In the spring of 1970, when my Dad decided we would be moving from Washington DC to Jackson, (ug) Mississippi he drove his white 1963 VW Beetle down south. (We had two Beetles at the time, the other was a red convertible.) A fuse burned out just before he left - the fuse in the circuit that controlled all the dashboard functions. He decided that it didn't really matter if he didn't know how fast he was going.
Around about Birmingham, Alabama he discovered that the dead fuse also shut down the oil pressure gauge. He discovered this because he was out of oil and burned the engine up. Because he didn't have a temperature gauge either, he didn't discover the problem until the engine had fused itself into one big
lump of rapidly cooling metal.
His college roommate lived in Birmingham, so he had the tow truck tow it to the roommate's house where it sat for a year. When the roommate in question finally screamed loudly enough about moving it, Dad went over there and towed it with a pickup truck to a junkyard where he had it weighed.
He sold the transmission and roof rack, the only remaining usable parts; Once he knew the exact weight he walked over to the crane operator at the metal crushing pit and asked how much it would cost to smush 1000 lbs (or what ever it was) of scrap. The guy quoted him a figure and my Dad pointed at the
little white VW. When the guy finally stopped laughing he told my Dad that he would do it for free, because it was so funny.
Dad put the key in the ignition and then the giant electromagnet attached to the roof. Dad was taking photos while the crane picked up the car and swung it towards the pit, where the crane dropped the VW into the the eight sided crushing machine. The car was made into a cube.
The crane picked the 32 inch cube up again with the magnet, dropped it into the pickup truck and hauled it to Jackson where it took almost a dozen people a whole day to move it in to the backyard (art party!) where Dad eventually built a rock garden around it (that thing ain't EVER moving!). He even had a sign made, which he put at the corner of the fence, which read:
Volkswagen I
1963 VW 357 sedan
Bob & Beth Canizaro 1970
