Back in the early '70s when I was stationed at Luke AFB in Arizona, two friends, Jimmy and Bernie, from New York State decided to travel cross-country to see California. The old car they started out with barely made it to Ohio. With little money and two strong backs, they took some day labor jobs at construction sites and earned enough money to buy an even older car, a '59 Chevy, 5-cylinder, automatic, station wagon, that had no emergency brake and the automatic did not have any reverse.
I wrote 5-cylinder because it had a burnt valve and that cylinder had no compression… At their first gas stop, they discovered something else, the transmission also had no Park… they stopped for gas, hopped out, Bernie went to the rest room and Jimmy popped the hood and as he was reaching for the dipstick, the car started rolling backward…
Jimmy panicked and thinking that he forgot to put the car in park, he ran to the side of the car and reached in the window to shove it into Park. The car kept rolling and Jimmy is hanging out the window, and he keeps jamming it into Park, again and again, but the car keeps rolling and picking up speed and with Jimmy hanging out the window the car rolls across the road and into the ditch on the other side where it rear wheels wound up dangling over the open ditch… Luckily no other cars were coming…
They went to the farmer whose ditch their car was caught in and asked if he could use his tractor to pull them out, but this was the '70s and Bernie and Jimmy were Hippies and I guess he did not care for the look and the farmer agreed but not for free, he did not want money, but for them to shovel the cow manure out of the barn.
They said it was not as bad as it sounds and the farmer’s wife did provide supper for them.
Now, that Chevy was not about to give up all it quirks so quickly, it also stared burning oil, a lot of oil and it even needed oil between fill ups…
Jimmy and Bernie with so little money and only picking up some day jobs along the way, they carried a bunch of old gallon oilcans and they scrounged up used, drained oil from service stations along the way…
When they arrived in Phoenix, they called and I went down to meet them and guide them back to our place… When Bernie “parked” the car, Jimmy jumped out and shoved a cinder block in the front and the back of the rear tire… They said that was their “Parking Brake…”
They stayed for two weeks and found enough work to start on their trip again. They did make it to California and the Chevy even got them back home to New York State…