Last week I recounted a miserable winter living with my new bride in a ramshackle summer place on Star Lake and surviving frigid weather through the good graces of sympathetic neighbors who took us in.

Not only did the Cox family put us in a spare bedroom, they shared the dinner table and one day they lent me their '32 Chevrolet to get to Boeing. My rusting '33 Plymouth had failed to start one day. The fuel pump or some other mysterious part had failed. I knew absolutely nothing about cars or how to fix them. I had been given a '29 Model A Ford by my big brother who had joined the Navy. It ran beautifully but when the rear door handle came loose I lost faith in it and sold it to another Boeing guy for $100 and bought the Plymouth for $50.

A dumb move.

When Mr. Cox offered to let me use his car to get to work if I could fix the flat tire I jumped to the task. I jacked the rear end up and took off the wheel, pried the tire off, patched the leaking tube and put the wheel back on. I had a lot of trouble getting the lug nuts back on but finally finished the job and took off. I got out on Highway 99 and had reached Midway when I felt the car wobbling and pulled into a Gilmore gas station across from the Spanish Castle. Oldtimers out here will remember that landmark as the place to dance and bring your own bottle.

The filling station attendant looked at the rear wheel which was only partially attached to the car by one or two nuts and pointed out that whoever had put the wheel on had forced the lug nuts on clockwise instead of counter and stripped the bolts. What a dummy. Only the luck of the Irish saved me. He found some new bolts and put the wheel on right. I told Mr. Cox about it and he just shook his head in bewilderment.

I found someone who could fix my Plymmy and one day my bride, who had now learned the rudiments of driving, decided to take Mrs. Cox down to Redondo beach while I was busy trying to catch frogs in the bull rushe . I used a piece of red flannel off one of her nightgowns and dangled it over the bullfrog's nose till he jumped at it. I thought frog legs might make a nice change of diet from Franco-American or Chef Boyardee spaghetti. She had never cooked anything so we got by on hot dogs and canned stuff.

I was busy trying to get us dinner when a cop came down the road with the two women. They looked pretty distressed. They had started down that winding Redondo road and the brakes had failed and they hit the ditch and ran into a dirt bank. They were shook up but not injured. Someone had seen it happen and called the County Police. I managed to get it towed to a mechanic and fixed it. The front end was a little banged up but it ran okay. They were pretty lucky.

A month later we were driving down a steep hill in north Seatttle and going too fast, we hit a big chuckhole. Next thing I knew I saw both front wheels flying down the hill as we went flying headlong into a huge pile of brush that road crews had left for later pickup.

The big hole I hit in the road had jarred the car so hard the wooden spokes in the front wheels had popped out. We had avoided disaster by a whisker missing a telephone pole by only a few feet. The brush saved out lives and only the headlights had to be replaced.

We found two new wooden spoked wheels and decided to sell that car. We upgraded to a 1928 Desoto.