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When men were men and cars were tanks, Florida was a long way from California. It still is. P. J. O'Rourke takes the scenic route in a '56 Buick Special.
From the February 1978 issue of Car and Driver.
I love old Buicks. My family had a Buick dealership when I was a kid and my first car was a Buick, my first job was washing Buicks, I had my first wreck in a Buick, and did some other things for the first time in a Buick's back seat. So when Tom Sargent, publisher of Cycle magazine, wanted his 1956 Special four-door sedan driven from Florida to his home in Los Angeles, I was more than glad to do it for him. I got a photographer friend, Humphrey Sutton, to come along for the ride, and together we flew down to the little Florida town of Crescent City where the Buick had been stored for the past couple of years.
We were coming in just above the palm fronds in a Cessna four-seater when I got my first look at the car. It was sitting beside the grass landing strip, clean, shining and so perfect that it startled me. If I just squinted and ignored how we were banking at stall speed with one wing in the treetops, I might have been back in the O'Rourke Buick garage getting yelled at for playing in the grease pit or staring at the nipples on the Valvoline calendar girl.
For obvious reasons, we called the Buick "Sargent Dynaflo," and it was as wonderful a car to drive as to look at. The weather was beautiful. People smiled and waved to us as we rolled through the little towns. We had a cooler full of beer, and there was nowhere in the world that I would have rather been than behind that sailboat-sized steering wheel. Humphrey and I were both in a better mood than anyone over the age of 30 has any right to be in. We drove 150 miles across Florida like that, and the car looked fabulous and ran perfectly right up until the moment it suddenly quit.
Not a lot of forethought had gone into this expedition. Sargent had neglected to tell anybody that we were coming to get the car until the night before we arrived, and Humphrey and I had driven away from Crescent City with an ancient set of filed-down points in the distributor, no tools, no manual, not even a flashlight and one map of North America which only showed railroad lines.
When the engine went out we were in a desolate stretch of piney woods somewhere south of Tallahassee. There was no warning. All of a sudden it was just much too quiet and we weren't going nearly as fast as we should have been. We figured it was probably the old set of points.
There was this shack-like building about a hundred yards down the road with a couple of broken gas pumps out front and a sign that said "Beer." It was half overgrown with swamp and looked like the first panel in an old E.C. comic, but it was the only building we'd seen for twenty miles so we pushed the car over there and I went inside to borrow some tools. There were about a dozen hard-visaged, definitely unfriendly and possibly cannibalistic Southern types in there, all eyeing me suspiciously. The bartender was a big, nasty-looking old guy with an enormous paunch, a flat-top haircut four inches high, and an unlit cigar turned backwards in his mouth. I got the idea that he didn't much like my looks either, but he loaned me a screwdriver and an adjustable crescent wrench.
Humphrey was all business under the hood, tinkering with this and tapping on that. I thought maybe he knew what he was doing until I realized that he couldn't find the spark plugs. Buick used to put these lid things over them. God knows why. But, anyway, after we'd pried one off and given ourselves some electrical shocks we figured maybe it wasn't the old set of points after all. Maybe it was vapor lock. If you leave vapor lock alone it gets better. This is exactly the kind of mechanical problem that Humphrey and I are good at, and we decided it was vapor lock and went inside for a drink.
Humphrey is from England, so he thought this bar was a great little place—very quaint, a real piece of Americana, and so forth. But I'm from Ohio and have seen In the Heat of the Night twice, and I was sure we were going to be killed. Especially since more people were arriving all the time and none of them were any improvement on the people who'd been there in the first place. And Humphrey's English accent is . . .well, I mean it might not sound exactly manly to certain ears, and after he's had a few drinks he starts talking a little louder, and after he started talking a little louder people started looking at us a little funny. Then just when I was sure we were going to be killed, somebody wanted to know if that was our old Buick out front with the hood up. We said yes, and somehow that made us okay. Trunk lids popped up, tool cases snapped open, and in minutes our engine compartment was packed with fearsome drunk Florida crackers undoing fuel lines, pulling off plug wires, and wrenching on things that I couldn't see while beer bottles piled up in front of the radiator and spilled out over the grille.
Not that any of them were able to get the car started. Humphrey and I went back in the bar and began drinking at a table with the local game warden and Jose, an immense half-Indian half-Mexican who'd been the 1959 and '60 Rocky Mountain Professional Wrestling Champion and whose presence in the Florida panhandle was never adequately explained to me. The game warden said that he himself had had a '56 Buick. "Had one just like it," he said. Several other people said the same thing. In fact, on our entire trip, it was hard to find a man over 45 who said he hadn't had a '56 Buick. And they were fondly remembered, to a car. "You couldn't break 'em with a stick," said the game warden, "That car'll run forever."
Humphrey said he'd settle for tonight.
I asked the warden what the place here was called. "Well," he said, "sometimes we call it the '98 Inn' and sometimes we call it the '98 Tavern,' but mostly we don't call it anything at all. Hell, you're thirty miles from nowhere and forty miles from nowhere else." Then he went off and got into a fight.
By midnight Humphrey and I were stinking drunk, and we fell to talking with a fellow named Jack who was only twenty-two but looked a lot like he robbed gas stations and shot liquor-store owners to get his heart started in the morning. He had one of those sharp Appalachian faces with a row of missing teeth and some scars, and he'd recently shot himself in the stomach over something to do with an estranged wife. He showed us where the bullet had come out. Now he was living in a trailer with another lady and her five kids but they were all off at her mother's canning something, so he invited us to stay with him. We were sure he was a homicidal psychopath and we'd be torture-murdered in the night, but it was that or sleep in the car.
Actually, Jack turned out to be a perfectly amiable guy. And it was all we could do to keep him from persuading us to take a little vacation and spend a week down there fishing for razorback pigs, or whatever they do on vacation in the piney woods. But we didn't know that until morning, and by then we were much too hung over to apologize properly.
Our friends from the night before had done a fair amount of damage helping us out. There were a lot of loose hoses and wires, fuel lines were draped over the fenders, and the contact arm on the points had been bent double. Humphrey decided that he'd better work on this himself, so he squatted up on the valve covers and sweated and diddled in the distributor for the next two hours. Finally, Jack rounded up some local fellow who took a big screwdriver, jammed it once into the points, slapped on the distributor cap, and started the car first try. "Used to have one just like it," he said.
Humphrey and I drove south until we found the ocean, got a motel room, and had some showers and a lot of Bloody Marys. We thought just in case this happened again, we'd better buy some tools. So we went to a Sears and picked out some things that, at the moment, looked like they might be useful: a large hammer, three sizes of Phillips screwdrivers, a set of tiny Japanese pliers, and a pry bar.
It was after sundown before we could bring ourselves to get back in the Buick. But it was running perfectly now, and we drove over to Mobile with no problems at all except that Humphrey turned out to be scared of insects that they don't have in England and nearly put us into a ditch when he got a June bug down his shirt. And we couldn't figure out how to work the instrument panel lights so the driver had to open up his three-ton door every time he wanted to check the gas gauge, and that would send the car careening across the road into oncoming traffic and make all the water that had leaked out of our collapsed beer cooler slosh into our shoes.
We figured that if the points weren't screwed up before, they certainly were now. But only one junkyard in Mobile had a '56 Buick and that had kudzu vines growing up through its engine compartment, and the distributor was missing anyway. Eventually, the junkyard owner found a garage that had a new set of points, and we were on our way over there when the car quit again. This time we knew it was the points.
I hitched to the garage and came back with their tow truck. The driver unhooked the fuel line to the carburetor, and there was a vicious reptilian hiss. "Vapor lock," he said. So we had a new set of points installed and spent the rest of the day battling vapor lock all across Mississippi.
Back in the 98 Tavern, Jose the wrestling champion had told us that the one sure-fire cure for vapor lock was to put wooden clothespins all along the fuel line. We thought that sounded pretty stupid but by the time we got to Hattiesburg, we'd bought two bags of them and had stuck on as many as we could fit. Then we stopped for gas in a little town, and when the station attendant went to check the oil, about twenty of the local farmers burst into hysterics. So the clothespins had to go. I thought we should give them another chance. Maybe they'd start to work or something. But Humphrey said he drew the line at getting laughed at if we died in a wreck.
We now had our vapor lock cure down to about 30 seconds, but we'd quit getting vapor lock. And we were just congratulating ourselves when the water temperature hit the bad peg and wouldn't come down. We had to spend an hour and a half cooling off in the Kisatchie National Forest. There is absolutely nothing to do in the Kisatchie National Forest except sit around and look at the one kind of tree that the Kisatchie National Forest is made up of—a sort of ho-hum soft pine, the decorative capacities of which would be greatly enhanced by wholesale conversion to two-by-fours.
The engine overheated again as soon as we started the car, and we limped into Clarence, Louisiana, where the owner of the sole filling station told us that the thermostat had gone to the promised land. He didn't have any parts or even a garage but he gave us the phone numbers of all the local mechanics. I called everyone in a fifty-mile radius, but no one had a hand free to do the work. Finally, I got one fellow who said, "Hell, I had one just like it, and I just tore the damn thermostat out. Threw it away. If you ain't got a gasket, just slap some damn cardboard in there. Damn thing'll run like hell." I was too embarrassed to admit that I didn't know exactly where thermostats made their home, but the station owner did. He made a gasket out of the back of my reporter's notebook and bolted it into the water hose connection where it stuck out on every side, little spiral binding holes and all.
The overheating was completely cured, and while we drove up to Dallas that night Humphrey and I tried to decide whether to have the thermostat replaced. They must have some reason for putting them in besides cold mornings in Kansas. Even in Africa or Central America where it's always hot, cars have thermostats. At least we sort of thought they did. Maybe thermostats provide back-pressure or something in the water pump or somewhere to prevent, you know, surge and gurgling in there. Maybe we'd really need one in the desert where surge and gurgling could be expected to be at their worst. Without a thermostat all the water might swish around too fast in the cooling system, running through over and over again at hundreds of miles an hour and turning into super-heated steam until the whole car blew up like the steamboat Sultana. We didn't know.
The new thermostat—plus labor, new antifreeze, a radiator flush, "water pump inspection," and several other things that I couldn't make out on the bill—cost almost $50 and took all day to install.
There hadn't been much to do in Dallas, and we got as far as Wichita Falls that evening when we realized that we'd had too much to drink at lunch and much too much to drink at dinner, and anyway, the engine was overheating again. So, as it turned out, was the air conditioner in my motel room. And the desk clerk told us that this was a dry county and it was 50 miles to the nearest bar or carry-out.
The Texas Panhandle has to be one of the most featureless landscapes on earth. They have sightseeing buses that take you into Lubbock to see the tree. Or if they don't, they should. If snow were dirt this is what Antarctica would look like.
For lack of anything better to do we stopped at a junkyard in Memphis or Quanah or Goodnight or someplace where the owner had a lot of old Buicks parked in a field. He said our overheating problem had to do with the cylinder head design. "They'd all overheat," he said, "all those '56 Buicks." And several other people would tell us the same thing. The next person blamed it on hot oil in the Dynaflo transmission. Somebody else said the radiators were "too thick and not wide enough." Another said they were "plenty thick but too high." And one man in Barstow claimed that the problem was "this shitty weather we've been having for twenty years." But not one of these people was shaken in his belief that a '56 Buick would "run forever."
Actually, just then our '56 felt like it would. The temperature gauge was strangely somnolent, and we didn't have a single major problem all day except for the hour or so when our fuel pump was spraying gas all over the hot exhaust manifold.
For half an hour coming into Amarillo, Humphrey and I had been complaining to each other about how the city stank of gasoline. Which seemed to make sense because there are a lot of refineries in Amarillo. But then the smell kept getting worse for the next 30 miles going out of town. When we eventually stopped at a filling station we found out that the tiny rubber gasket under the bolt that holds the fuel pump cap in place had collapsed and gas was squirting out and boiling up in little spitballs on the headers. I have no idea why this didn't turn us into a miniature two-toned Hindenburg. But it didn't, not even after Humphrey gasped in dismay and let the cigarette drop out of his mouth and fall right in there.
There's a beat-up old road, Route 104, running northwest out of Tucumcari through the desert to Lake Conchas, then up into the Cornudo Hills and across a grassland plateau to the Sangre de Christo mountains and Santa Fe. I've flown to California a dozen times, but I'd never driven across the West, and this little 150-mile stretch of road awed me to imbecility. Humphrey says I was actually dangerous behind the wheel—bouncing up and down in the seat and jabbering about the mountains and the vistas and pointing out all the cows. We had to stop in Santa Fe and have a few drinks so that I could settle down.
Other than that it was just another day with the engine overheating all the time again and a new vapor lock problem that happened only on dangerous precipices or around blind curves. And even when the Buick was running right it was, if the truth must be told, a very ordinary car. Once the museum-piece novelty had worn off, driving it was about as exciting as driving a new Ford. Or it was until we got lost down some lousy dirt roads south of Santa Fe, and the car just sort of fell apart. The shocks and springs got Parkinson's disease and all four wheels broke loose and headed every way but straight. At 20 miles an hour, you would have thought you were riding down the Baja Peninsula with Mickey Thompson. Humphrey had some theory about suspension harmonics or something and claimed that everything would be all right if he just drove faster which made everything a lot worse. At least the Buick took to getting vapor lock in front of bars and taverns in all the little towns we went through, and that was some improvement. But by the time we arrived in Albuquerque, we were beginning to doubt the intelligence of this project. In fact, we were sick to death of the whole thing.
Saturday we were drunk all day in Albuquerque.
Up in the Nascimento Mountains, we had a truly perplexing mechanical problem. We'd stopped for lunch in Cuba, New Mexico, and when we came out of the restaurant the car wouldn't start. We assumed it was vapor lock but there was no hiss when we opened the fuel line. Humphrey thought maybe the fuel pump had lost prime and was pumping backwards, but there was no vacuum pressure either, and when we took the top off the fuel pump it was blowing bubbles in there.
Humphrey tried to suck some gas up the fuel line. And that didn't work, so I tried until I began to giggle from the fumes and then get sick. Then Humphrey found a length of radiator hose which he put over the filler neck and blew into. I don't know what this was supposed to do but it certainly made him look funny. After that, he insisted on taking the fuel pump apart. I'd never seen the inside of a fuel pump, but Humphrey claimed it was doing all that a fuel pump should so he put it back together. Then I tried the starter again and the engine caught and ran like nothing had happened. Beats us.
We drove out of Cuba, over the Continental Divide, and into the huge Navajo reservation that takes up almost a quarter of Arizona. The landscape opened up impossibly vast and desolate, and it occurred to us, for the first time really, that when the next thing broke we might be in serious trouble. We'd go 40 or 50 miles without seeing another car, and the Buick was overheating worse than ever. We'd bought a five-gallon jerry can in Tucumcari and whenever the gauge went all red, we'd stop and one of us would leap out and splash down the radiator while the driver gunned the engine. This would hold us for two hours, or one hour in the midday heat, or ten minutes on a grade. We had no business being off the Interstate with this car. We knew that. But we'd started out driving on the back roads because we thought they'd be gentler on the old Buick, and then these little byways had been so interesting, with such interesting people and so many interesting places to break down in front of and buy beer in that we'd forgotten ourselves and now we were in the middle of nowhere at all.
Between Kayenta and the Grand Canyon, we went a hundred miles without seeing any sign of human life, and we were pretty much in mortal terror every inch of the way. Then the sun went down and for the first time since we'd left Florida, the temperature fell below 70 degrees. All of a sudden that Buick was a different car. I don't know quite how to explain it but it seemed to exude this aura of strength and dependability. I was driving and I put my foot down and we just took off—70, 80 miles an hour down these twisting roads, whipping along for all the world like a mint-fresh Trans Am.
We were pulling out onto Route 89 just over the Utah border when some fellow in a Datsun Fairlady buzzed by doing 85 or so, and I took out after him. It was dark by then and a misty evening, and I wonder what the guy thought when he saw that wall of chrome well up in his rearview mirror. He was being overtaken by the past. And the past went by at a hundred miles an hour with door handles higher than his head and two inches of travel left under the accelerator. For me, it was a truly exhilarating moment of rapport between man and machine. Then we got vapor lock and the engine conked out.
We'd had to go almost a hundred miles up into Utah to find a motel room, and in the morning it was raining. The Buick wouldn't start for a while. Something had gotten wet under the hood and we had to wait for the showers to let up and mop around under there with a towel before we got it going. Ten miles down the road it began to rain again and we discovered that we didn't have any windshield wipers. We'd been hearing obscene sucking noises from the brake pedal for a couple of days, and we knew there was a problem somewhere in all the tubes and hoses of the Buick's Medusa-head vacuum assist mechanism. But everything seemed to work and it hadn't occurred to us that the windshield wipers ran off this system too. I could get the blades to move a little when we were headed uphill, but downhill I had to keep on the accelerator with one foot and on the brake with the other in order to build up any vacuum pressure, and that made the rear wheels begin to slip around some. Thus we traveled up every incline with clearing skies and down every slope with drenching squalls until we got back in the desert and began to overheat.
We played it safe through Arizona and Nevada, sticking to Interstate 15 almost to Las Vegas. Then Humphrey insisted that he had to see the Valley of Fire. So we filled the jerry can and headed down a maze of gravel roads into that red sandstone wasteland. I suppose it's very beautiful if you think you're going to live to tell anybody about it. It was over 110 degrees in the shade and we were completely alone. I was sure that when they found us—our bones picked clean by whatever it is that bothers to live out there—they'd think we were left over from the 1956 Shriners convention. And we did manage to get lost. We'd had a CB radio with us all along, but we'd kept forgetting to have it installed.
And it was a humiliating moment out there in the desert when I realized that Humphrey and I would not be able to figure out how to connect that radio—not, literally, for the life of us.
Fortunately, we got unlost. Then I decided that there was a quicker way than the Interstate to get to Las Vegas, and we got lost again for a while. Quite a while, actually, so that when we pulled over the top of one more hill and saw that city below us we were almost out of gas, completely out of water, and totally out of patience with each other.
Dirty, half-naked, and our car covered with filth, we weren't sure they'd take us at the Sands. But the doorman had "had one just like it" and talked for twenty minutes about how nothing went wrong with them.
There's a 2400-foot climb up the "Barstow Incline" on the California-Nevada border, and we were sure that if we didn't make it before 10 a.m. we wouldn't make it at all. So we had to get up early in the morning. Besides, we were three days overdue in Los Angeles and practically broke.
Somehow we made it to Barstow without seizing up. The temperature gauge was half in the red at exactly 50 miles an hour, and if I went even 2 mph faster or slower the radiator began to boil. Humphrey was flopping all over in his sleep, kicking at me and falling against the steering wheel. Once, when we were completely boxed in—trucks fore and aft and a car in the left lane—his leg shot out and stamped me on my accelerator foot. We would have crashed for sure if I hadn't punched him in the gut and made him curl up on the seat.
Tom Sargent lives in Bel Air, and Humphrey knows his way around Los Angeles a little bit, so outside San Bernadino, I managed to get him sobered enough to drive. It had taken eleven days and we'd had some kind of breakdown every single day except that last, and when we pulled into Bel Air, Humphrey missed Sargent's home, went to turn around, and reverse gear gave out. Gave out completely—the Buick couldn't even be pushed backward. We had to drive all the way through Bel Air and out onto Sunset Boulevard again to get back to Sargent's house.
I don't know. I still love old Buicks. But I probably wouldn't try to drive another one cross-country. And I still haven't the slightest idea how Sargent got that car out of his driveway.