The saga of my 190SL Mercedes is an interesting one, which until now I have made no effort to document. I owned the car from November 1973 until July 1975; without question the most memorable and wildest time of my life. It began on Halloween night 1973 as I rode with some buddies to an off-base Halloween party. On the way we passed a British garage with a few used cars parked outside. I spotted the 190SL and made a mental note to check it out the next day. My status at the time was totally up in the air, I was still doing physical therapy several times a week at the Air Force hospital at RAF Lakenhealth and was driving a beat-up 1965 VW Beetle. At Chicksands I was working weekends and some evenings at the Rec Center, waiting to finish rehab and get my orders for a new assignment - which I expected to be at another base and probably another country. I was really taken with the car which had the unique distinction of having spent its first decade in Africa (I think it had been owned by a British diplomat) before coming to England. The price seemed reasonable although my efforts to trade in my now rebuilt 1972 BSA as part of the deal were unsuccessful. In retrospect it was at best an ill-advised purchase, I did get a lot of ownership pleasure and it helped me to maintain my sanity during an especially intense time, but it was a time of great uncertainty and burdening myself with the car was incredibly stupid. As it turned out I stayed on at Chicksands for almost a year after the purchase and the Air Force paid for most of the cost of shipping it home, so things could have worked out much worse.
One of the first things I used it for was to bring Tina Newport back from her high school in London for a dress rehearsal of a children's theater production. She was playing Jack in "Jack & the Beanstalk", so it was critical that she be present. I had a minor part in the play but was "correctly" credited with devising a means to give the illusion of a giant beanstalk growing up on one side of the stage which Tina used to climb into the clouds. I was happy to fetch her because the ride back would give us some time to get to know each other. I would later sum up the three girls who were part of my life in England by saying one was for living with, one was for being with, and one was for dreaming about. Tina was the one for being with and in the world of fond memories has totally eclipsed the other two. Indeed Tina is a major regret in my life, an everlasting sorrow (to quote Anne Shirley) and another illustration of how we don't recognize the most important moments in our lives when they happen.
It was also the car Brian Linke and I took to the continent for the 30th anniversary of the D-Day landings and some general touring, including our ill-fated visit to Rome. As best I can recall we spent two nights camping out near Omaha Beach, one night in Nice, one night in Pisa, two nights in Rome, one night in the Swiss Alps, one night in Nancy, and one night in Amsterdam. The Italian border guard warned us in heavily accented English when we crossed into Italy: "Be careful boys, Italy has 55 million people and 54 million of them is crooks". Starting with that guy we really liked the Italians we met and I am still thankful to the guy outside Genoa who took Brian into town on the back of his Lambretta to get a mechanic and a replacement fan belt for the car. This was our first spot of trouble on the trip, about 40 miles later the muffler literally fell off. It dragged along the road for a few miles, held on by one end before finally falling off altogether. We drove along the western coast of Italy for about 80 miles without a muffler. Anytime we cruised by a policeman I shifted into neutral and coasted until we were out of hearing range. Amazingly we were not stopped. The second day in Rome I drove it to the Mercedes dealership and left it overnight - it was the cleanest car service shop I had ever seen - incorporating the ideal staffing model - a German Service Manager supervising a team of Italian mechanics.
I parked it on the street in Rome, probably because with no muffler I cringed at the amount of echoed noise it would make inside a concrete parking garage. It was broken into the first night. The thieves slit the top and took Brian's camera, my University of Wyoming Football windbreaker, the eight-track tape deck in the dash board, and a box of tapes. The tape deck was ancient and no great loss. The tapes were a collection I had purchased by mail of hit songs from 1955 to 1970 (?); a tape for each year in their own fitted case. Brian and I had fun imagining a visit to the Vatican where we discovered the Pope listening to my "Hits of 1958" tape. The only thing they did not steal was a tool box in the trunk - that would be stolen at the Bayonne Military Ocean Terminal when the car was shipped home four months later.
In September 1974 I drove the car from Bayonne New Jersey to Minot North Dakota, with a stop to visit Gary Simmons (an Air Force buddy) in Morgantown West Virginia and another stop in Ohio to visit my parents. In January 1975 I was discharged early to attend Cornell University in Ithaca New York. I had five days to get there before the start of classes. But on day two of the drive the engine burned through a valve and I found myself the next morning stranded in Madison Wisconsin and wishing I had applied to the University of Wisconsin. I left the car at a repair shop near campus and flew to Cleveland where several high school friends helped me out and drove me to Ithaca. January 20th found me experiencing my readjustment blues in a dorm room on campus without any transportation - hardly the idealized return to college that I had been anticipating.