Before I get to the topic in this week’s headline, I wanted to deliver a report on your financial status. On my first column of 2018, I reported on each man, woman and child’s share of our national debt by the last tick of the clock at the end of 2017. It amounted to $63,210.
When I woke up on Sunday morning I thought it’d be interesting to see how just six months had changed that figure. I’ll admit that it was already eight o’clock in the morning when I thought of it but, as the old expression goes, it’s close enough for government work.
In six months, the population has increased roughly 1.9 million while the debt has gone up about $500 billion. My calculator indicates that, in actual figures, your share — and every member of your family’s share — of our debt has gone from $63,210 to $64,779. I just thought you’d like to know.
Back to my first topic — a recent car show at the fairgrounds made me wonder if a man ever tires of going through a mental list of old cars he once owned, wishing he had darned near every one of them back again? Ride with me, if you will, down memory lane as this old man recalls his first bittersweet memory of automobile ownership.
The year was 1944 and I was attending a Lutheran boarding school, Concordia Academy, in Portland. Another student knew of a friend who had a 1923 Overland three-door sedan for sale in a tiny community south of Portland called, simply, Four Corners. This was an adequate description of the area which, I suppose, is a thriving upscale community today.
The asking price was $12, based on the fact that the friend had discovered it in a remote barn, paid $10 for it and had installed 4 spark plugs. The only problem was that it needed a new distributor. You remember what they were, don’t you? It wasn’t difficult to find a used replacement because most cities had stores where used car parts were sold, and where they had catalogues of interchangeable parts. This was also a time when you could find a man to replace an element in a toaster or repair your radio or put new soles on your shoes. You didn’t just throw things away and buy new ones back then.
We knew enough to know that to set the proper time to get a spark to ignite the gasoline was when the piston was at the top of its rotation and that one merely had to remove a spark plug and insert a screwdriver into the open hole to determine when that was and then rotate the distributor to create its spark at that same instant. Are you still with me?
We did that, but could never get any noise — except an occasional loud backfire — when we tried to use the crank, and later, when we got the seller to push us with his newly purchased car. I left the car there, intending to do more work on it, but it was at that time that the school and I came to identical decisions about my continued presence at that particular institute of learning. I left that $12 car sitting in Four Corners, kissed my money goodbye and returned to Tacoma to enroll at Stadium High School.
It wasn’t until years later — many years — that it dawned on me that in our ignorance we were setting the timing exactly 180 degrees out of synchronization! Can you blame me for occasionally wondering what that $12 car might be worth today?
I’ve owned many cars since then, including an Oldsmobile ambulance with tie-dye curtains. Hey, it was the 60s. Maybe I’ll report on some of them some other day.
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
