Remembering the Vista Cruiser

I remember, soon after we had gotten our drivers’ licenses our sophomore year in high school, many a weekend night (and most nights during the summer) was spent driving around town doing nothing productive. Maybe playing hide-and-seek with another carful of kids we knew. Sometimes driving past the houses of boys we liked. Stopping at the neighborhood McDonald’s for French fries and a drink, hoping some other kids (preferably boys) would stop there too. Mooning, of course. Generally, just wasting gas.

I rarely drove. I had gotten in trouble early on, after driving one weekend night. My dad had begun tracking the mileage on the cars back then, to see how many miles per gallon each car was getting. One morning, my dad had checked the mileage after I had driven one of the cars the night before. He had asked where I had gone to put well over 50 miles on the odometer. I didn’t have a ready answer. My friends and I really hadn’t “gone” anywhere. My dad was angry that the car’s tank needed to be filled again after having just been filled a few days before. That is when he deputized me to begin writing down the odometer reading before and after I drove the car. Having this responsibility persuaded me to avoid driving on weekends.

My friends and I needed a big car to haul us all around town. Sometimes we had to settle for two cars if all of us were going out. Sparky’s infamous Vista Cruiser was the car of choice for our outings but, truth be told, Sparky was not an ideal driver. Indeed, Sparky was somewhat of a spaz. She often yelled when she drove, instilling an aura of hysteria among us. The car, too, seemed a bit unbalanced, seeming to have a mind of its own and with a penchant for ditches. By pairing Sparkle and the Vista Cruiser together, you were just asking for trouble. And trouble meant F-U-N to us back then.

My friends and I have so many stories involving Sparky and her Vista Cruiser. Some I experienced myself, others I heard from my friends. A classic I remember well is the time Sparky complained that the car was driving funny. It was at least a half a mile of rough riding that one of us passengers saw that the entire passenger side of the Vista Cruiser was up on the sidewalk. And had been for at least a half mile! How could anyone not notice that they were driving on a sidewalk?

In its way back, the Vista Cruiser had tried to hide two of us so we could sneak them into the drive-in movie theatre without having to pay their admission. It ended up being a bust, however, because the damn car drove us into a ditch on the side of the road. The hidden passengers were shaken but not otherwise hurt. In the end and after about an hour of trying, Jill succeeded in maneuvering the Vista Cruiser from the depths of the ditch and we didn’t have to call a tow truck. Which is good because we did not have a phone, did not know where to find a phone, had no credit card, and no clear idea where we were. We eventually made it to the drive-in and were able to see at least one of the feature films, which I think was “Little Darlings.” And were we ever!

Sparkle admitted to me recently that that wasn’t the only ditch she’d driven her Vista Cruiser into. For the other one, she had had to call a tow truck. She also confessed to taking out a huge chunk of wood from a telephone pole near the Wendy’s where she worked. (Off subject, but this will give you an idea of Sparky’s personality aside from her bad driving habits: At Wendy’s, Sparky used to wear a name tag that read “Erma” so she wouldn’t get in trouble over any customer complaints filed against the employee named Erma.)

Sparky once hit a moving police car in the Vista Cruiser. She was adamant that it was not her fault and I’m inclined to believe her because the cop barely stopped to acknowledge her before taking off in a different direction. No ticket. No documentation. Didn’t happen, right?

I remember leaving a basketball game with Spark and the car wouldn’t start. We had driven the Vista Cruiser to some remote school in the unfamiliar hinterlands. We sat in the car, long after all the players and fans had left. It was dark and spooky outside the car and we were getting nervous. We couldn’t turn the key in the ignition. Both of us tried. We sat. We tried. We worried. We sat some more. We tried again. We worried some more. Finally, we figured out the problem. As was her custom, Sparky had turned off the Vista Cruiser without putting the car in Park. The car wouldn’t start because the gear was in Drive. You could apparently do that back then.

Sparky also had the tendency to put the car in Park before stopping the vehicle, giving her passengers whiplash on a number of occasions.

One night after Christmas, we collected a bunch of Christmas trees lying on the curb waiting for trash pick-up and stuffed them into the back of the Vista Cruiser. Earlier, we had painted a sign reading “Xmas Trees for Sale.” We put the sign and the three or four dead trees we had collected into the front yard of a guy we went to school with. Boy! The stories that car could tell.

Though most of my friends and I considered Sparky an inept driver, and the worst driver among us, without Sparky we may never have known what “padiddle” was (kissing your neighbor if you spotted a car sporting only one headlight), or that you were supposed to scratch the ceiling of the car whenever you went through a yellow traffic light (for good luck so you’d make it through the intersection without being killed.) And, most importantly, we never would have known how cool it was to be driving the streets of central Ohio inside a Vista Cruiser. Thank you, Sparky.