My Trusty '76 - A Love Story

So, a little background on my love for the 1976 VW Transporter...

It was in the late 1980s when I got a wild notion to acquire a good VW Bus. I'd gone through several VW machines, back then: There was this wacky 1973 4-Door 412 Type 4 that went up in flames when my girlfriend borrowed it. I really like that car. I also had a 1975 Dasher 5-Door that came before the Fox. I didn't like that one because it was a carburetor engine that was discontinued just prior to the advent of VW's ubiquitous Fuel Injection Engine. 
 

Obviously in the late '80s, we didn't have the Internet to search for cars, technical tips or information beyond what one could ordinarily find in the Bentley or the Muir books.

The Muir book (How to keep your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot – ISBN 10 1-56691-310-1) was easiest for me to read because it explained complicated functions in a language I could understand. Along with a goodly amount of history and humor, the likes of which I needed, when trying to install a new starter or adjust my valves, the Muir book offered R. Crumb-esque illustrations that were remarkably accurate.

The Bentley book was cool for cats who had the tools and general know-how that I lacked. When I had a question about a procedure I generally hit the Bentley for more in-depth coverage, although I felt moronic and alienated by the terse technical language and the bland, black and white illustrations.

I'm not a truly technical person, as you will learn as this project progresses.

If you wanted to look for a VW Bus back then in Los Angeles and the surrounding area, there was the Recycler. Although the Recycler is a great on-line resource nowadays, back then you could buy anything through the Recycler; kind of a craigslist in newsprint. If you wanted to join a band, you checked out the Recycler. If you wanted to scam your fellow Angelinos of their hard-earned dough, you could do it through the Recycler. If you wanted to sell your rare Nagel prints, you would usually sell it through the Recycler. If you wanted to get laid, you could even do THAT through the Recycler. What a terrific resource the Recycler was!

Even then, finding a Type 2 wasn't really a breeze. Several weeks of looking found me just a couple VW Type 2s that were worth really considering. 
 

It took 3 tries to find my bus... 
 

1969 Westfalia – Nothing doing, the Previous Owner didn't think I possessed the passion and the drive to take care of his darling Theresa—yes, he named it, and wanted it to go to the right home. Instead of trying to sell his Westfalia, he kept grilling me on my experience with a dual-port, dual-carb system. Could I easily replace the wiring on a 12 Volt System? Have I ever “pulled” an engine before? What's my experience with body repair and paint? Could I explain to him what OG meant? “Colors,” a movie about gansta life in South Central LA had come out around this time, so I thought it meant Old Gang-banger. Finally talking the Previous Owner into letting me take darling Theresa for a test drive up the block, I smacked my knee into the steering column and convinced him that I was not the right suitor for his darling Theresa.

I got the feeling that he was a member of some strange cult or something.

1974 Camper – (I'm not sure it was a Westy, but it was definitely a camper). Shit Brown with an awning, along with rotting camping accoutrement it smelled like mildew in there. I knew, driving it away that I'd made the wrong choice. My buddy Dave and I took the LA Metro Bus down to Silver Lake where I bought the van for $400. We rolled it down the hill and onto Sunset Blvd. It was an automatic—my first mistake—and the engine died at the first stop light. With the engine turning over and over, I discovered the lights dimming and realized the alternator/generator had given up the ghost. Dave and I pushed it onto a side street and somehow I got the thing to start again.

Although it really didn't give me much pain after that, I felt uncomfortable with the automatic tranny and eventually sold it to a cameraman I'd hired for a surf video I was producing. He literally begged me to sell it to him, while I told him of EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM the bus had; more than anything, I tried to talk him out of buying it from me—abiding by the rule that one should never sell beaters to your friends. Pulling up in front of my apartment in West Hollywood, he agreed to waive the $500/day fee for shooting my video and take the bus in exchange. I have to confess I was pretty stoked to get that old beater off my hands. I even made a hundred bucks in the process—viewed correctly. 
 

Eating lunch at Pink's Hot Dog Stand on LaBrea, I joylessly scanned the Recycler looking for a VW Type 2 that had apparently never been born. This week, there were two ads for a Type 2. One for a 1969—which I knew I didn't want, realizing that my dream Type 2 had to be a 7-Passenger from the mid-'70s. The other ad copy:

“1976 VW Bus/Transporter – Eng gd, nds clutch, not cal veh, $650 OBO, Venice 213-555-1111”

I rode a motor scooter down to Venice where I saw the bus. There was a little surface rust and a strong sounding engine. I took the bus for a spin and liked the clutch action and the engine made the sound one always seeks to hear. It was true love. Even though it wasn't a California vehicle—a real problem for out-of-state cars in California due to smog compliance issues—I knew that at $650, I was onto something. Oh the adventures I would have!

My girlfriend and I took it for the now ritual spray-wash and found that under all the road dust, it was Chrome Yellow OG (Original German) with a white top paint and the rust was merely surface and not cancerous.

Next came smog issues. The first place I took it said that it wouldn't even put the sensor in the pipe because it hadn't passed the visual inspection. So, I took it to another smog place, where the technician just shoved the sensor up the tail pipe and minutes later, he took my $40 bucks and I'd cleared smog, somehow.

I spent the next few years driving my Trusty '76 down to Mexico, up to San Francisco, all along the California Coast. Highway 101 and my bus were very good, well-acquainted friends. With my Trusty '76 I surfed, shot videos, picked up hitch-hikers, waved at other Type 2s out there on California's highways, camped on the beach, drove seminal industrial act Grotus to their first gig ever, all the while only having to do minimal upkeep on the machine.

Life was good, until I had a run of bad luck with a parking attendant that slithered around our neighborhood. He was a skinny little bastard with an attitude, a measuring tape and itchy ticket-fingers. He was openly hostile with people in the neighborhood, many of us planning sock parties for him that would never happen.

People would come out of their houses on Detroit Street and shout, “How do you sleep at night?”

The little fucker would come back with something like, “With my head on my pillow...”

There are about 50 ways to get parking tickets in LA. You can park too far away from the curb, too close to the curb, too close to the cars either in front of or behind you, or you can park at an inappropriate angle. Then one has to heed the permit areas. You had to have your permit sticker on the back bumper—its edge not within 2” of but not to exceed 3.5” of the left edge of the license plate.

That fucking bastard parking attendant measured my permit and found it to be .25” too close to the license plate and therefore in violation. The permit stickers were neither easy to come by, nor were they easily removed and re-stuck. So every day that this motherless fuck had worked and my van was present on his watch, I received a ticket, along with several of my neighbors.

I spent a lot of money just paying tickets to the City of LA.

Eventually, I fell behind on the payments. Not only was I paying for the permit to park my bus on my own street, I was paying these spurious tickets that the judges down town would not reduce, regardless my entreaties complete with photos showing my permitted bumper.

The City was making a killing, so why would the judges downtown want to reduce revenue. You have to drive a car in LA, otherwise, you not only are stuck where you plop your ass, you're considered a bum, a degenerate and a loser.

With me falling behind and lacking an income for a good long time, I woke up one morning to find a boot on my Trusty '76. It was an agonizing 4 or 5 days. I scrambled unsuccessfully to get the money together. No one at the time had much work and there was nothing I could do.

A sad day, I waved goodbye to my Trusty '76 as it got towed up Detroit Street, making a right on Willoughby.

“Goodbye, bus...”

Never to be seen again...

I promised myself that I would have it again one day.

That was in 1989. Twenty years later, here I am. Where is my bus?