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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Cars gave me nothing but trouble W ay back when I was single, I was a car collector. Not a person who collects a whole bunch of cars over the years; I was a serial collector, owning only one car at a time. I was also a spendthrift before I got married, a guy who couldn't keep his accounts straight. I changed cars about once a year. Over the years, I was the owner of (or debtor for) lots of autos. I bought my first one in 1948 in Roseburg. It was a 1939 Ford two-door, which a year later I traded in for a brand new Packard four-door sedan. I remember that during the sales pitch, the hot-shot "sales executive" responded to my concern that I was making only $80 a week. He said that lots of people in my salary range were the owners of Packards. Mine cost some $2,300. I should have asked for the name of a person in my salary range who could afford such a car, but I was a pushover. After moving to Klamath Falls, I traded the Packard in on a new red Dodge two-door with candy-stripe upholstery. When my neighbor, who was a telephone company cable splicer, received a trip to his hometown of Cleveland as a delegate to the union's annual convention, I agreed to drive the family there. He provided the gas and oil money. I decided to drive alone from Cleveland to New York to have a couple of days with my brother Lee, who was a starving actor. I spent one night at his fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village before we left the big town and drove down to Washington. My practically new car developed an insatiable appetite for oil, a quart every 200 miles. I got so mad at the cute little vehicle that I traded it off after the oil problem was fixed -- not a wise thing to do. My worst experience with a car -- which reads like someone made it up -- happened years later after my wife, Nora, and I and our daughter moved to Billings, Montana, where I was to be the manager of a radio station. It turned out that the station was bankrupt, something I didn't learn until after our arrival. Try as hard as I could, the station remained in the bankrupt condition. The car we were driving was a 1959 American Rambler. After a year in Billings, we moved to a station in Helena, marking time while I drove all over the West looking for a job. It was then that our hard luck with cars multiplied. The little Rambler began having heating problems. The temperature gauge would rise to the red line, and then the boiling water in the reservoir of the radiator would split along the seam at the top of the water reservoir. The scalding hot radiator coolant would spew across the motor and some of it would wash up on the front window. I would call a tow truck, which would pull the car to a garage, where the blown seam in the water tank would be soldered closed. Believe it or not, this scenario happened six times in the following three months. The radiator exploded near Spokane; south of Seattle; at Dunsmuir, Calif.; and three other places. The most harrowing experience was when I was driving over the mountain pass north of Wallace, Idaho. The highway had two lanes, and my radiator exploded just after I had driven around a sharp corner. There were no shoulders. Unbelievably, the next car going northward was an Idaho State Police cruiser. When the patrolman found out what my problem was, he offered to turn my car around if I would stop traffic around the corner. He whipped that car around like a professional race driver. I thanked him profusely. Even without a motor, the 11 miles downhill to Wallace were covered in record time, and I brought the car to a stop in front of a radiator repair shop. What amazes me is that in all six cases, no one at any of the shops was able to discover the cause of the meltdown of the radiator's water reservoir. Weeks later, a man at a filling station heard my story and quickly found the problem. A major hose running from the bottom of the radiator was so soft that driving at 65 mph created enough suction to cause the hose to slowly come together and halt the distribution of water into the radiator. I wince when I think of all the money we spent just because a radiator hose was soggy. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA