𝐌𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐑𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟖: 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐳𝐲!

 𝐌𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐑𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐫

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟖: 𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐳𝐲!

The Cavalier served me really well, in spite of being a manual window 5 speed. It was tough and reliable. I installed a power release wiper/washer gate out of another J Car hatchback parts car in it and that made rain and snow a lot less of a hassle.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and the Cavalier met its end from me under-estimating water running over the road on Pleasant Valley Road. There was no real creek, so I thought nothing of a little water on the road and drove through it. I was wrong. There was quite a bit of gravel gone, and the resulting crash sheered off all of the motor mount bolts and dropped the engine and transmission down onto the subframe. It was still running, and the CV axles hadn't pulled apart, so theoretically it should still drive. The lowering of the engine/transaxle unit had dislodged the clutch pushrod out of its place, so I couldn't get it into gear again when I went to turn around at the Byce farm. I pushed the car back out onto the road backwards, then pushed it forward as fast as I could and jumped in and crunched it into first gear. I'm off! I can get home. I was a master gear floater so that wasn't a problem. The boxes were all in great shape so I could hit them on the fly. Less than 20 kilometers home.

Long story short, I made it. The car really hadn't apparently come to any other harm, but getting all those bolts drilled out was going to cost more than the car was worth to me being a crank window 5 speed vehicle. Retirement time, Old Girl.

So, back on the hunt for another car, pronto.

The exact same lot, and by far my least favorite, presented just what I needed: a white 1985 Oldsmobile Firenza hatchback with a blue velour interior. It had nice sporty looking body colour wheels with chrome trim rings in the holes. It was a 5 speed too - but it had power windows! "How much?"

"$5750.00."

"You're out of your tree! I'll give you 1500 dollars, taxes in, cash right now, and only because I need it."

"There's no way they'll take that. I'll talk to the Manager, though. We'll sharpen our pencil and see what we can do for you." Oh, the oldest BS in the book... He likely didn't even go near the Manager. He thought he'd let me stew there for a while thinking he'd crack my nut of need. Guess again. I'm Scottish. You ain't gonna bust my cast iron coconut, Jack. Eventually he came back in and sat down and faced me leaning forward in fake sincerity with his hands clasped on the desk. "The Manager says we'll take $5500.00 plus tax."

"Nope. Fifteen hundred bucks, taxes in."

"They'll never take that!"

"Tough. You've got nothing in it, so fifteen hundred bucks, taxes in. Take it or leave it." Cool as a cucumber. And as firm as a Clinton denial.

Another few back and forth's without me budging an inch and he blew his stack. "You're ****in' crazy!" and he threw his pencil down so hard on the desk it bounced up and hit me in the chest.

My chair hit the wall and I was on my feet and he was just about to have a Very Bad Evening when the Manager strode quickly into the office.

"What's the problem here?!"

I cast a distaining and dismissing nod to the other side of the desk; "Your salesman's an ar**hole, that's what the problem is."

The Manager excused him knowing he had pushed my buttons in very much the wrong fashion and they certainly weren't going to result in a sale.

"Now, what can I do for you?"

"Just what I told that guy: That Olds Firenza: Fifteen hundred bucks, taxes in."

"We can't do that!"

"Sure you can. You've got nothing in it. You likely got it for less than free for taking it off of the other guy's hands on trade. Fifteen hundred bucks, taxes in. And only because I need it."

They'd never be that honest with me. I can't stand car dealers.

Rather than go on and bore you with the details, I'll just humbly admit they won. They got 50 bucks out of me. I drove away in it that night for $1550.00, taxes included. Not bad, from a starting price of $5750.00 plus tax.

I guess I wasn't as firm as I thought. I'd have to work on that.

The very first thing I discovered about that car was its awesome fuel economy. It drove really nice, and its upholstery was really comfortable, but its fuel economy made my mouth drop. The J2000 had a 1.8 liter carbureted engine, and the Cavalier had a 2.0 liter throttle body fuel injected engine, but the Firenza had a 1.8 liter Over Head Cam (OHC) engine with throttle body fuel injection, and it got 50 percent better fuel mileage than the Cavalier. At that time the Cavalier took 12 or 13 dollars of gas a night. The Firenza did the route every night for 8 bucks, like clockwork. I didn't believe it the first real night, gas station to gas station, but it repeated it night after night and very soon won my praise for that.

I nicknamed it the 'Frenzy', and we'll soon get to why.

Being an Olds, it had power windows, power locks, power tailgate release, tilt steering wheel, cruise control, etc... It didn't have a 6 way power seat or a sunroof like the J2000 SE had, but I was okay with that, especially since I had just Waterloo'd the Cavalier that morning and was back in the saddle again so quick, and for less than I paid for either the J2000 OR the Cavalier.

The front end of the Frenzy looked a little funny to me with the turn signals sitting in between the headlights. It gave me an impression of someone with their eyes too far apart. But, the turn signals were big and vivid, which was far more important than the kind of awkward appearance of them, so that was good. Both the Cavalier and the Frenzy had unobstructed headlights, which was also important. They gave better side dispersion of light, which really helped to illuminate the boxes as I drove up to them in the dark. The J2000 had deeply hooded headlights in their '77/'78 Firebird/Trans Am-like nose. That practically eliminated light spread to the sides, so either the Cavalier or the Frenzy were a big improvement there. Earlier Firenza's had recessed headlights much like the J2000, but not this one. All three cars had four rectangular headlights. The J2000 was for sure the most stylish and appealing, but, as much my favorite as it was, I have to admit the Cavalier and the Frenzy both made far better use of them. The Frenzy in particular, because with the way they were spread out across the front they created a 'wall of light' and a night time rural paper carrier needed all the light they could get. I usually changed incandescent headlights over to halogens for better light. At least when they blew.

I immediately installed the air shocks and the rear ← STOP → auxiliary light, and, other than an automatic and a rear wiper and washer, had myself a pretty darn dandy new route buggy that ran for peanuts. I had also installed a much larger dome light in the Cavalier that had its own switch so I could better see what I was doing when I needed to, so that made the transition as well. The Cavalier was an RS so it had the heavy duty sway bars, making it handle a smidge better than the Frenzy, but the Frenzy beat it hands down when it came to fuel economy, and at precious little loss in performance. I was SOLD on that fine little OHC engine. And still am.

The Frenzy had one little flaw. Well, two, actually, but the second one didn't show up until winter. Once a morning, and usually in Foresters Falls, all of a sudden the engine would just take OFF. I'd feel acceleration I didn't call for, and push in the clutch. It would sit there and WHINE at high RPM. I thought it was going to blow up the first few times it did it, but I got used to it. Sort of. After about 4 or 5 minutes of winding out at 4000 RPM in a 'Frenzy', it would slowly wind back down again and finally return to idle. After that, it was back to its regular mild mannered and predictable little self. There was nothing I could do in its Frenzy. Shutting it off did nothing because it went back into the Frenzy when I restarted it. Pumping the gas did nothing. Trying to hold it back in 5th with my foot on the brakes did nothing. The Frenzy just had to run its course. Maybe that was why it was traded in because it was in excellent condition otherwise and that quirky little trait would have been completely hidden. I didn't know how it could do it. Tuned port injection, maybe, but not throttle body. It should have acted like a more precise carbureted engine, but it didn't. So, it was sit there, embarrassed and looking stupid, while it raged out in its Frenzy and settle back down again, and then drive off sheepishly with what little was left of my dignity.

It sure is funny the things you can become accustomed to.

Nothing I have ever been able to find or think of could explain a throttle body fuel injection system doing that because there was very little electronic interaction with the throttle body to... Something just came to me: Maybe it was the cruise control? It's a long time ago but I think it had cruise on the signal stick. I think I can see the cruise mechanism sitting on the left side of the engine in my mind's eye. That would have been the only thing that had any external control of the throttle. Maybe if I had disconnected the cruise control because I certainly never used it. That's GOT to be it. I mean it HAS to be. Why didn't I think of that then?!

But, it ran cheap and was comfortable, and gave me back the absolute LUXURY of power windows after being so long without them, and I unabashedly loved it for that.

The OHC engine was configured quite a bit differently than the other ones. One very noticeable difference was the distributor laid horizontally towards the driver's side and was driven off of the end of the camshaft.

We had registered Bichon Frise puppies in that time. One of the things we did to properly climatize them was to raise them with kittens. When they were ready to go, they had respect and affinity for cats. They'd never be cat chasers, but cat lovers. Sometimes their fellow kitten was adopted with them.

With one litter of puppies, we had a litter of orange tabby kittens. One male kitten, Goldy, didn't get adopted, and stayed with us. One morning, we stopped in at the farm for a power nap, as it was exactly halfway around the route as I mentioned earlier. Unbeknownst to us, that adolescent kitten had climbed up under the hood where it was nice and warm while we were napping. We headed back out, and went up the rest of the Queens Line, up County Road 21 almost to the Plantation, then back down and out 21 to the Fourth Line, then Magnesium Road and up the Kerr Line into Foresters Falls. We stopped at the Fox Den and shot the breeze over a chocolate milk with the locals, and went back out to the car. I was just about to start the engine again when I thought I heard a faint 'mew'. Must be a neighbour's cat. I went to turn the key again and I heard it again. Then again. It sounded like it was under the hood! But that was impossible... No... there it is again. I yanked the hood release and lifted it, and the widest-eyed orange cat I ever saw was staring back at me. Goldy's hair was standing up all over his body. He had wrapped himself tightly around the distributor to hang on for the ride, and there he was. I reached in and tried to pull him off of the distributor. I couldn't. He was frozen tightly around it. I had to put my foot on the bumper and TEAR him off of the distributor with both hands. There wasn't really much I could do with him, so I put him in the back seat to wait to see what would happen. His four legs remained in exactly the same 'O' shape as they were when they were wrapped around the distributor. He just fell over on his side like a cardboard cutout, stiff as a board, when I set him in the back seat. He didn't blink and not even his ears moved. He was likely getting shocked by the distributor the entire way. I can't imagine what the lower part of the Fourth Line was like for him where I did 80 miles per hour with him being constantly electrocuted by the distributor at over 3000RPM.

Over the course of the rest of the route, Goldy's fur gradually lay down and his limbs loosened up at the same rate until he was able to curl up in a ball and drift off to sleep. That furry little fella never climbed up under the hood of a car again.

A Miracle happened in the Frenzy. I mean an absolute, True Blue Miracle. We were heading out Fletcher Road when we came over the rise past the tracks. As we crested the rise at 70 MPH, to our horror, a huge dead maple had fallen across the road. I slammed on the brakes, and the car went into an immediate nose dive. That put the tree trunk, held aloft by its sturdy branches, at windshield height. We were dead if we hit it like that. No question. I yelled at Denise to hold on, and, against all instincts, pulled my foot off the brake to raise the front end again and hit the tree square on. There was an insane crash, and a cloud of branches and bark, and we flew through the air and hit the gravel again in a cloud of dust well on the other side of the tree. I looked over at Denise and she was fine. I was fine. We'd just hit a 5 ton tree at probably still 50 MPH, and we were fine. I figured the car was destroyed. I went to pull over, but... the car felt fine. The hood wasn't piled up in front of us in a crumpled heap like I expected. No explosion of antifreeze from the radiator and windshield washer fluid from its tank. I stopped, and got out to inspect the damage. There wasn't any! I mean none. Nothing. The hood opened and closed as it always did. Not even a broken headlight; Nothing. Believe me or not; that's up to you. I don't care. I know what happened. Not even the front license plate showed any damage after we hit that massive tree at full posted speed. It wasn't our Time, and God posted an angel or angels to see us over and through that tree. We weren't even hurt much less killed. Not a scratch on us. The car at least should have been demolished, but it didn't have anything more than one very small scratch on the bumper cover. And I can't say for certain that scratch hadn't already been there. Nothing will ever convince me we didn't experience a Miracle that day. Not even our CAR came to any harm!

Is God real? You better believe He is!

The second little quirk the Frenzy had revealed itself the first really cold winter night. It started just fine, as usual, but, when I shoved in the clutch and went to put it into gear, to my surprise I found I couldn't move the stick. It was frozen solid. I applied all the pressure I dared, and I felt it move. First I was able to move it side to side, a little at a time. That was the sideways cable. Then I was able to move it forward and backward, a little at a time. That was the other one. Eventually it freed up and was fine. As the weather got colder, it got worse. I found that warming the car up for half an hour helped, but it was a struggle to get that stick freed up. Finally, one morning, my fears were realized when the one control cable finally snapped. I took the truck instead, and had Keith Martin order me in a new shifter cable. The old cables had water in them that froze when it turned cold. Keith poured engine antifreeze into the new cable and the remaining old one, and that inconveniencing problem was now thankfully gone forever.

One really cold winter's day, the Frenzy just refused to run. It started, but would not rev up. We decided it was water in the gas and had frozen up the throttle body. Gas line antifreeze didn't over come it. We came up with the risky trick of warming the gas line antifreeze, comprised mostly of alcohol, in the microwave. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Don't try this at home, kids. I ain't kiddin'. Lo and behold, that worked. We poured the warm gas line antifreeze into the throttle body and it responded to the throttle! A couple more applications as it began to freeze again, and the antifreeze that we had poured into the fuel tank began to work its way through and she was back to normal. However normal a car named 'Frenzy' ever could be.

Quirky or not, I loved that car. I would buy another one in a heartbeat if I could ever get my hands on one.

The 1.8L OHC, though, wasn't without its other problems. I never found anything online to explain its revving frenzies, but they were known for head gasket trouble. The problem was 'gasket creep', brought on by different expansion and contraction rates of dissimilar metals. The 1.8L OHC had an aluminum head on a regular cast iron block. As the aluminum and cast iron expanded and contracted at different rates, they wore the gasket sandwiched between them in a chafing manner. The Frenzy fell prey to that one day when I noticed a huge column of white smoke billowing out the back on The Garden of Eden Road. That's a dead giveaway for engine antifreeze being burnt in the combustion chambers; a blown head gasket.

You NEVER allowed a 1.8L OHC to overheat or you would almost certainly blow the head gasket.

I hauled the Frenzy up to Gerard and Kim Vitsuski's garage in Westmeath. The head was warped and needed planing. The bill was $400.00, but my sweet but slightly finicky Frenzy was back in my hands.

The problem arose that I just didn't have the money to pay. I was in a rough spot, and other bills had unexpectedly come up and I was out of money. I was embarrassed, and I didn't know what to do, so I did the worst thing: nothing at all. One day, a letter arrived in the mail. A small claims letter from the court. Oh, now I had done it. My making more trouble by avoiding trouble came back to bite me in the butt. I called Gerard and apologized to him and told him I just didn't know what to do so I did nothing. I promised him I wasn't trying to run out on him and would for sure pay him when I could, and it wasn't because of that letter. He gave me the best reply I could have ever asked for: "Danny, I'm glad you called. I didn't want to do this. A bunch of other people aren't paying their bills either, but if you promise me you'll pay I'll rescind this letter." I did, and managed to pay him in full over the course of two or three months, and our Respect and trust for each other grew through it and remains rock solid to this very day. Take my lesson for an example: If you get into a jam, contact your debtors and tell them you intend to pay them, and work out a plan with them. They'll greatly appreciate you doing so rather than leaving them wondering. Trouble doesn't get better or go away altogether by avoiding it.

Our mutual Respect for each other resulted in Kim working for me later on as my secretary/treasurer for a memorable and rewarding 7 years. They are still close and treasured friends to this day. No, they are Family to us.

One nice thing about the Frenzy being white was it didn't get very hot in the summer sun, but it made me feel like a sitting duck when I got stuck in the snow in the winter. Its small square taillights weren't very visible, but the auxiliary ← STOP → light added a lot of security that wouldn't have been there otherwise. One time we got stuck in a huge snowdrift across the Garden of Eden Road in a heavy snowstorm in the Frenzy. It was a nice warm car, so we weren't in any danger of freezing, especially since it was filled with gas every day without fail and was so easy on it. We could just wait it out in comfort. The big thing was keeping the big rear window swept off so the aux lights shone through and kept our otherwise perfectly camouflaged car from being hit by oncoming traffic. Being that it was the middle of the night and not many people would be venturing out in that heavy of a snowstorm at any time anyway, our biggest risk was being run into by a snowplow. Sure enough, one eventually came along, and saw our lights flashing, and had enough time to stop. A quick yank backwards with the tow chain I always carried with me in the winter, and we were able to follow him as he opened the road for us. More than once snowplow operators saved the day for us. The night, really. Night folk looked out for night folk.

We had our Miracle in the Frenzy, and Goldy had his also. It was quite the car.