Grouse Hollow Journal for February 2, 2017 by Greg Koelker

Grouse Hollow Journal for February 2, 2017 by Greg Koelker

I just came in from my evening chores, that is getting around food and water for our livestock, Scout and Gypsy.  This is quick except for the petting and ear rub time.  There was a sharp breeze out of the north this evening and the overcast appears to be losing ground to blue sky as the clouds go chasing the sun behind the bluffs.  There was sunshine enough for a late January day.  So much so that I got motivated to get the car washed outside and in.  It has been dirty for so long, that I had almost forgot it is a pretty deep red color.  

For awhile this year we had four vehicles - for two people.  This week we are down to two.  Ben has the Ranger out on the ranch in Colorado now and we sold our old Explorer to a nice young couple from Esofea last week.  We still have the - now shiny red - Sonata and the F150 we got from Tee’s in Stoddard back in November.  

Why a journal about vehicles?  Well, I have always been a car shopper.  My friends tease me that I couldn’t own a vehicle for more than a few days before I was looking for something else.  Truth is, I do like shopping for cars and trucks.  I do not like paying for them though.  I do like to remember back to all the cars I’ve known before.  The Flintstone car my mom and dad presented me with back in 1967 was a dark blue 1949 Chevy coupe.  Dad bought it for $50 from a farmer.  It lasted me for part of the summer and into the football season of my junior year of high school.  I blew a rod out the top of the straining 6 cylinder engine while racing it down a hill outside of Lancaster on our way back from a football game at Belmont.  I had a carload of friends on board and we were lucky enough that we got rides back to Cassville from hometown passers by.  The next morning, Dad and I drove over with his truck and a log chain intent on pulling the Chevy home and repairing the engine.  Sadly, some ne’r-do-wells had broken all the windows out and broke the steering wheel and dash glass.  Nuts.  My next car was a blue and white ‘61 Chevy Impala complete with fins that I paid $200 for.  (You’ll notice that I paid for this one.  Lesson learned maybe?)  This car had a 283 V8 with a stick shift on the column and an AM radio and some rust.  I got my first taste of bodywork when Mike Schier and I spent hours fixing up the rust rot over the headlights.  

This was the era of muscle cars and I - and my dad - had the fever.  He called one evening from Goben Motors in Madison and said he thought he found just the right car for us to play with.  It was a Barbados Blue ‘67 Rambler Rogue.  It was a two-door with bench seats, AM radio, a tach on top of the dash, four on the floor, a Borg Warner T10 tranny, with a Dana 3.54 gear ratio and trans lock rear end.  (I purchased the bucket seats out of Ken Schauf’s totaled Pontiac Le Mans to make the interior a little sportier.)  The car didn’t have seat belts.  The outside looked a little like a granny car until one raised the hood and heard and felt the growl.  There was a huge - for this car anyway, think Toyota Corolla size - gold and chrome trimmed new high-compression 343 V8 with a 4-barrel carburetor that produced 280 hp.  It had an Iskenderian cam and Offenhauser heads and headers with chrome valve covers and exhaust pipes and air filter.  My car’s story was that it had been a Madison police car.  I beat a Judge with a six-pack in a drag race.  I held my own with a Chevy 454 too, getting nosed out at the finish line.  I also lost my car for a week after I got caught drag racing.  I didn’t know at the time that I had a collectible here as AMC only fit out 51 of these Rogues in hard top like this.  I paid $1,667 for it.  It got 12 to 14 mpg if you drove with a light foot, but gasoline was 35 cents a gallon so who did that.  

Dad and I worked on it together - a lot, mostly replacing the head gaskets and cleaning antifreeze out of the engine oil - twice in one weekend once.  Anyway, I could tell lots of 1969 style stories about “The Rambler” and many of my friends can too - Ambrose Timmerman of Viroqua (formerly of Cassville) is one of them.  Back in the day, he drove the Rambler and bent a couple wrenches on it in his garage.  Boone Glassmaker, one of my buddies and college roomates, rode back and forth to Madison when we were in college.  He had many white nuckle stories he could tell I imagine.  I took Ellen out for our first date with the Rambler, so she could testify too.  My best friend Kim Klauer of Cassville has the scars on his right arm that tell the final Rambler story.  Anyway, I drove it for almost two years and wrecked it twice and was fortunate that no one got badly hurt.  I’ll just add that no kid should be allowed that much muscle under the hood.  

Ellen and I had many, many other cars.  A ‘62 Chevy Bel Aire - I sold to Jerry Hochhausen, a ‘63 Pontiac Catalina my dad eventually wore out driving to Dubuque to work, Jane Ledbury’s ‘65 Datsun 510, a ‘70 Mustang (named Spot), a ‘75 Vega - our first ever new car, a rusty ‘71 Blazer and a soon to rust‘75 Blazer, two ‘77 Chevy Pickups - one new and one lightly used - both disasterous vehicles with a blown engine, blown tranny, and rust amuck, a ‘79 Chevy station, an ‘81 Chevy Citation - great mileage but lousy quality, a ‘94 Geo Metro - no air bags and too fast for teenagers, a ‘95  Ford Aspire - with air bags, a Buick Ciera (aka “Starter Eater”) purchased with only 9K miles on it, a Buick Century wagon (aka “The Grocery Getter”), Big Blue a ’76 Jeep truck, and the tough little ‘86 Jeep Comanche (also bought brand new and that survived both our boys high school days and was often mentioned in this journal), an ‘89 Jeep Cherokee that I loved but without A/C, two newer Ford Taurus station wagons, three Ford Rangers ‘94, ‘00, and ‘04, three Explorers - a ‘93, and two ‘02’s (one two-door one four), at least five motorcycles, the Sonata and now the F150.  I could add the boys’ cars too and I probably missed some others here, but you get the idea.  Ben’s Ranger was probably the most durable over the 13 years we had it.  The Rambler and Jeep Comanche were probably the most memorable for me, but every one of these vehicles has a story or two to tell.  One could say they chronicle the story of our lives in some ways.  I just might try to write this story some day.      

Until next time, get out - we have been hearing tom turkeys gobbling and El and I saw four toms strutting for a big flock of hens last week one morning.  The river is open so I am thinking maybe walleye fishing could happen next.  Happy Ground Hog’s Day!  It is February; if it goes by anywhere as fast as Janurary did, it will be March in a couple of days.   Enjoy.