Saturday 08/19/2023
Scott reminds me that the ’56 Fords did not have the flathead V8. Since I am positive my car had one, that means, it wasn’t a 56! Checking online, the last model year for the flathead V8 was 1953. Looking at images online I find a 1953 4-door sedan with the blue-on-blue paint job that I remember. This looks right.
I have a lot more places and cars to try to sort out. I only today remembered that for a year or so I was driving a dark green 1957 Chevy coupe. I can’t sort out the sequence of the yellow 65 Pontiac, the 57 Chevy, the 60 Ford, and the CHP car. Then came the Fiat 124 Sport Coupe that I bought new. That model was made, the internet tells me, from 1967 to 1975 and I can’t say what year I bought it in; probably 70. Anyway, I drove that for a good while, until we bought our Acura. (I sold the Fiat to Debbie Goldeen and a year later, a tree fell on it, total loss.)
You think the cars are a jumble? I also can’t sort into sequence of when I: shared an apartment with John Snow (308 Presidio); shared an apartment with Glen Fray in the Castro district (probably 18th or 19th street near Castro, which wasn’t completely a gay district then); shared an apartment in the Sunset with my sister Joyce (couldn’t say where, maybe 25th avenue?); lived alone in an apartment somewhere on the flanks of Twin Peaks (that one is associated with the memory of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, so 1968); shared ownership of a house with Joyce and my parents; and lived alone in the basement apartment in Daly City. I’m amazed at how peripatetic I was between 1962 and 1973 when I married Marian and we bought our house on Tasso st.
The Daly City place is associated with the end of the 1953 Ford: it blew a head gasket, and John Snow helped me replace it three times. (Why I’m so sure it was a flathead V8!) The head was warped, so the second gasket blew, then I had the head planed, and the third one still blew, and I remember John being in an absolute fury at the car and ripping through the third gasket replacement in a kind of berserker rage. And that happened in the garage space at the entrance to my basement apartment. Then I sold the Ford to Tom and Nan Kurtz (is that the right last name?). So I was probably right when I wrote last week, the CHP cruiser and the Daly City place came together. And both were early in the above sequence, in my first year or two with IBM.
OK back to diary. In the morning I finished assembling the videos for the C&W party. Then I did the noon docent tour at the museum. On return I shucked out of my red docent shirt and chinos into jeans and a tee and bopped on up the street to the Varsity theater to see the Barbie movie. Meh. It had some amusing moments. The end was philosophically thin and unsatisfying. I was hoping they could come up with a more insightful ending than “be yourself”. But there you go. Pretty people, pretty sets.
The opening sequence, the little girls swapping baby dolls for Barbie dolls? Was a clever parody of the opening sequence of 2001 A Space Odyssey. I wonder how many in the modern audience catch on to that?
Codgerville 