List:
I can't believe I've owned my '68 2000 since 1977 and didn't find out
about the List until this past spring.
It must have something to do with too much garage time and not enough
road time.
Am I a lurker? Well, I've posted a couple comments, met a couple List
people, bought some parts, and started the Roadster disassembly process.
So I guess I'm hooked, lurker or not.
High school friends had Sprites, Volvos, VW bugs, Karmann Ghias. Me, I
had a '55 Ford Sunliner convertible that my aunt had bought 15 years
earlier. It was a 260 V-8 ragtop, 188,000 miles on the odometer, and
enough sheetmetal to make me fearless. When I went away to college Dad
gave it to the kid who pumped gas at the Esso station and told the guy
he never wanted to see it again.
My first car was a '60 Porsche 356B S90 Cabriolet: visually beautiful,
mechanically rough. Didn't matter, it was totalled when I hit a wall
with it. I put the 1600cc engine into a VW Bug. At speed, it was cool to
watch the speedometer needle go all the way around and peg-out on the
back side of zero mph. Not surprisingly, it was totalled when I hit a
tree with it.
I dropped out of school for a while, worked and learned to weld by
putting the floor back in a '59 Porsche 356A Coupe. I finally graduated
with a BA in French Literature. Spent a semester at UMass in Grad
School, realized the futility of it, loaded the A Coupe and returned to
Lancaster PA, where I'd gone to College. Living on a farm for a while
afforded me the luxury of room: at one
point I had the A Coupe, the Roadster, and four VW Squarebacks.
Squarebacks were a truly great automotive design: the aircooled "pancake
engine" was about 10" deep and sat under the wagon's rear floor, thereby
allowing a front trunk, seating for four, and a rear cargo area. The
swing axle torsion bar rear suspension had great load carrying
capabilities: firewood, building
supplies, tools, etc.
Anyway, I bought the Roadster as fun, topdown transportation. It was all
that and more. I did some autocrossing, some camping trips to the Glen
for the USGrand Prix, and a lot of daily driver use. And of course, the
valuable educational experience of pulling the engine in an unheated
20deg barn, and reinstalling it on a 95deg August afternoon. As I became
busy doing other things, the Roadster was eventually stored "out of
sight out of mind".
It sometimes takes a while to get oriented in life. In 1986, two
friends and I started a welding business specializing in stainless steel
process piping and custom metal fabrication for the food, beverage, and
pharmaceutical industries. We currently have 35 employees and we've had
job sites in 16 states, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Trinidad. We do a lot
of high purity automatic orbital tube welding for R&D and BioPharm
facilities.
This winter, my Shop Foreman and I are going to put some time and energy
into getting the Roadster back on the road and hopefully out to the
track in the Spring. He has a track prepped 1st gen RX7. One of my
partners SCCA Hillclimbs his Miata. We'll have fun with the Roadster.
Other Cars that I've owned: Toyotas, a Nissan Stanza, Citroen 2CV,
Renault 4L, [3] Audi Quattros, [2] Saab 900 Turbos, VW Passat with VR-6
engine, and a Chevy Lumina Minivan for my excellent wife, Karen, and our
twins Jack and Marci, age 3.
Things that I did so long ago that they seem they were somebody else's
life: Travelling, hitchhiked up and down the East Coast, spent a summer
at 10,000ft in the Colorado Rockies helping a friend build a cabin,
wandered/hitched back to PA, thumbed from southern England up to the
Isle of Skye off the Scottish coast, hitchhiked from Paris to Istanbul
through Yugoslavia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece. Drove and
hitched from Tunis on the Mediterranean south to the Sahara, stayed in
an oasis village so isolated that the wealthy man of the village had the
only transportation[a donkey], windows had no glass only shutters,
floors were beaten dirt, and the daily bread was cooked on hot stones by
veiled, henna'd women with facial tattoos. I did some sport parachuting.
Had some beach time. Did some offshore sailing.
Current interests: Wonderful wife and kids, taking the Passat to Summit
Point and VIR to embarrass BMWs on track days, skiing the edge of
steeply wooded Vermont trails, and work, work, work.
Future projects: Get that 356A Coupe back on the road, get the 1936
wooden Cape Cod Knockabout back under sail, and get the kids skiing.
Bill Murdock
Lancaster PA
'68 2000 05690
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