This Nova Went!

Growing up my family had two vehicles—a custom Ford Econoline Van (1982ish) and a Chevy Nova (1976). The Nova was a hit in the US, but a bomb in Latin America. In English we know a ‘nova’ to be some sort of star. In Spanish ‘No va’ as it is pronounced means “no go”. Not a great selling point for an automobile that’s only reason for existence is to take you somewhere!

I didn’t grow up in Latin America, but instead in Southern California. Southern California has its share of Spanish speakers, as well as every other language spoken in this diverse world we live in. What is my point? I knew that Nova was Spanish for ‘no go’. But I knew differently—our Chevy Nova was no gutless four-cylinder rice-burning Japanese import. It was a beefy American car built like a tank with an engine intended to get it down the road.

My first memories of this blue two-door passenger car (the picture is the right blue, but the 4-door model) take me back to family vacations. Every summer we took at least a two-week vacation to drive from our home to American Fork, Utah to visit my maternal grandparents and visit Brigham Young University (my parents’, and later my, alma mater). This was a 12-hour drive in those days when the speed limit was 55 mph for fuel conservation. From there it was 8 hours further north to Emmett, Idaho (above Boise) to my paternal grandparents’ dairy farm.

The Nova was our only car until the van. So by 1982 and the purchase of the family van, my family consisted of me (age 10), Winnie (8), John (5), Ilene (3), and Mark (1). Yes, every year from 1976 to 1982 my family made this long trip with more kids to wrestle with.

The Nova had bench seating in the front and back. Good thing since we were carting around 7 passengers—five of them children! This was in the days before seat belt or car seat laws. I can remember taking naps in the area intended for your feet. I remember my little brother’s baby carrier sitting between my mom and dad in the front seat. Somewhere in the midst of this chaos was also a little cooler containing snacks and a jug of ice water.

These trips were made in the summer and this car did not have air conditioning. My parents, I acknowledge without reservation, deserve sainthood just for making these pilgrimages. Dealing with 3 to 5 children (depending on the year) in a confined space while driving through the desert with no A/C is a textbook definition of “cruel and unusual punishment”.

I have made this trip backwards from my home in Utah to visit my in-laws in Southern California many times with my three children. But my trips are very different. It is in a minivan with A/C and my laptop playing whatever animated film my children request to keep them from asking me the constant “how much longer?” and other childish inquiries.

So, like I said, my parents deserve ‘Parent of the Year’ for making these trips without leaving one of us by the side of the road in the middle of the Mojave Desert that makes up the I-15’s northeast pathway from Southern California to Utah.

In an age before water parks, my family often went swimming at a neighbor’s pool or on occasion made a trip to Puddingstone. This man-made beach/lake in San Dimas, California was a favorite. It had a sandy shore and extended to a “deep end” of some 13 or 14 feet. It had several water slides and diving boards. The high dive was the ultimate in childhood bravado and daring. Puddingstone was later purchased and made into Raging Waters. I have never been there, but I still have fond memories of jumping off of the high dive and trying to grab some sand at the bottom of the deep end to prove that I could go that far down.

It was on one of these trips that an interesting event occurred. Puddingstone’s admission fees was on a per-vehicle basis. So some time in the late 1970’s we piled into the Nova us four kids and a neighbor family and their kids. So here we were two mothers and seven kids in ages ranging from 8 to 1. We were nearly to our home’s off ramp heading south on the 57 Freeway. Suddenly our car was moved sideways. My mom was at the wheel and as you can imagine with seven kids in tow and the windows down for ventilation it was a noisy car! She didn’t know what had happened, but decided to pull over. The rest of the story has been filled in over the years by my mom. A semi-truck carrying a load of tomatoes hadn’t seen us and had changed lanes. Since he hadn’t seen us his front bumper clipped our back bumper causing us to be pushed out of our lane. The truck driver stopped as well and as my mom tells the story grew paler as each additional child exited the car and piled on to the side of the freeway. The car sustained only slight cosmetic damage (a flesh wound) which we never had repaired. The truck driver apologized profusely and with that we all piled back into the car and went on our merry way.

As I have alluded to in previous blogs, the Nova was often our mode of transportation on rainy days to deliver our newspapers. I can remember one particularly windy day when my sister, Winnie, got out of the car to deliver a newspaper to one of my route’s customers. Upon tossing the paper (it was a bad throw to begin with) a gust of wind carried it onto the roof of their house. What horror to a little boy. Luckily, we had a few extra papers and we simply left another on the porch. That paper was on the roof for months afterward and I nor they ever mentioned it.

Some time in 1984 or 1985 my dad and I went home teaching. For the uninitiated in the LDS faith, home teaching is a monthly home visit made by male members to all church members involving a spiritual thought and simply an opportunity to make sure all was well with the family. My dad and I were assigned to two older couples with no children at home. The family we were visiting that Sunday afternoon was my piano teacher and her husband. As is normal in metropolitan areas, I locked my door as I exited the car. The closing of the door sounded different this time. I paused to make sure the door had closed (it had) and turned towards the house.

After our visit, my dad unlocked the door for me. But to my surprise the door wouldn’t open. From then on that door never opened again. So our two-door Nova was now a one-door car. Of course, over the years this became a family joke. When I was old enough to drive my grandpa would say to me that the Nova was the “perfect date car”. Why? I would ask, “Because your date can’t get out.”

My dad always dropped me off at high school because it was on his way to work. Here was the morning routing: stop the car, open the driver’s-side door, dad exits the car, I crawl across the seat and exit the car, dad gets back, and travels on to work.

Of course, I grew and soon I was on the driver’s side of the Nova with my learner’s permit. Then I just had to get out of the car and dad would slide over on the bench seat. It is at this time, that the radio became an important feature of the Nova. The Nova had an AM-only radio with those push levers that memorized the radio station’s placement on the AM dial. Another strike against our Nova for a teenage driver—AM only radio, one functioning door, no A/C, and the leather-like upholstery was starting to show its age.

My mother came up with a solution to the cracking upholstery. Bath towels were purchase and sewn together to fit all the way across the bench seating both front and back. Not the classiest solution but one that was both functional and advantageous. No longer did you jump out of your seat upon sitting after the upholstery had been baked by the hot California sun.

My passage into teenage freedom (my driver’s license test) arrived in September 1987. We drove to the Pomona DMV for my driver’s test. The driving instructor walked to the passenger door and attempted to open the door. I quickly unrolled the window and explained that the passenger door was jammed shut. With a look of disgust the driving instructor informed me that there would be no driving test in a car that was clearly unsafe. I returned a few weeks later and passed my driving test in our Ford Econoline van. Fortunately I was not asked to parallel park that behemoth!

With the ability to drive myself around town and none of the authority of my parents, driving the paper routes with my siblings soon devolved into my siblings climbing out of the passenger door window “Dukes of Hazzard”-style. By now that door had been jammed shut for 5 years and at an age of 20 years it was no longer respected.

My friends and I all had access to the family sedan. The Nova was given the nickname “Blue Bullet” because it was the fastest of the family sedans. Somewhere around this time the gas gauge began to falter. This trusty car was showing its age. It had served faithfully for more than 20 years now. By this time, we had added a used manual-transmission Honda Accord to our family’s transportation arsenal (our first “rice burner” foreign car).

The gas gauge would vacillate wildly from empty to full, from ¾ full to below empty. It was slightly annoying and slightly amusing. Over time you learned that the vacillations tended to subside the more empty the fuel tank was. So to be on the safe side I think the Nova usually had at least a half tank of gas in it. Graduation 1989 was the day fate struck. My graduating class went to Disneyland for Grad Night. We arrived back in the school parking lot by bus at 6:30 am the next morning. Now, I had to drive my friends home. The gas gauge wasn’t vacillating, but I was exhausted and pushed my luck. The car sputtered to a stop at the intersection of Diamond Bar Blvd. and Maple Hill. My remaining friend and I managed to push it out of the busy intersection, walk to his house, and to call my dad for help.

The Nova had grown on me. I remember putting the pedal to the metal one night on the way home from my pizza restaurant job. I was neck and neck for a while with a fellow co-worker’s IROQ-Z. He was impressed and I knew that while this car was an oil-leaking beast it still had some muscle under the hood.

One night after closing at the pizza restaurant I entered the parking lot to find the back window intact but shattered in a million pieces. Apparently some BB gun-toting individual thought shooting windows would be a lot of fun. I drove home unable to see out the rear window. A bump caused a circle of glass to drop out of the window. I got home that night and applied masking tape to the edges of the hole to keep it intact. It was about a week later that we got the window replaced but not after losing more glass shards and expanding the taped edges.

I had visions of fixing the Nova up. But I went away to college and then on to serve a 2-year LDS church mission. During that two-year mission the Nova was sold to a neighbor for a couple of hundred dollars. He was a handyman and as I understand it he had the door unjammed in an afternoon! This was after several inquiries of Neil, our auto mechanic, to fix this problem. The Nova suffered an ignominious death. After years of faithful service the Nova was totaled in a crash involving this neighbor’s newly-licensed daughter.

This Nova was anything but “no va”. It was the Energizer bunny that kept going and going. Thanks for the memories Blue Bullet.