My first bus was a green VW van with the split front windows. I called it Atticus. I bought it in Montana after a summer’s work on oilrigs on the Canadian border. I made $3.25 an hour that summer, which was a huge wage for me at the time.

I was in Montana because my parents had moved while I was going to Oregon State. Dad was with U.S. Customs and went where he thought he could get the most overtime. He had moved us from Wyoming the December of my senior year in high school. Several good things happened to me as a result of this move, though at the time I was extremely upset at the move and the disruption of my school life.

At any rate, I flew to Montana for the summer and spent a few weeks cleaning out the muck from the bottom of mustard seed silos before I became a “rough neck”. I may have weighed 115 pounds at the time and the image of me dragging chain and pulling a vertical stack of oil pipe that weighed at least a ton across the deck must have been hysterical. We moved rigs often as we were mostly drilling to maintain mineral claims, but we actively drilled two wells looking for oil while I was there. No oil, but we did strike water!

I don’t know in which town I found the bus, but it was perfect. it had one cracked front window pane and pink paisley curtains around the back windows. My plan was to drive it back to Corvallis with my sister, who was going to go to  Oregon State, and Lydia who I had flown out from Oregon, and who, like me, was going to OSU. It was a perfect plan until the bus threw a rod in Glacier National Park. My father, who was rarely happy with me in those days, left work to rescue us by pulling the bus into Missoula. Imagine hurtling down the mountains of Montana with no control of your vehicle. I tried to tap the brakes a few times to slow down but that only resulted in jerking dad’s car and pissing him off. It was a horrible trip, ending with us being dumped at the VW dealership in Missoula, while my father made the return trip to work.

My wife (not then but later) marched in to the dealership and demanded to be allowed to call her father, who was the VW Marketing Executive. Lydia, when she is riled up, is a force to be reckoned with and so was immediately connected. Her dad, one of the nicest adults I have ever known, authorized a motor replacement and lent me the money for it on the spot, making sure that I had enough money for my tuition.

Long story short, the motor was replaced and we returned to Oregon with a green hippie bus. That was Atticus I.