A new creamy-tan 1963 122 two-door was the first Volvo I distinctly remember. It belonged to Al Strailer, a student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. I could identify Volvos on the street in 1963 -- hell, I could identify almost any model on the road by the time I was six, thirteen years earlier -- but I'd never knowingly touched a Volvo before hopping into Al's. I remember it well; the solid click to the door shutting, the comfort of the seat, the quiet, purposeful ride, the funny flat handles on the window winders. The thing felt like a tank. Of course, my own car at the time was a Fiat 600. A Borgward would've felt like a tank.
In 1963, my auto-esthetic fancy was caught on twin-nostril Ferrari Testarossas and Wolfgang von Trip's Grand Prix car. Al's Volvo had big twin breathing orifices too, which could not have hurt my impression of Volvos, but the rest of the 122 seemed a little dated and not at all sporting. There was no mistaking the solid quality, however -- an impression of Volvos that has never entirely evaporated, though the '69 140 automatic my dad had awhile almost did it. Dad bought that car on my suggestion before I'd really seen what Volvo had done. I was appalled.
Nice as Al's car was, it didn't promote lust in the loins. Of the cars I could afford by stretching far in those days, it was a Fiat-Abarth Zagato that lifted my libido and wallet, stealing me away from my lowly Fiat 600 (with its engine cover propped open, ala Abarth 750s of the day). I also enjoyed flings with one pal's Austin-Healey 100-4 and another's Mini Cooper-S on Marlboro Raceway.
A Volvo for myself never entered my mind. Nice and solid but tippy and stodgy, I thought, and reliability wasn't an issue. I don't remember it crossing my mind back then. I assumed all guys changed rod bearings every 6,000 miles. Taking long road trips in the Zagato was seldom considered. To see my girlfriend at a college 300 miles away, I just naturally hitch-hiked.
The years went by and I was an automotive rogue: There was the Ford Falcon Futura thrown over for an MG 1100 Sports Sedan, then came the MGB, TR-3, Morgan +4, the Alfa Giulia Spyder Veloce, the Spridgit -- love 'em and leave 'em. Who cared? I had college and career and adventure to pursue, boats to sail and women to woo.
It was the mid-'60s in Seattle that I got brushed by a Volvo again. I was fooling around with my Morgan 4/4 in SCCA, and the course workers' chief at the then-Pacific International Raceway and I became friends. He had a red P1800. We went a few places in it. Being the Northwest, it rained, but we were dry (I know, I know, but it's relative: I had a Morgan, remember?). We never had to stop and wrench on the thing. It was comfortable. It looked like a Ferrari. You could hear the FM radio. It was solid and smelled a lot like Al's 122 , but it was sporty. I don't remember what, if anything, my friend had done to the suspension, but I don't recall it cornering on its door handles. I did learn somewhere that 1800s didn't have to simply be bigger Karmann Ghias or T-Birds -- boulevardier's cars. I knew with a little tweaking, they could move. Maybe I'd read of Art Riley's exploits.
The two Volvos that had flitted through the edges of my life came to mind a couple years later when, as a San Francisco newspaper reporter, I needed a new car in which to commute across the Golden Gate Bridge and to occasionally streak up to Bodega Bay or Seattle. The Spridgit my girlfriend and I shared was tired and my motorcycle wasn't fun in the fog. We needed a good car. It was a given that our ride should have some ‚lan, fergawdsake, and handle well, and tour fast and well. I wanted a land-jet. It also had be the proper totem for my tribal station. It would be a brand-new, 1967 British racing green Volvo 1800S with chamois-color interior.
I was making what seemed to be enough for a good new car, something I'd never had. I'd had a new car once, but it wasn't good -- it was the MG Sport Sedan. Bad car. I checked out the Mercedes 280 SL (or was it the 230 in those years?). I ruled that out since I wasn't a doctor's wife. How about a Lotus Elan? I took one for a test drive around the winding road past San Quentin and man, did that sucker corner! But it was British and I was tired of wrenching. Porsche? Nope. Rear engines never made sense, polar moment considered. Then it hit me: What About A Volvo 1800? Of course!
I had the dealer mount the antenna atop a rear fender and one bent-stem Lucas mirror centered on the left front fender above the wheel well. A Cibie driving light went on the left side of the grill and an amber fog light on the right. "You've got really good taste for a heterosexual," a friend said. "You're conservative-flashy," and I guess I was (am), but the thing also had to work well.
Taking a couple of much older co-workers home in it one day (yup, we were crowded in there), a senior reporter of a certain age said she thought the 1800 too "old" for a guy in his 20s. It was, but then it was still stock. I had my plans: I knew about swaybars and Koni shocks and stiffer springs and line-boring and balancing, porting and relieving and cams and double valve springs, sodium-filled valves and five-angle grinds, and headers and dual side-draft Webers. As soon as the warranty ran out, it went into a friend's shop and got all that stuff (except line-bored 'cause it didn't need it), plus wider rims and fatter Pirelli CN-36s. Even doing all that, it was barely more expensive than a Porsche 911 and faster.
It was not a status car in the San Francisco of '67. I covered the Haight-Ashbury scene where it was dubbed way too materialistic. In North Beach after work, jazz musicians thought it was cool, but I knew Kerouac and Kesey wouldn't. It wasn't a Caddy or a bus and I wasn't about to paint it like Janice Joplin's Speedster. Since the older woman reporter couldn't see all the modifications, it still seemed to her too adult for this kid. I didn't give a damn -- I knew what I had, how comfortable it was, and how stove-bolt reliable, even hopped up. What the hell did she think I should drive? MGA maybe.
The strongest memories of that 1800 are of late-night gonzo runs. I worked for the morning paper, meaning a lot of late nights. Getting off at 2 a.m. was no fun. The rest of the world was asleep, the bars closed, and here I was full of deadline coffee and adrenaline. One solution: Blast over empty roads to, say, Eureka and back in the 1800S, about 100 miles each way.
Highway 101 was mostly two lanes then and fast. I'd use the whole road whenever I could see well enough, drifting high-speed sweepers, the garish chromed speedo frequently showing 120 down the long straights. Yeeee-ha! I seldom got stopped, and when I did I seldom got tickets. The cops would have to glimpse my press cards as I fumbled for my license. That didn't put me in the "brotherhood," but maybe the "cousinhood." If the last reporter hadn't burned the cop in print, I was usually cool. Besides, I never sped in town nor ran lights. I only sped on the open road.
Like a dummy, I let that car go with only 96,000 miles on it when I became a boat bum. For several years I was ashore a few weeks or months, then at sea awhile. I bought $100 cars when I came in, sold 'em for about the same when I sailed off again. There were old Fords, a VW beetle, a couple of tired motorcycles in there, and a Volvo 544.
I did one of the meanest things of my life when I bought that one. A girl had it plus a newer Karmann Ghia just willed to her by an aunt. The 544 wasn't running well. She advertised it for $250. I checked it out. It was white, and somebody had done a really nice job setting it up. It had simple chrome, curved and closed nerf-bars front and rear, swaybars too. Inside, a big speedo and matching tach had been very nicely set into the dash. Round smaller gauges flanked them. It had wider wheels. It looked good. It ran like crap.
I nursed it down the street and around a corner and had to see what I could do. Fiddling under the hood, I discovered it was just loose carb linkage. It was running on one SU. I blipped the carbs together and it smoothed right out. Hell, it sounded great! I shut the hood and limped back to her place. I talked her down to $150 based on the lousy engine, did the paper shuffle, and back at the car I connected up the linkage and fired it up. As I drove off, I saw her in her doorway. She'd seen me. I felt like a cad. The least I could have done is drive a block away before fixing the thing.
That 544 is another car I should have kept. Six months or so later, I sold it to a pal for $250 and went sailing.
A few years passed when good boats were important but cars weren't. I drove coast-to-coast in a $100 '56 VW beetle (oval rear window). That car's another story, a hellova tale for another time. I sold it in North Carolina and bought a '67 Ford Fairlane with a 289 V8 so I could tow a boat I'd built there (here), and I moved on to Maine.
In Maine, I became a magazine editor and traveled a lot. The Ford was tired. It was time for my last new car -- a center-of-the-road-line yellow '74 Volvo 145, a great car once I'd carefully fiberglassed the cheesy cardboard spare tire cover. I met others with '73 and '74 Volvos who said they were nothing but trouble, but mine wasn't. I was told Volvo had labor strife in its Swedish factory in those years and quality suffered. Mine was built in a Belgian factory. I guess it was a happier place. I drove that car -- and slept in it, hauled tons of stuff, towed my surf dory coast-to-coast loaded with tools and books, and cruised at 80 -- for seven years. It never broke down, except when I accidentally bagged a doe and a fawn with it one winter late-night.
A Westerner living in Maine is like an Italian living in Norway, so around 1980, I moved home, first to Puget Sound, then Morro Bay, California. When I sold it, the 145 had gone 165,000 miles, including numerous cross-country dashes, and it was like-new -- except for body rot showing through due to salted Maine roads, and some funky metal inside due to Phang, my black Lab retriever. He slobbered buckets when he rode. I carried hooded foul-weather jackets for back-seat passengers until Phang died and it was time for a new Volvo.
Barely aware of ESs when they were new, I'd seen several once West again and decided I had to have one, ideally a yellow '73. A newspaper reporter again, my beat was from Port San Luis north through Big Sur, which meant I was often on the road, often running glorious Highway 1. I followed seven 1800ESs until they stopped back then: "Wanna sell that car?" I'd ask. The answer was always "no" -- but one guy hesitated first. I gave him my card. Three months later he called: He'd gotten his ass in a financial sling and needed money. Was I still interested?
You bet! -- and just in time for the car's sake. He'd had it only nine months. He bought it in perfect condition from a Navy jet-jockey from Oregon. The guy I got it from was a careless slob. The car was on its way down, but not yet terribly far. Since I first saw it, it had gained a newly-bent grill surround, a scrape along a door, fresh dash cap cracks, funky inside mirror and silly, tall 195/85 tires. It looked like an off-road ES. It also had only 93,000 miles on the clock, stick-shift, no rust, never any serious body damage, the overdrive worked -- and it was dark green, my second favorite ES color. I bought it.
I switched inside mirrors, wheels and tires with my 145, and sold the yellow brick wagon to a pal with a body shop. Busy with work, my attention was further split: I had two old BMW motorcycles (R69S and R27), a wife and a 37' sailboat/home to pamper. I just drove the ES and kept it healthy for a while, then began slowly improving it. It got sheepskins on the seats, leather on the steering wheel, round Marchal driving and fog lights (like my old 1800S), Cibie headlights and KYB shocks; IPD swaybars, new silvered glass for the outside mirrors, new dash caps and grill surround, and a visit from one of the first ever dent-doctors for the door-dings.
Anybody who's been reading my junk awhile knows I still have ye olde ES. I keep improving her a little at a time. She's now got a highly varnished Nardi wood-rim steering wheel (a trade for a book on rounding Cape Horn), 240 turbo alloy wheels and Delrin bushings. I rebuilt the engine carefully three years ago at some 455,000 miles (can't be exact with Smiths speedos). She breaths better now and the engine is finely balanced. I've given her a "new," freshened transmission/OD and much more supportive seats. I've fiddled with alignments, and though she has a full degree of negative camber each side, I hot-shoe enough corners that tire wear is perfectly even.
Having polished through the original paint and touched it up too many times, I broke down and got her repainted a couple years ago. I hated to: She had honestly earned her patina in many gonzo missions including 14 round-trips coast-to-coast, mostly non-stop, but she was looking kind of shabby. With her new coats, she got a new windshield and you can see into a setting sun. Most recently, she got new European headlights with 100 watt bulbs and 6" round 85-watt PIAA fog and driving lights.
We're stuck back in North Carolina on Purgatory Plantation awhile, so she rests a few weeks in winter 'til the salt's all gone, but she's always ready, closing in on half-a-million miles in better shape than ever. I hope I never have to replace her, though she might get a new garage-mate some day -- a Lotus Super 7. The good motorcycles are gone, I'm between boats and there are just some things a man must have before he croaks.
