Locate an Auto Repair Shop in Drake, Colorado

My 1975 Volvo had 4 wheel disc drakes and ~160HP in a ~3000lb package. Safe, reliable, and handled almost as well as a BMW of the era. If your Volvo was reliable, then you were lucky - very, very lucky. (Are you sure that your Volvo wasn't a '65?) My in-laws bought a '76 Volvo - on my recommendation, I regret to say - that caused them no end of trouble & left them stranded several times. Luckily for me, they're good Christians & good sports, & they forgave me a long time ago. Let's face facts: if you bought a Euro in the 70s or the early 80s, you were rolling the dice. My '78 VW Rabbit & '80 Audi 5000 were the stuff of really bad jokes, but my parents bought 2 Audis - a '79 5000 & an '82 5000S - & got 15+ years from each of them. As I said in a previous post, the less said about the 70s, the better. The Japanese were building the most mechanically reliable cars, but if you lived in a snowbelt municipality where the roads were salted in the winter, you could watch your car's body melt away in a month. The Europeans were the worst; they didn't learn quality control until sometime after 1990, so buying one was like buying a lottery ticket. We Yanks were somewhere in between. Again, the 70s marked the low point of the automotive arts, with slow, ugly (remember 5 mph bumpers?) cars of dicey durability. I don't think that anyone who was old enough to drive & buy cars then will argue that point.

It depends. My 1975 Volvo had 4 wheel disc drakes and ~160HP in a ~3000lb package. Safe, reliable, and handled almost as well as a BMW of the era. There were some great cars even back then. But just like today, tons and tons of forgettable mediocrity as well. If your car back then sucked, well, it's perhaps because you chose poorly.

I had one of those. Fun car. Being a motorcycle nut, I was right at home with that 600 cc engine and chain-drive transmission! I used to hit 80 mph in that thing. Terrifying. I just saw one of those parked under some redwood trees on Francis Drake Blvd heading toward Olema in Marin county.

"I'm still trying to get used to "24/7", "No problem", "He passed", "Later", "In a few", and some others." Richard-- I don't know if you're familiar with William Safire (now passed..er, I mean deceased). He was a conservative, a political speech writer and he wrote a weekly column for the New York Times Magazine called "On Language". Safire authored numerous books and often sought misuse of language stories from professionals in a broad range of fields. I know that my father provided an example that Safire published. We all know that internal combustion engines can, and do, seize. In the medial profession, however, a patient cannot "seize" as was reported by a medical student who was stating his clinical diagnosis. My favorite, though, is a blooper produced by a secondary school student and contained in a book chapter called "Anguished English" by Richard Lederer: "Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper". What an image! What a difference a few letters make! A "little" knowledge is dangerous. Gogiboy

Oh yeah, those good old traveling days. When we lived in San Francisco in the 70's I was national director of sales training for a large insurance company. Big title, not much money...but I did travel on a weekly basis, teaching seminars around the country, and there were a lot of perks involved. I remember checking into the St. Regis Hotel in NYC. A great first class hotel. I was at the front desk and there was a stairway nearby, when all of a sudden two men came tumbling down the stairway and landed right at my feet. One guy was a security guard and he had the other guy's tie wrapped around his neck. The other guy was saying something like "hey, bro, give another bro a break here...but the guard just told him to shut up. Turns out he had caught the guy trying to break into a hotel room. On another occasion in Chicago I was holding a seminar at the Drake Hotel. On Friday afternoon one of the hotel staff people called me aside and wanted to make sure that I was checking out later in the day because the room I was staying in had been booked to Ronald Reagan, who was running for President then. I left Reagan a note of encouragement in the room. Never knew if he got it or not. :)