Young and Foolish Bill Bollendonk
Summer 1948. My world was pretty small then, consisting of a few personal items that I cherished most, like my beatup old bike and a real 35mm Argus camera. I lived with my sister and mom and dad in a small three bedroom apartment in a Jackson Heights, NY, near LaGuardia airport. My bike allowed me to have an operating radius of about 5 miles from the little community in which I lived and my camera allowed me to record my many adventures. At 14, I had the world by the tail. My dreams at that point surrounded getting through the next three and a half years to the time I could get my driving permit and have use of the family car, a 1938 Chevy two door sedan. My father worked in New York City and took the train to work each day and my mom taught school nearby, so the car was rarely used, except on weekends when we would visit aunts and uncles.
The car was black and I would spend many hours cleaning and polishing the finish as it was not in very good shape. I can’t recall where the car came from, it just turned up one day. There were not a lot of cars in the neighborhood and I soon found that it was the canter of attention with many of my friends. We would all pile into it and take turns driving it as we shifted through the gears and made the lights, wipers, horn and radio work. There were chases with bad guys and police, discussions about the cars performance, but mostly boy talk using the inside of the car as a private meeting room, where only those chosen few were allowed. That was a great summer and I wish that I could recall all the adventures that took place in and around the Chevy.
I had several close friends. Two of them were, Bob Van Patten and brother Kenny. Bob and I were biking buddies and we would get up early and go on long bike trips arriving home many times well after dark. Bob and I shared a lot of common interests, including photography, electronics and the dream of being able to drive a car. Bob helped with the polishing as he too had developed the satisfaction of seeing paint gleam. Hours spend polishing and discussing the finer points of waxing. The job required some “elbow grease” as the waxes in those days were not very good and a paste wax required lots of pressure to clean and set up a finish, which was not all that good.
By late summer, it was becoming clear that the more we rubbed the finish, the more paint we removed, until the primer was beginning to show. This was especially true on the hood ( I was uneducated at that age ) and the front fenders. During one of the polishing secessions, Bob mentioned that there was a spray attachment for his mothers vacuum cleaner and why don’t we repaint the hood. Well, that sounded like a good idea and since the car was black, it wouldn’t be hard to get black paint to match. So off to the store we went on our bikes to find black paint that we could spray using the attachment. I can’t recall just how we were able to get the paint and thinner, but before the day was out, we had the paint, thinner and some sandpaper to start the job. Bob lived just down the street and it was no job at all to get the hood off and into his apartments basement where we set it on some boxes and began to sand. We had spread some newspaper on the floor, but in no time it was a soggy mess with the wet sanding that was going on. We didn’t spend a lot of time sanding as that wasn’t much fun anyway.
Time to get the primer on the hood and try out the spray attachment. All of this activity was happening within the short time of a weekday and the plan was to have the job finished by afternoon before my dad got home from work. Well as you can imagine, things were not going all that well and the primer went on in lumps as we couldn’t get the spray attachment to spray paint that was anything more that thinner. By mid afternoon we were getting pretty desperate and decided to try the black paint. That wasn’t much better, although the black looked a whole lot better that the red primer. The paint went on very dry and the finish was very heavy and rough. Several coats with quick sanding in between and the job was done. The finish was not to be proud of, but at least it was black and we decided that the finish work could be done after the hood was back on the car. Besides, it was getting late and the car in front of the apartment was very visible without a hood. Getting the hood reinstalled was easy and my only concern was that my dad would see the car before the paint was rubbed out and polished.
The gods of exuberant youth were really looking over me as no comments were made by my dad and the night went by without my disaster being uncovered. Bob was not so lucky, as his mom had discovered the mess we had left in the basement and he had spent the night cleaning it up. The next day we spent doing what we could to make the hood look presentable. By afternoon, we had succeeded in getting the finish to look rather good and with a coat of wax, we called it finished. At 14, I had somehow come through the experience with my life, vowing that I would not try such a dumb thing again.
My dad never discovered that paint job and I got my drivers permit on schedule. By the time I headed off to college in Colorado the car was mine and it served me well for the 11 trips it made to and from Boulder. On the last trip home to Jackson Heights, the car was burning about a quart of oil every 25 miles and laying down a real smoke screen. It had over 125,000 miles on the odometer, of which some 40,000 miles had taken me back and forth to school. I sold the car to a friend and as he drove away I noticed that the only surface on the car not showing rust was the hood.