Chapter 5

In later years I was to wish we'd held onto the Studebaker, too, but we didn't. Thanks to living so close to the school, for several years there we only needed one car, and cars aged quickly in those days. I could tell that several things were getting set to go wrong with it, so in the summer of 1956 Arlene and I decided to trade it in. Since it was her car, I let her make up her mind what she wanted, and I just basically went along with it. Even though I was pretty much a Ford man, we wound up buying a brand new end-of-the-model-year '55 Chevrolet two-door with the V8 engine.

If ever there was a landmark car, that was it. I've always been partial to the way life was in the fifties, but I've said many times that they built some really butt-ugly cars back in those days. They were too big, too flashy, too loaded with chrome, and they reflected what the designers thought the public wanted, rather than what the public itself wanted. This phenomenon was capped off by the introduction of the Edsel in 1958, which of course fell on its face. I mean, name me a good looking American car from the 1950s. There weren't many – the '52 Studebaker, the '55 Thunderbird, which chromed and sized its way out of its promise by 1958; the '55 Chevy, which suffered from the same fate, and the ... uh ... well ... you get my point.

In many ways the '55 Chevy was the major milestone of these, not entirely because of the body design, which was pure and simple in an era when many cars were overdone, but from that little 265-cubic-inch V8 tucked under the hood. The small-block Chevy V8 introduced in that period may set a record for being the most successful all-round engine ever designed. That same basic design is still being produced all these years later, although a bit larger in displacement. You want to know what was under the hood of the largest number of NASCAR winners last year? The last twenty years? That small-block Chevy V8 introduced clear back there in the 1955 model year, that's what.

That particular Chevy was a little special, too, in that we brought three kids home from the hospital with it.

Arlene and I had made up our minds that we weren't going to rush into having kids, and that we wanted to get to know each other a little better before we went down that route. I have to admit that chance got involved in it, and Vernon came along a little sooner than we'd planned, but only a little sooner, in September of 1956. Raymond joined us in November of 1957. Arlene and I had made up our minds that we were going to try to keep our kids pretty close in age, but two kids in diapers in that little house was plenty, so we put off trying one more time for a girl for a bit. Elaine came along in March of 1960, and with that Arlene and I pretty well made up our minds that enough was enough.

The thought of having to live with three little kids in that house was more than we really wanted to deal with. We'd liked the house well enough to buy it back there in the fall of '54, and it had served us well, but after Elaine came along we were pretty sure we were going to have to do something different. One of the things I'd liked about that house was it was within easy walking distance of school, so we could get away with only one car (by then the Ford didn't count), but it got to be a pain in the neck at times. It was pretty clear we were going to have to have a second car no matter where we moved, so we decided to not look just in town. We decided we didn't need to be in any huge rush about it though. In those days Arlene was working only part time, and getting someone to care for the kids when I couldn't do it was something of a problem, so we had to be a little careful with our money. I had tenure by that time, so I knew I had a job with the school as long as I wanted to stay there, and that gave us a little stability to work with.

I started teaching driver's education in the summer of 1955. A little to my surprise, I enjoyed it a lot and rarely had a kid scare me with their driving. The classroom part of it was easy, but I had to put in a minimum of driving ten hours with each kid. When you're talking thirty or forty kids, that does a real good job of eating up a summer, and it got worse as the class sizes increased through the sixties when the "baby boomer" kids began to hit driving age. A lot of the simple stuff was pretty easy, since I could get the kids started on low-use country roads, although in driving around we usually headed into Kalamazoo or South Bend once or twice so the kids would get a little more idea of how to drive in heavier traffic.

I was riding around with a carload of my driver's education kids one day along in the summer of 1960 when I happened to notice a farmhouse on Taney Road about three miles west of town. It wasn't the first time I'd seen it, of course, or even the hundred and first. In fact, it had been for sale for a while. I'd often thought that it seemed to be in pretty good shape for an older house, and pretty close to what Arlene and I were looking for, except for the fact that it was a farm and we were just looking for a house. Now, of course I'd grown up on a farm, and if that taught me anything it was that I had no desire to be a farmer again.

But somehow that morning a different train of thought began to form. Just because it was a farm didn't mean that it had to be a bad deal. It might be worthwhile to buy the place, divide the house and a large lot off of it, and then sell the rest. As far as that went, there was no reason I couldn't lease out the land or have someone farm it on shares. I thought that might come close to covering the payments, and if I could do that it seemed likely that the land value might go up enough over the years to make it a decent investment. That thought was strong enough that on my lunch break I took a swing by the real estate agency to find out a little bit more.

It turned out that the farm was owned by an older couple. They'd owned it for years and farmed it for a good many of them, but in recent years had leased the farmland out. Now, they wanted to sell out and move to Florida. It had been on the market for a while and they'd just reduced the price.

That evening at dinner I brought the idea up to Arlene. She thought the idea might have some potential if the numbers worked out, so we made a date to check the place out. The house proved to be in very good condition; the old boy who owned it was something of a handyman, and everything was in top shape. The place had several outbuildings, including a fairly large barn and a large two-car garage. When everything was said and done Arlene and I agreed that we liked the place a lot. We played with numbers and fudged things around a bit, and wound up making an offer on the place. We worked out a deal to continue the lease arrangement, and never did get around to splitting the land off.