[larrybuck]

Nice 56. It seems to be a small world. My mother had a 56 bug that she used for years commuting as a school teacher. It had nonstock bronze exterior color with stock olive green interior with a black topped manual sunroof. As a teenager, I was impressed that I could listen to the car radio straight from the battery with the key not having to be turned to accessory mode like most American cars. Even as a teenager, I had input to what cars my parents bought. Before she bought the bug, she was considering a Fiat sedan owned by somebody that she knew, and I was very negative about that. When my parents looked at typical American station wagons, I was there when they test drove 1966 full size Dodge wagon. I again through in my negative comments, and we ended up with a 66 Bel Air Chevy wagon with a 327 in it. Anyway, I tried to convince my mother to sell the bug eventually to me so it would be my first car but she refused saying that one of the four bolts holding her seat was broken and she also said that it would pop out of third gear once in awhile and she didn't think that was a good idea for a new rookie driver. Of course looking back now, how easy it would have been to have fixed a couple of those issues. I ended up happily owning a 67 Chevelle Malibu four Speed on the floor as my first car with absolutely no regrets other than the fact that my dad and I bought it off of a used car lot, and it had 327 badge on the front fenders. I found out a year later that it wasn't the 327 it had been replaced with a 64 283. But that was okay because a year later, the 283 morphed into a high performance rebuild. TRW 12 to 1 Pistons, Edelbrock high-rise intake with to Holley 600s, much go and no stop manual brakes haha. Naturally the high performance motor was done just in time for the fuel shortages in 1973 and I sadly sold the car soon after as I was only getting 7 miles per gallon. The high-rise manifold had a weakness in that there was too much bolt separation for the gaskets. The gaskets kept popping under the pressure, so before I sold the car, I went back to a more conventional intake with one Holly 600 on it, and got back to 12 miles per gallon.