by Tom Anderson
It seems like car enthusiasts and many non-enthusiasts are able to define the different eras of their lives by what car they owned, had in their family or were around most often at that time. Even among people who are not really that into cars, the automobile is unique among the machines and most other inanimate objects we use every day in that we associate it with significant events and periods in our lives. And an informal survey of # staff and faculty members at the University of La Verne, indicates that many Leopards can name at least one distinct, favorite memory involving a car.
Nicole Forrest Boggs, manager of annual giving, went to a Porsche Club of America gathering in Portland last summer with her family. Among the attractions at the gathering was a real life replica of Sally Carrera, the Bonnie Hunt-voiced Porsche 996 from the Disney-Pixar movie “Cars.”
“I got my picture taken next to her,” Forrest Boggs said. “It’s kind of dorky, but I enjoyed it.”
Another ULV staffer with vivid and happy memories involving a Porsche is Assistant Professor of Communications Maia Kinsinger. She has cherished memories of riding up the road to Mount Baldy for picnics in her father’s 1958 356 Speedster.
“It was also neat to go through the tunnels and hear the sound of the engine,” Kinsinger said.
Photography Department Manager Kevin Holland also has vivid memories of his parents’ car. He remembers going on road trips in the family’s “huge Pontiac station wagon,” riding in the back seat and being serenaded to sleep by the rhyth-mic “Thump-thump!” of the rear suspension as the car traversed many a freeway.
Odds are many people have had something funny happen to them while around cars, and Ian Lising, an assistant professor of speech and debate, has one that’s bound to elicit a chuckle or two from someone who has owned a pre-1991 GM fullsize car.
“When I was 17 I bought a 1978 Buick Electra,” he said. At the time he was living with an uncle in Nebraska, and his uncle offered to buy him the first tank of gas. Well, Lising and his uncle drove the big beige Buick to the gas station, Lising gave the cashier his uncle’s money, and went back outside to start filling the tank. There was just one problem: Neither he nor his uncle could locate the fuel-filler neck.
Lising and his uncle spent 30 minutes trying to figure out where to put the gas in (Under the hood? Inside the trunk?) before they discovered it was hidden behind the rear license plate. Lising drove it for two years, and sold it just before moving back to the Philippines. Holland also has a memory of his first car, a 1972 Ford Pinto Runabout. One day when he was driving a friend to the airport, he recalls, the pint-sized station wagon just died on the freeway. Thus the friend, who was to have flown home to Pakistan, missed his flight and had to stay with Holland an extra three or four nights.
But despite these bumps in the road, the relationships members of the ULV community have had with their vehicles over the years seem to be, for the most part, as close as the relationships most have with family or friends. No other machines become so intertwined with our lives like the automobile and, for better or worse, that doesn’t look like it will be changing anytime soon.
