Here’s how it worked: the kids and their friends would ride in the back of our minivan. Because car loads of kids are always fun. As we traveled, our son Wesley would call out “Yellow car!,” and since he was the first one to spot it, this entitled him to punch the kid sitting next to him. Hard. He would dole out a blow to someone’s upper arm, and life would go on. It might look like the start of a harmless enough game on the surface, but it wasn’t.
Kind of like the war in Vietnam, it had a tendency to escalate. While playing this game, it was possible to be one-upped. Wes has a sharp eye and was good at “yellow car”, but his friend Dougie could be a bit of a troublemaker sometimes, and when he played, the level of violence increased exponentially. The sighting of a Volkswagen Beetle, aka “bug”, would initiate the Def-Con 4 sequence spiral of events known as “slug-a-bug”. It’s like “yellow car”, except more dangerous, with much harder hits, and lots more of them. When a Beetle was spotted, and someone would call it, and I often observed what looked and sounded like my own private Bruce Lee movie happening inside my van, visible in the rear-view mirror. The kids would scream in simultaneous pain and delight. But when one of these came around, that’s when things got ugly.
Behold, my friends, the Fat Man-Little Boy of the juvenile automotive spotter’s world. This is the Yellow Car Slug-a-Bug Hurtable Convertible. You didn’t want to be sitting anywhere around the kid that was the first to lay eyes on this one. Even three rows away in the same vehicle wasn’t entirely safe. By the time you saw it, it meant things had gone nuclear. Anything was now permissible. The balled fists would fly like machine gun fire in close-quarters battle. Those who were killed off early were the lucky ones. Any atrocity was now possible, or legal, and any manner of personal bodily injury likely. Bruises. Black eyes. Concussion. Subdural hematoma. Basilar skull fracture. You name it. I don’t know how those kids survived as long as they have. Maybe I should have tried to establish some rules? Some etiquette? But what fun would that have been?
If you like the looks of the car shown in these photos, the seller says it runs but needs brake work and other work. He says the floor pans have been restored, and the top mechanism is in working condition. It’s listed for sale here on St. Louis Craigslist for $3000. Do you think it will make a good project car, or does even looking at it give you PTSD?
Source: barnfinds.com
