After working at Caterpillar for about a year, I was settling into the job. The Cutlass was still running, but the job was starting to require a lot of travel. Joliet and Detroit were coming up, those were within driving distance, so I wanted to get a good highway car.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the stock market was going up like a rocket. Growth was 20 or 30% per year. I was cash-poor in grad school because my student loans were in the Magellan mutual fund.
The project manager at Caterpillar – Joliet was a douche-bag. He thought he was slick, telling me about how he cheated on his wife. We weren’t friends, but I was at the plant pretty often and had to be amiable because he was my internal customer. He explained how clever he was with his stock market tracking system. It was scientific, he couldn’t lose.
I was in Joliet on October 17, 1987 for meetings with the douche-bag and other engineers. That day became known as Black Monday, because the Dow Jones dropped 22% in a day. That’s the biggest one-day drop in history. It’s glorious to watch the destruction of a douche-bag. It’s so good, the Germans invented the word “schadenfreude” to describe it.
Lucky me, I had pulled money out a few weeks before to have cash on hand to buy a car.
I wanted a car that was good on the highway, comfortable and a little different. Vehicle #4 was a 1983 Volvo 240 Turbo. That’s not it in the photo, but it looked exactly like that. I bought it from a dentist who had bought out the lease. I may have gotten it for $8400. That’s $23 k in modern dollars.
It was glorious. Everything was solid, tight and functional. Swedish engineering is like German engineering, but without their sense of whimsy. Sunroof, 5 speed manual with overdrive, Blaupunkt stereo and a turbocharger.
Driving a car with a turbo is different. It felt like the gas pedal went farther than other cars. I could be traveling at 70 mph, and could still smoothly accelerate. That was important when I was traveling to Detroit. I-75 turned into a speed run in Michigan. Cars would pass at 90 mph.
Lucky me, I totaled the Volvo in Peoria. A little reminder that luck isn’t always good.
To be honest, it wasn’t bad luck. It was all me. I was onsite in Peoria, working long hours, really stressed, thinking about a technical problem and not paying attention. I had pulled out when I shouldn’t have. A pickup truck hit my front right fender, both cars spun and smashed in the right rear fender. The frame was all messed up. Nobody was hurt and my insurance took care of the other guy’s vehicle.
I had the Volvo for five months. This was the first car that was worth enough to warranted full coverage. When I was back in town for a while, I intended to meet with my insurance guy to put more than liability coverage on the car. Damage to the Volvo was all my problem.
That’s life. Take the good with the bad. Suck it up, buttercup. Whatever, you just have to work the problem.
Having no plan, I had the car brought back to Ohio. I think AAA paid for that. Even though my insurance company wasn’t paying, their damage evaluator considered it totaled.
The guy I was working with in Peoria, Paul, was a technician who was extraordinarily meticulous and diligent. He did automotive bodywork on the side. I had the Volvo towed back to Peoria, and Paul took care of it.
When I was onsite, the hours were long and the brain work was challenging. I don’t recall how long it took or how much it cost, but Paul got the Volvo all fixed up and painted it more of a graphite gray. Between Paul’s work and writing it off as a catastrophic loss on my taxes, I think I was down $4500. I kept it for another five years.
It was becoming my custom to turn my vehicles over to my little brother. Again, when the rust started, I gave or sold it to him. He drove it for a while, then sold it to a friend. The Volvo made it to 230,000 miles before being scrapped.
