A Life in Four Colors Part Fifty-Six

1973 was a year of changes for Susan and me.

First, that was the year that we moved out of the tiny hovel in which we had lived since our marriage and into the larger stucco house that would be our home for the next four years.

Second, Susan replaced her wholly unreliable 1970 Mustang Mach I with a blue 1973 Volkswagen Super Beetle.

While I've mentioned the house before, let me stress again just how significant a change this was for us. The house in which we lived from 1971 until mid-1973 was so tiny that we could only have a few guests at one time. In contrast, the green stucco house we moved into had two large bedrooms (one of which we had transformed into a fan room and library), a huge living room, a large kitchen with plenty of room for a full sized tubular-steel-and-formica table that could seat six people if elbow room wasn't absolutely necessary. And as a bonus, it even had a large screened-in porch.

The new home offered us tremendous opportunities. For one, we could actually get all of our books out of boxes and onto shelves. In order to do this, we had to put four sets of steel shelving in the middle of the fan room, dividing it in half with books facing out on either side; we left a thirty-inch wide gap between them, creating two groups of two shelves with a passageway. Against the outside walls, we put more shelves, which enabled us to get our entire library at the time onto bookshelves where we could actually see every book. And that still left room for our fan desk, which held our used-but-new-to-us micro-elite wide-carriage electric typewriter, and a rolling TV cart that housed our very first Gestetner electric mimeograph.

If you're not a fan, the last two items mean nothing to you. But to us, this was a major step forward. Until 1973, we produced all of our fanzines using one of two manual typewriters that we owned. They did the job, but not particularly well. Manual typewriters cut great mimeo stencils when you pound the keys firmly; however, typical typists don't hit every key with full force. As a result, some letters simply don't cut as cleanly as others, and it shows on the printed page.

But our electric typewriter, by contrast, hit every key with full force. And the micro-elite wide carriage typewriter meant that we could actually work on the stencils in landscape format in order to produce 5.5" x 8.5" wraparound booklets instead of 8.5" x 11" stapled sheet fanzines. Or, if we wanted to do 8.5" x 11" fanzines, we could use two-column format and still get a fair amount of words on every line.

Our typewriter interest was piqued by our friends Steve and Binker Hughes, who had turned fanzine production into an art form, utilizing a wide variety of formats that included silk screen, multi-colored mimeograph, true metal-plate etching, and more. Their house was almost a museum of printing equipment, distinctive paper stocks, and typewriters.  They introduced us to micro-elite type, and we were intrigued with its possibilities.

Two weeks later, we found a used micro-elite typewriter at the House of Typewriters in Marietta, a store that had become one of our regular stops when we made our monthly runs to Cumberland Mall. Since we were apparently the only customers who had showed any interest in this particular typewriter, a deal was cut and we went home with the machine for only $35. (We had begun setting aside $1 a week for our "fan fund" in early 1972, so we had the money for the purchase. A year later, after increasing our fan fund savings to $2 a week, we bought a used IBM Selectric II from the same shop for $100, and we felt like we were doubly blessed.)

We bought our first used Gestetner mimeo directly from the Hughes, who had a number of machines they weren't using and offered to let us have one of their mimeos for $20. So by 1973, we were set up to produce fanzines with much higher production values. Furthermore, since we didn't get rid of our old Sears hand-crank manual mimeo, we switched it over to colored ink, which meant we could print colored art using that mimeo and then print black type on the same page using the Gestetner, just leaving a blank space where the art was printed.

The results began to show up in our apazines almost immediately--and a year and a half later, we would use that same equipment to begin producing our very own review fanzine, Future Retrospective, which would go on to change our lives in a number of ways.

***

It says a lot about Susan and me that we were almost as excited about the typewriter and mimeograph as we were about the new car.

Considering our budget, it may seem odd that we'd buy a 1973 VW when we had a 1970 Mach I with only 25,000 miles on it--but the Mach I had been a curse ever since Susan bought it, and we were desperate to be rid of that car.

Susan was in love with the car's appearance and performance when she bought it. When it worked, that is. The car was so incredibly unreliable, though, that it frequently left us stranded for an hour or more when it would simply fail to start after we stopped to shop or buy gas. The local Ford dealer tried replacing the battery, the starter, the alternator, the ignition switch--and nothing helped. No one there could figure out why it wouldn't start. For a while, they didn't even believe us--until it failed to start with them when they were trying to pull it out of the mechanic's bay. They kept it for two days, then called us back and told us that they had no idea what the problem was. And as far as they were concerned, that was the end of it. We were stuck with a car that might or might not start at any given time.

Since Susan's employer had transferred her from the Cedartown office to their larger office in Bremen, GA, she was frustrated and anxious. The Mach I would sometime fail to start when she got off work, leaving her stuck in Bremen for a half-hour or more until it started up as if nothing had ever been wrong.

My 1964 Volkswagen, in contrast, had been remarkably reliable. Oh, the VW had the usual VW problems--a clutch cable would break occasionally, and the battery would sometime run down (because I was bad about forgetting to remove the back seat and put water in the battery cells). But replacing a clutch cable cost $30 and took about a half-hour, and the car was so light that I got pretty good at giving it a bit of a push, then hopping in and putting it into gear to jump-start the car until we could recharge or replace the battery. The car just kept on running.

The big problem for Susan, though, was that she had no idea how to drive a stick shift. I  finally taught her in the 64 VW, and she hated it. She could drive it, but she'd rather not.

Then we discovered that Volkswagen offered a semi-automatic transmission. The car required that the driver shift gears, but there was no clutch. It was the clutch that was the source of Susan's concern: she had trouble coordinating it with the gear, and thus was constantly grinding gears. But with the semi-automatic transmission, Susan didn't have to worry about that.

Unlike my '64 VW (which was a very basic model), the Super Beetle also included air conditioning and a 60 horsepower engine. So in the summer of 1973, we traded in her Mach I and came home with a brand new Super Beetle. Susan was so proud of that car; while the Mach I had initially appealed to her due to its sportiness, she felt that the Super Beetle's "cuteness" reflected who she had become by 1973.

A reliable vehicle made a world of difference. Susan went from dreading every workday to feeling comfortable at her job, because she didn't have insecurities about whether she would get there and back without problems. Even better, the trade in value on the Mach I was such that we actually didn't have to pay very much for the VW--we financed the balance for 24 months for $43 a month. And t turned out that the fuel savings would save us a significant portion of that, because just three months after she bought the car, the 1973 oil crisis began, and gasoline pretty much doubled in price in a matter of weeks, from 31.9¢ for regular gas to 59.9¢ per gallon by the end of the year. The Volkswagen got 60% better mileage than the Mach I, and Susan was driving 23 miles each way to work. If we had kept the Mach I, she would have spent 70¢ more each workday (or $14 per work month) on gasoline--almost a third of our car payment! For people living on a budget like ours, that was a tremendous return on our investment.

To this day, some people we talk to are amazed that Susan willingly got rid of a low-mileage Mach I in order to get a Volkswagen. It made perfect sense to us, though, because we had come to learn in the first two years of our marriage that security, reliability, and peace of mind were important to us. And that would remain the focus of our lives together from that point on. Even when we took risks, we did so only after rationally running the numbers and considering where we would be if the risk failed to pay off.

For example, when we decided to give up our home in Cedartown in 1977 and move to an apartment in Marietta so that Susan could take a temporary-to-permanent position in software design with a company called Management Science America. Or when we decided in 1979 to buy our first home even though the monthly payment would be $447, which was $150 more than our apartment rent at the time. Or when we decided in 1982 to take a second mortgage on our house so that I could take advantage of an opportunity to buy a used book/record/comic shop called Dr. No's.