The Chocolate Brown 1977 Datsun Station Wagon

Everybody has a best car they ever owned. In our family, there’s not even a debate about it. Ask any of the 7 of us old enough to remember it, and the same answer will come spilling out, the 1977 Datsun station wagon.

We bought it at a used car lot on West 2nd street that had once been a gas station. Three of our five sons were in school at the time, and all of them were involved in a variety of extra-curricular activities. We were looking for roominess and fuel efficiency. We bought the Datsun the spring of 1990 for $1,100.00. It already had close to 100,000 miles on it.

The vehicle was chocolate brown with lighter tan vinyl seats. The air conditioner didn’t work, but once we had the air conditioner charged with a little Freon, it worked like a breeze off an arctic tundra.

We had planned a trip to San Diego to see my sister and her family the first two weeks of August in 1992. My parents had already flown out to San Diego for their visit. We were going to pick them up in San Diego, and they were riding back to Iowa with us. Our oldest son, Matt, was working as a youth minister in a little community in southern Arizona near the Mexican border, and we had made plans to visit him on the return trip.

We left Ottumwa, IA on Saturday, August 1st, around 8:00 P.M. Our three younger sons, Marcus, 12, Lucas, 10 and Ian, 4, were camped out on sleeping bags and pillows in the back of the station wagon. We picked up interstate 80 heading west towards Omaha, NE, intending to drive all night. In fifteen days we visited Salt Lake City, UT, Las Vegas, NV, Death Valley, CA, San Diego, CA, Nosgales, Mexico, Phoenix, AZ, Flagstaff, AZ, The Grand Canyon in AZ, and Four Corners where Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona converge, pulling a fold out camper behind us.

Once in San Diego we did all the touristy things, a trip to Sea World, walking beneath an aquarium with a whale in it, taking a walk through a Catholic Church with hand-painted art work adorning the arched ceiling, swimming in the Pacific Ocean, going to Deb’s office to see where she worked, and we took a side-trip to Lake Tahoe. However, while my first view of the ocean was breath-taking, I preferred swimming in the Condo pool. There was a wicked rip-tide that day we went to the beach, and I was worried about my child who was out in the ocean on a surf board. Finally the beach lifeguards reeled him in and grounded him. Lake Tahoe was too cold to call anything we did there swimming.

Eight people climbed in that little chocolate brown station wagon to head towards Iowa when we left San Diego, my husband and I, our three younger sons, and my mom and dad. The Datsun had almost 100,000 miles on it when we bought it. We’d driven it for two years before we made the round trip to San Diego and back. It ran like a dream the whole trip.

We drove it another eight years after that, until Luke graduated from Ottumwa High School in 2001. One day that spring of his senior year, Luke was waiting at the top of the high school steps for his dad to pick him up from school. The kid he was standing there with was laughing at this chocolate brown Datsun station wagon pulling up to the curb, all rusted out, looking like a demolition derby car ready for the junk yard.. The bumpers were gone. Mike had welded a cast iron beam across the back of it so we would have something to attach the trailer hitch to. The floorboard was rusted out and it looked like it was ready to fall off the frame. It had 200,000 miles on the odometer. Luke said he’ll never forget how embarrassed he was walking up to the car and climbing in. But it still ran like a tank.


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