By Phil Roberts
A 42-year odyssey with a white 1979 Chrysler LeBaron came to an end this week when we sold it to a salvage yard for $85. Not bad for a car hit seven times—all in collisions not of our making.
Actually, the first week we owned the car should have been a signal of coming attractions. Peggy was driving along Pershing Boulevard not far from our house when an errant yellow paint can fell off a highway department truck right in front of her. She tried to brake and to avoid the open can, but traffic prevented her from finding a safe path past it. Boom! The new car, barely a week from the dealers, was slathered in yellow highway striping paint! When word came back to the historical department where I was working at the time witty PR specialist and newsletter editor Tracy Stoll started singing, “We all live in a yellow submarine…” –much to my irritation.
Fast forward to that September. The Wyoming State Bar was holding its convention in Cheyenne and I was a fairly new member looking to fulfill Continuing Legal Education requirements as well as socializing with friends statewide who I’d known mostly at classmates in the class of ’77 at UW Law School.
We were living in a big two-story house (apartment on the upper floor) at 24th and Evans, just across from Memorial Hospital and two blocks from the Capitol. It was late when we got home, but fortunately, I found a parking spot right in front of the house, on Evans, quite conveniently behind one car nudging the stoplight on the corner, making it easy for him to park, but challenging for me. I was just removing my tie in the living room upstairs when I glanced out the bay window, hearing screeching tires, and watching a late model sedan hurtling toward what little space remained between our new Chrysler and the car parked ahead of it. By the time I got to other window to get a better view of below, we heard the engine cranking, the car started up again as the driver pointed the car back toward the street, apparently intending to make a get-away. Then we both saw a stocky young man get out of a car, lodged again against the huge concrete porch steps. He was running down the street in the general direction of the hospital, screaming, “I’m hurt! I’m hurt!” The driver managed to hit both cars, discovering too late that there wasn’t any way the car, after bouncing off the stoplight on the corner, could avoid either target. It was later discovered that the car had been stolen earlier that night and the culprit was never found.
We got the car repaired (after convincing the insurance adjuster that indeed, the right front of the car was hit by a car running a stoplight and hitting our front porch first). Our young student intern borrowed the car to pick up an ad at a nearby business when the car collided with Channel 5’s mobile van on Van Lennon St., three blocks from the Capitol Times office. “I almost made it back without anything happening…”
We were driving through Laramie on Reynolds one bright warm Sunday morning. A car shot past the stop sign on 7th Street and slammed into the front right side. “I was listening to the Broncos on the radio…”
I was driving north on 15th Street and stopped at the red light behind a Laramie police car when suddenly, just as the light changed and the police car got to the middle of Spring Creek, a car came careening east down Spring Creek. The driver ran the red light and slammed into the front of the Chrysler. The policeman stopped immediately, ran back and said “Do you know how close that car was to hitting me”? “Well, yes, but he didn’t miss me,” I said as I surveyed the damage. A few seconds later, a thin dark-haired man appeared. ”Anybody hurt?” he asked. “No, what about in your car?” “No,” he said, trying hard to shield from me and the cop a woman, apparently his wife standing nervously next to their car, that came to a stop a few hundred yards away. The cop said, “She looks to be in shock. Better call an ambulance.” “Oh, no, she’s just fine,” the young man said, only then admitting that he never saw the stoplight. I glanced at his car plates. Yup. Colorado. He again denied any need for medical help, only saying as he grabbed the ticket the cop had written up, “She’s almost eight months pregnant and I’m getting my M.S. in biology from CU next year. I can’t afford to lose my student status and be sent back,” he admitted. I told him not to worry about the slight damage on the front of my car, assuming, correctly, he had minimal insurance.
Fast forward four years. In student housing on Sand Point Way in Seattle, a little boy would appear the few times I had to water the flowers on the south side of the house. A very happy child, he would not say much, but help hold the hose. One day, I was leaving the flat when I overheard a man tell his wife he’d missed the bus, and, thus, would be walking. I rarely took the car, except when returning lots of library books, made necessary for my dissertation. That was such a day. En route to the parking lot, I told him. “Can I give you a lift?” He reluctantly took me up on it, profusely telling me he hoped I wasn’t going out of my way. We both got in the Chrysler. “ever been to Wyoming?” I asked after learning he was a foreign student from Iran. His whole body went stiff, “Y-yes—just once,” he answered. We got to campus after a silent ten minutes or so. “I get out here,” he insisted, far from the usual parking area. “But, I can get you closer—” “No. this is good.” He shot out of the car almost before I came to a stop.
I was perplexed all day about the incident, but when I got home and parked, I noticed an old beat-up wreck of a car—with Colorado plates. As luck would have it, I kept the copy of the ticket from Laramie from years before. Sure enough. The numbers matched. A check of the name in the Student Directory confirmed it. He and that driver long ago were one and the same. The little boy helping me water… Coincidences like that are weird.
The last wreck of the Chrysler was when a huge pickup slammed into the front right side in the parking lot of the AHC. The driver admitted he never saw the car because he was watching several good-looking young women walking into the AHC. Wouldn’t you know, they were finishing assignments for my Wyoming history class…