. Well, guess what? There was. There in the automotive section of the want ads was a 1959 Borg Ward for parts in NE Portland. I went right over with some tools gave the guy $2.50. I took the master cylinder off his little ugly Borgward sedan and promptly took it back to the station and slapped her onto my little custom Borgward 2dr wagon.
In those days, like I said earlier, I didn’t know all that much about cars. I was just faking it, trying to be cool for the guys. However, I did manage to swap out the old master cylinder for the new used one and got it all hooked up right but I didn’t know that I had to bleed the air out of it. I just filled it up with fluid and took off for a test drive. Boy howdy was that car ever exciting to drive after that. You could get it going just fine but when you came to a stop light, where you would have to wait for a moment or two, the clutch would begin to give way causing the transmission to engage causing my little car to begin to move forward. Since the brakes weren’t very good and since the idle was turned up really high that little bugger of a car really wanted to go and would not wait for the light to turn and standing on the worn out brakes did not do much good. I got really good at avoiding stop lights by cutting U-eys and driving over peoples lawns and going through parking lots and such. After a while, we decided that using the clutch was much too dangerous and discovered that you really didn’t need the it after all. You could start it in first gear by turning the engine over and letting it hobble along for a second and then it would fire right up and off you would go. When you wanted to shift you just took your foot off the gas and at the same time pull it out of gear and when the RPMs would settle just pop it into the next year. It worked really slick. After all the bugs were worked out and the custom work was complete it was quite a car.
All my buddies and I took turns driving the daylights out of it. It wasn’t long though and it gave up the ghost. We took a sledgehammer to it and then rammed it into the retaining wall. We chained up what was left and hauled it to the junkyard where I got my original investment of fifteen dollars back. The junkyard guy said if we hadn’t of broken out all of the windows he would have given us twenty.
John
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