Beetlemania!

Ah, the memories a few lines of a classified ad can conjure.  Take this example from a recent  ad in Ocala:  "1967 VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE ... This car was last driven in 2008, stopped driving when the battery ..."

And thereby hangs our tale ...

Once upon a time, there was an original Volkswagen Beetle. It ran flawlessly, got great gas mileage and remained dependable transportation for its original owner for some 20 years.

  This was not, alas, MY Beetle.  It was my grandmother's.  She drove it everywhere since she drove it off the showroom floor in 1969.  Rain, snow, sleet, sun, didn't matter.  It went where she pointed it.  She loved it, and it was a great little car. 

  Unlike today's modern VWs, the Beetles of yore were about as simple as it's possible for four-wheeled motorized transportation to get. No air conditioning. No power steering. No power brakes. Hand-cranked windows.

  

 I thought Mamaw's Bug was a blast to drive, and in college, decided to get one of my own.  Mine was a 1970, and had been owned by a mechanic. What could go wrong?

  Over the next three years or so, I managed to find out -- just about everything.   The car left me stranded on half the roads of Eastern Kentucky.  With rusty heater boxes and no ventilation fan, it forced me to scrape more ice off the inside of the windshield than the outside -- while driving. It had about as much horsepower as the average leaf blower, and when the muffler went bad, was twice as loud.

  The turn signal switch broke. VW used the same switch for several years before, and several years after, but in 1970, they used a design unique to that model year alone. I still remember the cost of that one -- $46 for the part alone, on a college student's budget.

  One low point was a rainy Friday in March when I was driving home from school for the weekend. I had the flu, and felt lousy.  Shortly after I headed onto the interstate for the 20-mile trek home, I heard a familiar thump-thump-thump.  Flat tire.  Just perfect.

  I got out of the car, dug the jack and the lug wrench out of the trunk. and got to work in the steady downpour. Car jacked up? Check.  Hubcap off? Check.  Lug nuts loose?

  No.  

  Try again.  Lug  nuts loose?  

  No.

  Try again, standing on the wrench this time.  Lug nuts loose?

  No.

  Thanks to some kind of mechanical gremlin, these old beasts had a nasty habit of locking the lug nuts, nearly welding the wheel in place.  I ended up having to flag down a truck driver to break the things loose. Not exactly my most macho moment.

  But the breaking point came on a day when the car actually was running well.  Heading into my senior year, I took  it to my trusted mechanic for brakes and a muffler.  Cost $125, and I thought it was money well spent, thinking it would at least get me through one last year of school.

  All was going fine as I headed toward home, once again on the interstate.  It was a really nice fall day, so I had the windows open and the AM radio cranked up, cruising about 65.

  Then I heard the sound of something dragging under the car.  With no idea what it was, I pulled off at the nearest exit.  The car was still running fine, with no obvious sign of distress as I pulled into a parking lot and shut it off.

I got out, walked around the car, raised the engine cover in the rear, looked around.  No obvious problem.

Until I looked under the back seat.  Where I expected to see solid sheet metal, I saw only a perfectly rectangular hole. Automotive history lesson here, folks: in original Beetles, that's where the battery lived.  

  As for what happened, let's pick up the thread of our classified ad above, with some slight spelling correction along the way:

  "Stopped driving when the battery fell out of car onto highway due to extensive floorpan rust (embarrassing, huh?)"

  Well, embarrassing isn't exactly the word.  When I called my mom to tell her I needed a tow truck, and the reason why, she cracked up.

  Honestly, I don't recall my mom laughing that hard before or since.  She must have laughed for a solid five minutes. She was still laughing when I hung up the pay phone to wait for the tow.

  I found it considerably less funny.  There's a story, possibly apocryphal, that Elvis Presley once shot a high-priced sports car when it refused to start.  Standing in that parking lot that day, I knew exactly how he felt.

  But the faithless Bug had the last word.  In the intervening years, I've owned four more VWs, including the Jetta that currently graces the driveway of Maison Cundiff.  So there must be something special about them that keeps me coming back.

OK, fine, I wouldn't have shot it.  But I would have Tasered it.

Rut-Ro! It's a Conspiracy!

Rut-Ro!

  Chances are, if you're somewhere between age 6 and 60, you probably know just what that means. It's cartoon dogspeak, of course, for "Uh-Oh!"  Like many foreign phrases, it can convey a range of meanings in just two syllables, anything from "Oops" to "Oh S***!"

  But who said it first? And who decided that animated mutts should speak in a language where everything begins with the letter R?  Let's face it, if you'd never heard it before, "Mutt-Mo" or "Zut-Zo" could make just as much sense, no?

   First things first.  The first cartoon canine to utter the now immortal phrase Rut-Ro was none other than Astro Jetson, a/k/a Tralfaz. (If you don't know where Tralfaz comes from, to quote Annie Savoy, you could look it up.  If you don't know who Annie Savoy is, I give up.  Don't expect me to do all the heavy lifting here, folks.)

  Astro was the quintessential cartoon dog -- smart, loyal, capable of understanding English, and of speech -- as long as every word started with R.

   Some time later, another telegenic pup came along, name of Scooby Doo.  He and his merry band of meddling kids roamed the country in the Mystery Machine, solving crimes before the police, foiling the aims of various and sundry villains and ne'er do wells.  

  For animation lovers, the series raised numerous existential questions:  Was Freddie really gay or did he just dress like it?  Why were Daphne and Velma portrayed in the classic Ginger/Mariann dichotomy rather than having brains and beauty in one female character? And why exactly did both Shaggy and Scooby perpetually have the munchies?

  And perhaps most perplexing of all was the fact that Scooby spoke the same language as Astro.  "Rut-Ro" was as common as Scooby Snacks whenever the lovable Great Dane was around.

  After spending a considerable amount of time researching this issue -- at least 90 seconds, anyway -- I have discovered the answer to the one mystery Scooby and the gang couldn't solve.  According to that unbiased, unimpeachable, trusted information source Wikipedia, Astro and Scooby spoke the same language for one simple reason:

  THEY HAD THE SAME VOICE!

  More specifically, Hollywood voice actor Don Messick voiced both characters.  Messick, well known for other cartoon characters, including Bamm-Bamm Rubble, Boo Boo Bear and Papa Smurf,  created Astro's trademark R-centric speech in 1962.  Seven years later, he voiced Scooby in the same voice.  Messick also voiced the cartoon villain sidekick dog  Muttley's classic snicker.

  Now some among us might wonder if the the Astro/Scooby/Muttley combo is really a secret language for dogs, who are patiently biding their time, using it as a means of communication to coordinate their own plot to take over the world and make bacon the international unit of currency. I asked Snickerdoodle the Wonder Pup what she thought of that theory.

  She snickered and said it was, and I quote, "Rabsorootry ririculous."

  Hmmm ....

Rut-Ro.

Postscript -- Sparky the Wonder Cat  was sitting on the desk as I wrote this.  No joke, he clicked on the mouse in an apparent attempt to delete part of what I just wrote.  That can only mean this is bigger than I thought.  Now it's a cross-species conspiracy!

RUT-RO!