By Bob Kaster

When I was fourteen years old my family lived in a suburb of Denver, Colorado. My primary goal in life was to get a driver’s license and be able to drive a car. But I was the youngest kid in my class and still had more than a year to go, while my classmates were turning sixteen and getting their licenses. I would be the last one! It was awful!

Then, a miracle happened! Just before my fifteenth birthday, my family moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Wyoming driving age was fifteen! On June 5, 1957, my fifteenth birthday, I went to the Cheyenne Department of Motor Vehicles and got my license. I still have it. It has the iconic image of the cowboy riding a bucking bronco you still see on Wyoming license plates. The license described me: “Color of Eyes: Blue; Color of Hair: Blond; Weight: 130; Height: 5 Ft. 10 ¼ In.” Life was good!

My parents bought a 1957 Volkswagen Bug, which was the car I got to drive. It was unique and unusual at that time, although you still see later versions of them all over. Volkswagen has since moved on to other models. The purchase price was about $1,200. It had a whopping 36 horsepower, and theoretically would get from zero to sixty in thirty seconds. But that was on a flat road with no one in the car but the driver. If it was on a slight up hill, or if there were passengers in the car in addition to the driver, it would not make it to sixty at all.

There were only four of them in the entire state of Wyoming.

The car had some drawbacks. For one, it put some limitations on the love life of a high school boy. All the other boys in my class were driving 50’s-ish Fords and Chevys. If you were really cool, you would have a lowered ’50 Mercury. One thing those cars all had in common was a huge front bench seat that could probably accommodate four people. “Cruisin’ Main Street” was a popular pastime. The hotshot jocks would cruise with their girlfriends pretty much sitting on top of them. You could fit three more people in the front seat. Ever try that in a ’57 Volkswagen? I guess it didn’t matter. I wasn’t a hotshot jock. But I did have a girlfriend.

I remember driving to Laramie for a high school football game. Laramie is about 50 miles from Cheyenne, now connected by Interstate 80. Back then it was a state highway that went over a steep grade. I had three other guys in the car with me, and it was embarrassing. The weight of four high school boys plus the uphill grade meant that we were crawling along at about 35 miles an hour. We were being passed by all our friends in their big cars, honking and yelling at us as they passed. My passengers tried to duck down to avoid being seen.

Cheyenne got a lot of snow in the winter. Most of the time the little car did remarkably well in the snow because the weight of the rear engine was directly above the rear wheels, giving the car pretty good traction. But you could make it lose traction if you tried hard enough. I learned how to intentionally make the car spin out in the snow … my fifteen-year-old mentality at work. One time I was driving too fast in the snow in the city park and spun out, not on purpose. The car came to a rest about twenty yards from the road, facing the wrong direction. It was stuck because the undercarriage of the car was a flat piece of sheet metal, and when the snow was too high the car would sit on top of the snow like a boat in water, wheels spinning uselessly. I was in that predicament, trying to figure out how to get the car unstuck, when the police car came around the turn with lights flashing and siren blaring. I thought my parents would take away my driving privilege for life, but fortunately they were reasonable.

I graduated from high school in 1959 and ultimately took the car to college at the University of Arizona, where I joined a fraternity. I took a lot of good-natured heat from my fraternity brothers about my funny little car. I was careful to lock it when I parked it in the parking lot every night, but one night I forgot. The next morning when I walked downstairs for breakfast, there was my car, occupying center of attention right in the middle of the fraternity house dining room! The dining room was accessible from the outside by climbing up a few steps and entering through sliding glass doors. The pledges had maneuvered the car to the steps and then physically lifted it up and carried it inside.

Unfortunately, I had to sell the car during my last semester because I ran out of money and needed the proceeds to get me through to graduation. The good news was I had a girlfriend who had a car. Her name was Ann. We’ve been married for fifty-eight years.

I wish I still had the little VW. It had character. And today a car like that in reasonable condition is worth $28,900. Oh, well.