“Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet” ran one of television’s hottest ads in the seventies. The car is a symbol of American life. One of the most popular cars ever was introduced in the sixties: the Ford Mustang. Also increasingly popular in the sixties and seventies were foreign cars, such as the Volkswagen Beetle and the Volkswagen bus, which, with tie-dye curtains in the windows and psychedelic paint along the sides, became a symbol for the hippies of that era.

One of the first cars my husband and I bought after we were married in 1970 was an old VW bus. We called it ‘the Slug’ because it couldn’t go much faster than 20 if you went up a hill, even a mild incline, and on the freeway if you pushed it past 50 it started making this weird guttural whine. But it was great for camping and weekend jaunts. I made tie-dye curtains for the windows and a matching bedspread for the lumpy mattress. Once we even let a friend stay in our bus for a month, and he got along just fine, except after he left we found dozens of beer bottles and hundreds of roaches stashed under the seats.

We drove the Slug for five years, all over the country, until one day it finally just up and died. The day before we sold it to the junk yard we gave a “Slug Wake” for all our friends to pay their last respects, which turned out to be one of the best parties I ever gave.

If you’d care to share a story about this topic, please leave a comment here. At the end of each month I’ll gather up the Sharing History comments and pick one at random from a drawing, and send the winner of the drawing my e-book: your choice of a Making History Workbook.

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