Cars and Girls: The 1956 Rambler Station Wagon

After spending a year working as a carpenter’s helper building single family homes, living at home, and saving money, I applied for admission to the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, NY. After a full academic year

there, I ran out of money for the next year’s tuition and other expenses. I decided to go back home and enroll in Monroe Community College in Rochester and take required courses that would transfer to Alfred and enable me to fulfill those required courses at a much lower cost. So that is what I did. I needed a car to drive and what I ended up with was not exactly the car of my dreams. I bought a cheap 1956 Rambler, uh station wagon. Yup, you read right.

If you know anything about American Motors cars, especially Rambler models, you would wonder why on earth a young man would want such an ugly vehicle. Let alone a station wagon. Well, ugly yes, but it had reclining front seats. Get the picture?

That may have been its only redeeming quality. This was the car with the door post on the hinge side that was rusted so badly at the lower end that the door would not close unless I lifted the door by the handle.

At the end of the Spring Quarter I got a summer job working for the Monroe County Sewer Department. One of the benefits of working at the sewer plant was access to heavy metal street signs that my friends and I cut to size and screwed into the floors to patch the holes caused by rust. With the added support from the new metal and replacement rocker panels, the doors closed more easily.

Once the rusted body metal was repaired, my best friend Jim, who also worked at the sewer department, and I decided to take advantage of the paint sprayer at the sewer plant and one Saturday, after prepping the car, we spray painted it industrial red. It was originally a strange pale watermelon color. We painted the car right out in the open so you can imagine what the finish looked like. Over spray and bugs. But we thought it looked a lot better than the original color. What were we thinking?

My best friend Jim worked at the sewer plant full time. I was there only as a summer employee. He had duties that included testing the water and general maintenance. The plant was interesting and had enough things we could get in trouble with, including this rotating thing that looked like a small merry go round. It was a trickle filter, the last step in treating the water part of the sewage. We would ride on it for kicks.

Jim was an inside guy. I, on the other hand, could leave the plant in a cool Dodge Power Wagon that looked like a WWII Army vehicle. It had a big water tank that we filled from a hydrant via a fire hose. How cool was that? Our job was to go out and raise manhole covers when streets were repaved. We also had to go down the manholes and into the sewers and power wash the flow channels to make sure there were no blockages. That is what the water tank on the Power Wagon was for.

The sewage entered the plant and passed through successive treatment tanks until the heavy sewage settled into this one tank that had an Imhoff cone arrangement at one end. The heavy sludge settled in this area and was then pumped into digestion tanks where the anerobic process broke the sludge down. I digress. One day I was cleaning things around the treatment tanks with a high pressure fire hose.

My buddy Jim was painting the railing on one of the swimming pool size tanks. He had rigged a scaffold of sorts by notching the ends of a board and hanging the contraption by ropes on the inside of the railing so he could paint the water side of the railings. His big mistake was the notched board was just sitting on the rope, not really secured. Interesting right? Well, while I was using the high pressure hose, I heard Jim shouting. The board had slipped off the rope and Jim fell feet first into the tank. I found this terribly funny and fell on the ground laughing with the high pressure hose whipping around. Jim was kicking so much he only fell in up to his thighs and when he scrambled out I washed him down with the fire hose, still laughing. Jim did not think this was too funny and we cut his pant legs off and sent him home. Up to this time I had never seen anyone walk on water. But Jim did that day.

At MCC I met Jeri, an attractive brunette with a last name beginning in “M” also and we became friends and started dating. We had several classes together and I was very attracted to her. One of our favorite dates was to go out to a special parking spot on the shore of Lake Ontario in a thunderstorm and watch the lightning over the lake. The Rambler came in handy for that.

Jeri had a friend she wanted to fix Jim up with and on this particular double date I drove the Rambler. When I was driving the girls back home I heard a strange scraping noise coming from the right front of the car. I got out to look and was astonished to find the right front wheel laying flat in the road. I called Jim out and he said the ball joint broke. We got back in the car and I put it in gear and the wheel picked itself back up to my continued astonishment.

Obviously we could not drive the car back home and I left it parked on Jim’s date’s street until the next day when I called a tow truck. I did not have enough money for the repairs and towing, so the car stayed there for nearly a month. I finally got it home and decided to sell it, reclining seats and all. Some guy actually wanted it and paid me a lot more than I paid for it. Maybe it was the red paint job.