Rod Rumelhart can’t part with his first car.
Rod Rumelhart recalls two favorite stories involving the car.
By Rich Wicks | Guthrie Center Times
Anything in life that takes hard work seems to be appreciated more, and that’s certainly true of an old car that is parked in Rod Rumelhart’s garage. He recently took time to tell the story.
“This was my first car. I worked and saved up for it,” Rumelhart said. “I actually ended up buying it about six months before I turned 16, and that was in the fall of 1980. I paid $1,350, and that was a lot of money to me, because I’d worked a long time for it. My dad owned a construction business, and I worked building houses and remodeling with him.”
Rod Rumelhart takes a work break to tell about his GTO.
Rumelhart said he is the fourth owner of the car, so it needed some work when he got it, but he enjoyed the process of fixing it up.
“I bought it and put it in my grandmother’s garage, and then I was able to work on it, put speakers in it and do things like that. It was a 1965 Pontiac GTO, four speed on the floor, a two-door coupe, hardtop,” Rumelhart said. “Loyal Dorr owned it before me, and he owned the Conoco station down here. I believe he was the third owner.”
The car turned out to be a good investment.
“I had never driven a stick-shift before, so I had to learn with that car, and I drove it through four years of high school and four years of college. The GTO was one of those early muscle cars, and I had it in really nice condition. I even had it in a few parades,” Rumelhart said. “I’ve kept it all these years. I just haven’t been able to let it go, even though I’ve had plenty of people that have wanted to buy it.”
Thinking back to his school years, Rumelhart recalled two favorite stories involving the car.
“There was a classmate of mine who had a really nice car, and he always wanted me to race him. There’s a straightaway on School Street before you turn up to go to the high school, and nobody was on the road early one morning. He pulled up beside me, and we both laid into it. I’m not sure who won,” Rumelhart said. “He made the corner to turn up to the high school, but I had to go on by and turn around in the gravel past the high school. When I tried turning around, I dropped the back wheels off the shoulder and got stuck. I backed it down in, and it was swampy down there — and then I was really stuck.”
Luckily, the young men found a solution to the problem, but Rumelhart paid a price, nonetheless.
“My buddy worked at Conoco and had access to the wrecker, so he went to get that. And by the time he was getting me pulled out, all the school busses were coming, and all the kids could see me in the ditch. They were just having a heyday with that. I got razzed about that for a long time,” Rumelhart said.
The other story was truly a once-in-a-lifetime oddity.
“When I was 16 or 17, I wanted to go turkey hunting, and I got permission from a farmer south of Panora. I was going hunting with my brother and a classmate of mine,” Rumelhart said. “We were driving down there and got to the farmer’s driveway, and we go past to turn around. As I’m pulling into the neighbor’s driveway, I heard something, and then I backed up. I looked, and there sat my gas tank right in the driveway of that house — and there was a big tire mark where I had driven across it.”
Although this was clearly a big problem, it turned out OK.
“I called my dad, and he came out later. I ended up getting a new gas tank and new tank straps out of that deal,” Rumelhart said.
Today, the car sits in Rumelhart’s garage, but he hopes to someday restore it and drive it again.
“Everything is pretty original on it. It needs some work. There’s some rust, and the interior needs a lot of work,” Rumelhart said. “The car is the same age as me.”
Rumelhart recalled that the car had plenty of zip back in the day. Although he never really tried to see exactly how fast it could go, he said it was plenty fast.
“It would go well up to 110, anyway,” he said.