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At 10:01 PM -0000 6/10/97, WALTEE wrote: >I would like to invite >anyone who would like to send up a few lines about themselves, stats, >and or interests. Nice work, David! This is getting a great response. Suppose it's my turn... after my second Pinto went belly-up (o.k., so I *wrecked* the first one), Dad said that it was time to quit messing around--I needed a VW. Guess I can blame all of this on him. :) My first VW was a nice, clean one-owner '71 Super Beetle. That was in 1987, right after I'd started at Berkeley. The Super took me on a number of trips from Berkeley to L.A. & Phoenix and assorted other jaunts. I started to learn how to wrench on it courtesy of Muir & Bentley. One of the nuttier VW trips I took in the Super was part of a larger VW retrieval mission. I wrote up this trip for my introductory German class; see the story in (crude) German at the end of this email. :) Well, a Chrysler LeBaron was in too much of a hurry to pay attention to a stop sign, and crumpled the fender of this Beetle in July of 1989. His insurance paid for it, but... a *different* LeBaron ran a red light one year (+/- a day) later & totalled my poor Super. I was the second car through my green; bad day. My sternum still isn't quite right... good thing for seatbelts! With the Super about a foot shorter, I stripped it of the engine & sold some of the interior bits & went shopping w/ the insurance money. I put a wanted ad up on the fledgling rec.autos.vw, and got a bite: a '63 one-owner Beetle. One look and I was sold. The Super's engine now lives in the '63. (I've since had a re-thinking of the whole stock/modified thing... but that's another post.;) Meanwhile, my buddy Teresa bought a '71 squareback for $500 to satisfy her European wagon desires (some day she'll have her own old Mercedes, or at least a Volvo 122). The right side had been scraped the full length once or twice, but the vehicle was otherwise sound. I graduated from Berkeley in 1991 (Physics, dontcha know) and was headed to the U. of Michigan for grad school. I had heard stories of what happens to VWs in the Rust Belt, and didn't want to subject my rust-free Beetle to salty Michigan winters. I had a little bit of time between finals & graduation & visiting w/ friends and relatives to shop for a "winter" Beetle, but I wasn't having any luck. Meanwhile Teresa's mom was about to give her an '86 GTI, so T. agreed to sell me the '71 T3 for the $500 she bought it for. Cool. But what to do with the Beetle? I met T. in L.A. a week later, and I took the square then. I bought a tow bar (the square has a hitch), and used the square to tow my Beetle from L.A. to Phoenix. About 400 miles, with temps hitting 105F. The square ran like a champ! I put my Beetle up in storage in AZ, and headed off to Michigan in the squareback. About 2,100 miles... left Phoenix early in the morning, slept for an hour or two in the middle of the night somewhere east of Amarillo, and had a spark plug fly out in the middle of Missouri the next afternoon. Good time to take a rest. Made it to Ann Arbor on the third evening. Fell in love a few months later; I took Kirsten to visit her friend in Arcata (just north of Eureka, which is a couple of hours north of San Francisco) during winter break. Ann Arbor to Arcata to L.A. to Dallas to Ann Arbor. 6,125 miles in 14 or 15 days (3 days of little or no driving). Quite a trip. Problems? Gen. brushes wore out (I had brought a spare generator, *naturally*), I forgot to tighten the dizzy clamp in San Jose (found out about it outside of El Paso!), and a few exhaust connections needed clamping. Not bad for a $500 car! We took a couple of other extended trips... Connecticut, South Carolina... all in all, I've taken the squareback to twenty-eight states! Meanwhile, this whole Type III thing began to grow on me. I started messing around w/ HTML in spring of 1994 (anybody remember Mosaic?). VW resources started appearing on the Web, and I realized that there was *nothing* for T3. I came up with an outline for some pages, emailed all of the T3 people I knew on the net (what... maybe 8 people?!), most of whom checked 'em out & had great comments & material to add, and the T3 Web pages were born. Hurrah! I've since become a great T3 fan, and Kirsten probably even more so. She got her license in the squareback, and now drives it 25 miles/day. Our daughter Emily is now 2 & 1/2 and is a great VW fan as well. The poor square is now rusting appreciably; we shall see what happens. (Anybody have a rust-free T3 near Michigan to donate to a good cause?) Meanwhile, my dissertation in Applied Physics is still a good year+ away and, yes, you all *will* be required to call me "Dr. Greg" should I ever actually finish. :) I have a strong interest in teaching, and have taught outreach programs in physics & now HTML to middle school girls. I just got a *third* job this week as part-time webmaster for a non-profit... probably didn't hurt that the person who hired me visited the T3 pages & said: "My father had a 1964 VW squareback that he shipped back from Germany after he completed service in the Army, which he sold when I was 14; I'll forever regret that I didn't convince him to let me keep it because it was one of the coolest cars ever made!" This extra job will probably put my plans to organize a T3 club/newsletter on the back burner for a while... we shall see. I've enjoyed this list very much; thanks to all of you for making it what it is! -Greg '71 squareback '63 Beetle --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Ich bin mit meinem VW nach Phoenix gefahren. Ich habe meine Eltern in Phoenix besucht. Ich bin zum Phoenix Flughafen gefahren und ich bin nach Denver geflogen. Ich bin nach Trenton geflogen. Ich habe meinen Bruder besucht. Ich bin mit dem Zug nach Philadelphia gefahren. Ich habe meinen Freund in Philadelphia besucht. Ich bin mit dem Bus nach Pittsburgh gefahren. Da habe ich meinen Freund Scott getroffen. Wir sind mit seinem 1962 VW nach Nashville gefahren. Wir sind nach New Orleans gefahren, und wir haben Scotts Kusine getroffen. Wir sind nach Dallas gefahren, und wir haben meinem Freund Sid getroffen. Wir sind nach Midland, nach Phoenix, nach L.A. und nach San Jose gefahren. Wir haben in San Jose der erste Simpsons in Fernsehen gesehen." -Greg, UC Berekeley introductory German, circa winter 1991