An April issue of UK’s Autocar featured the Renault Dauphine in its
list of "22 Totally Charming Cars." It showed a still life photo of a powder blue Dauphine parked by the ocean. The car looked as if it had just left the 1960s showroom. I
contrasted it with the sad photo of a derelict Dauphine in another issue of Autocar and the article "The Haunting Abandoned Wrecks of Rural
France.," It showed a rusty shell of a Dauphine being swallowed up by
undergrowth in "a remote field in the French Alps."
This tells the story of our family's 1960 Dauphine. I first saw it parked in our Wichita driveway in 1962. My father needed a car to commute to
his job as a civilian accountant at the local air force base. That left our
1960 Ford Falcon station wagon at home with my mother who needed it to get us
to school, haul us to doctor appointments and run off to the grocery store. I
still can see the look of horror on the faces of grocery clerks as Mom hauled
her eight children, two of them babies, into the store. My father went to the Totally
Charming Yet Obscure Cars dealership and returned with Renault. It was an
oddity in a world of Olds Cutlass Supremes and GTOs. Big powerful rides
were the thing. The Dauphine was tiny looked almost the same from the front as
it did from behind. The engine was in the rear and looked like something that
might power a lawnmower. If it didn’t start, you could wake up the engine
with a hand crank.
My father’s not around to ask but I do wonder why he chose such an
impractical car when he headed a family of 10. He might have seen Renaults on
the streets of Paris on leave during the war. He might have liked the two-tone
horn (loud for city, soft for country) and the fact you could wind it up like a
toy car if it refused to go. He never said. But they are some of the Dauphine
traits I admired when I was gifted the car in 1967.
The previous year, I had learned how to drive in it on Daytona's deserted
winter beaches. I failed my first driving test in it when I arrived at city
hall on Dec. 18, 1966, with a bum fuse. The DMV man asked if I wanted to take
the test using hand signals or return on another day, fuse replaced. It was my
birthday. I had a date that night with a girl I fancied as my girlfriend. I
took the test and failed. I did OK with left and right turns but forgot to
gesture down for stop. I was devastated. It was a long slow ride home with my
father and am embarrassing phone call to my date.
My father was transferred from Daytona to Cincinnati early in '67. The
Dauphine had many miles and he didn't want to drive it north so he put it in my
hands. The idea was to take my brothers and sisters to school and anywhere else
they wanted to go. My mother still had toddlers and a baby (No. 9) to care for.
We would finish the school year, sell the house, and then join our father in
Cincy. My brother Dan and I had been most resistant to the move. We were
surfers, for God's sake, and there was precious little surf in Ohio. I played
JV basketball for the Father Lopez Green Wave and had high hopes of making the
varsity in my junior year. And I had a girlfriend, sort of.
I did OK bossing around my siblings. I was also OK with having a car. It was
no prize after seven years of hard use and three years of assaults by rust
spawned by the salt air. It had really earned its rusty-red color. My
classmates began to know me as the guy with the French car which sounds pretty
romantic until you got a look at it, especially after I ripped off a rear door
backing out of the garage and could only find a powder-blue replacement at the
junkyard. It looked like a high school kid's car but that was OK as I was a
high school kid with a car.
I revel in all of the fun we had. We crammed into the car and rode The Loop
around Tomoka State Park, turning off the headlights to admire the darkness and
tempt fate. I bought a surf rack and we wandered up and down A1A searching for
surf. Girls thought my car was cute and liked to ride. Meanwhile, I tried to
find a girlfriend with a muscle car so I could feel like what it was like to
drive American. I dated Darlene for a year and got to drive her canary yellow Chevy
Chevelle SS 396 and later her canary yellow Pontiac GTO. She had a thing for
yellow. Her father bought her a new car every year. She didn’t mind riding in
my car and but liked it better when my father returned from Cincy and bought a
white Plymouth Barracuda that he occasionally let me drive.
During high school graduation summer of 1969, my Dauphine died. Kind of a
drag as I worked two jobs getting ready for college and had to bum rides. I
sold my car cheap to a guy who planned to turn it into a dune buggy. I imagine
my car’s stripped chassis blasting through the beachside sand dunes before they
were replaced by condos. I can also imagine my two-toned car with the two-toned
horn abandoned in a “remote field” somewhere in the Florida scrubland.
I am 70 now. I am always 16 driving my Renault down The Loop’s dark road. Sometimes the headlights are on and sometimes they are off. I am happy.
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