Down On The Mile High Street: 1968 Volkswagen Beetle
Given the way that Beetles have had all their parts swapped over the decades, I’m always reluctant to try to nail down an exact model year of a street-parked example, particularly when it’s a primered-out survivor owned by a guy who spends a lot of time at junkyards. If we are to go by the taillights and hood latch, this car should be a ’68… or it might be a ’64 with a fender swap… or a ’74 pan with a ’68 body. Anyway, the important thing is that it’s an old air-cooled Volkswagen survivor that gets used as a tow vehicle.
This car is the daily driver and freight hauler for an artist who’s something of a legend in my south Denver neighborhood. His studio is an overwhelming house-sized collage of found objects, including thousands of automotive emblems; I’ll have to get over there and document his place with my stereo camera one of these days.
Here’s a short video that gives you the idea. This VW makes a couple of cameos.
Some folks would say that a Toyota truck with a good heater would be the ideal Denver art-material-scavenging machine, but a Beetle with a small flatbed trailer works just as well (provided you dress warmly in the winter).
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Those pop out rear windows are the best flow through ventilation. Apparently you could not get them if you ordered the S/R.
Are those 4-bolt wheels some sort of an adapter plate, or did "later" Bugs actually use that pattern? I had a '67 with the wide-spaced lug *bolts*.