Car Stories, the Putt-Putt

 

This is not a toy.

It's a steel screw-gear jack easily capable

of lifting 750 lbs. of automotive mass.

It was once stowed away under the seat

of the tiny car perched on the jack saddle.

Actually, no. That's a toy car.

But it is roughly a 1:30 scale model

of a real micro-car my dad once owned

that came equipped with this German mechanical jack.

The car is long gone, now 56 years past,

but the toy car was a gift I gave to my dad

many years ago to commemorate his favorite car.

He called it the Putt-Putt.
It only had one door.

It was a 1959 Isetta 300 manufactured by the Bayerische Motoren Werke AG or BMW for short. My dad purchased this unusual little car new in Tacoma, Washington in the fall of 1958. It is number 4 on his list of 21 vehicles that he owned in his lifetime. 

At the time, my dad, Russell E. Brubaker, was a captain in the U.S. Army and assigned to a Transportation Corps unit at Fort Lewis, Washington, now known as Joint Base Lewis–McChord after a merger with the U.S. Air Force. Our home was in nearby in Taccoma, Washington about 10 miles away from the base and since my dad's work hours could be variable he and and my mom decided they needed a second car. 

The original design of the single-door Isetta came from an Italian automobile company and was manufactured under license in several different countries including Argentina, Spain, Belgium, France, Brazil, Great Britain, and Germany.  However it was the BMW version that became the best known and supposedly was the first successful model the company produced in the post-war years. Between April 1955 when the first Isetta was released and May 1962 when the company ceased production, BMW built a total of 161,728 units of the Isetta. 

From 1954 to 1957 my dad had been stationed in France, where I was born, and in 1956 he had seen a French VELAM Isetta which was owned by a Hungarian neighbor who worked on the army base in Orleans. In the 1950s the U.S. military was more generous than in later decades and officers were allowed to import American cars to use while stationed in Europe, so in 1954 my folks were driving our 1953 Willy jeep station wagon around France that must have turned a lot of heads. Meanwhile it was the French and German cars that attracted my dad's attention.

The previous two pictures were taken on family picnics in Washington's Olympic Peninsula, but I'm not certain exactly where. Surprisingly my dad didn't take many photos of this car. I couldn't find any B&W photos so these two were scanned from 35mm slides. To be specific, slides from slots 68 and 151 in box #5, labeled "58-59". There are approximately 300 slides in each metal box and around 60 boxes. Fortunately my dad recorded the subject, date, and location in a handy paper index included in the boxes. Unfortunately some boxes got rearranged and have become the photographic equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle. 

Amazingly my dad saved the original Isetta manual, which I now have in my family archives, and in it he notes that he purchased this white Isetta on 30 September 1958 with 35 miles on the odometer. Decades later, in one of his many notebooks filled with handwritten lists, accounts, and recollections he wrote a few pages about some of our first cars. For the Isetta he says, "Great 2nd car - two places (seats) w/ Mike + Dog in back. 60 mph when downhill with wind at our back." 

A year later in the fall of 1959, my dad got orders to return to Korea, this time serving in the Transportation Corps instead of the Infantry as he had been during the war. Unlike military duty in France, families were not permitted to accompany soldiers to Korea, so my mom and I were sent back to Hyattsville, Maryland, outside of Washington, D. C. to stay with my grandparents. By this time our family had acquired a lot of stuff and though the military paid for professional movers to haul our household items around, cars were not included. My father's solution was to build a triangular trailer-hitch to tow the Isetta behind our 1957 Dodge Suburban station wagon on a great cross country trek. 

In this color slide from somewhere on the road trip, the two cars are linked together at some picturesque lakeside parking lot. My mom stands on the far side of the cars and I think I must be there too, visible through the car window. Our dog Moochy, a yellow cocker spaniel, is on the far right. It's an interesting to see how small the Isetta was compared to the Dodge. Here's a second slide from the same trip.

The Isetta was 89  inches long and 53 inches wide, and weighed around 353 kg or 780 lbs. It was powered by a 300cc motorcycle engine coupled to a 4-speed manual transmission. The official top speed was 53 mph though, as my dad said, it could go faster. The sound of the single cylinder thumper engine earned it the nickname, Putt-Putt. It's big appeal though was in fuel consumption, getting an astonishing 50 to 90 mpg!

In contrast the Suburban was nearly 18 ft long with two passenger doors and bench seats that flipped up to get into the second row, along with a huge tailgate door. It had a V-8 engine with 5,328 cm³ / 325 in³ displacement that produced 245 hp on its 3-speed pushbutton automatic transmission. The Dodge probably got about 11 mpg as described in several classic car websites, though my dad never mentioned it. Afterall gas was cheap in the 50s. Like most cars of this vintage, it had no air conditioning, no seat belts, and only an AM radio with one speaker. And since America's interstate road system did not yet exist, this must have been was a long, long trip. As I was only five years old then I don't remember any of it. By the time we arrived in Maryland, the Isetta had 8,200 miles which, even including the mileage under tow, is an impressive number of miles in its first year.

By chance the slide next to the one of the Isetta parked at the beach was a picture of my dad that my mom took.  Wearing oil-stained fatigue pants, hat, and jacket, he sits on the garage floor repairing something on the Dodge Suburban. My very first memories of my dad are of him fixing stuff, almost always a car. In those early times, because a young army officer's pay did not go very far, my dad did all his own oil changes and routine auto maintenance and whenever there was a serious breakdown my dad would always figure out how to fix it. Over time I became his assistant who held the flashlight, fetched wrenches, and kept an eye out for misplaced nuts and bolts. Maybe he was not an expert mechanic, but he knew enough to get a car running again, even if it required repeated adjustments and lots more swear words.

During his second tour in Korea, my mom used the Isetta to get around Hyattsville. She regularly drove with an extra adult passenger that put me and sometimes another small child crammed onto the rear deck behind the bench seat. She and my dad enjoyed the fun of driving an automobile and shared an enthusiasm for all cars, so many of their vehicles were chosen by her. And this first micro-car would not be her last.  Later when I became a driver, she passed down her small cars to me. The first was a VW convertible beetle and then a tiny 500cc Honda Z-coupe. In fact, I inherited her last car, a 2018 Honda Fit which I drive everyday now. It gets a frugal 40+ mpg which is not too bad, but nothing like the Isetta's mileage. 

After my dad returned in 1960 he was assigned to Fort Riley, Kansas and once again we travelled out to the west in a two-car hitch. We lived in three different homes there. The first was a rental house in nearby Junction City, Kansas and the next two were army quarters on post. In this picture my dad stands in front of the Isetta that is parked in a narrow garage drive at our second home. It was an older residence that was built with Kansas limestone blocks. It probably dated to the time of the Indian Wars of the 1870s when General George Armstrong Custer served there. All I remember is that it had bugs. Lots and lots of BUGS! Whenever we turned on a light in a dark room, hundreds of roaches would scatter.  

My dad has taken an uncharacteristic macho stance in this photo with a stern expression, that, to me, looks like he's about to scold someone for something. I think he drove the Isetta then as his daily work car which, not surprisingly, marked him for questionable scrutiny. One time his fellow officers played a prank on him by picking the Isetta up and carrying it into the lobby of  the post's officers' club. 

After three years there he got orders for Germany and after I finished third grade we set off to return to Hyattsville. The plan was for my mom and me to stay temporarily with my grandparents. I did half of fourth-grade there, and then in late December 1963 we flew to Frankfurt, Germany to join my dad. The Isetta was stored in a barn on my Uncle's farm near Frederick, Maryland. It wouldn't get started again until three years later when we returned to the US and moved to Newport News, Virginia near Fort Eustis, the headquarters of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps. 

By this time my dad had moved onto other cars. Due to its bad transmission which wouldn't stay fixed in Kansas, the old Dodge was replaced with a 1962 Pontiac station wagon which accompanied us to Germany. In 1969 he traded it in on a red Volkswagen camper van. This would the first of three VW vans that he owned. 

On our return to Virginia in 1967 my mom restarted her aspiration for a teaching career, so she picked out a sporty 1967 Volkswagen convertible. "Only $1 down!" reads the note on my dad's car list. Five years later I drove it during my first year at college until I learned an important lesson about not paying attention to traffic. I totaled the beetle in a front-end collision on an interstate exit ramp, but luckily its brakes and rear-engine design saved me from serious injury. Never assume anything when driving a car.

Since in 1967 I was still too young to drive, the little Isetta sat in our backyard under an old army tent. Ever the optimist, my dad still had a notion he could get it working again. So it was joined by a second Isetta, blue and white I think, that somehow my dad acquired "For Parts". When he got orders for Vietnam, he sold both Putt-Putts, probably to another army guy. The original one had 24,545 miles on the odometer. 

And that's why I have not one,
but two screw jacks and two manuals
for a 1959 BMW Isetta. 
All offers entertained.

Seriously, no reasonable offer refused.
I'll even throw in a free toy car.

Here is a German television commercial
promoting the BMW Isetta, 1955 - 1962.

It begins with the larger "sedan" size Isetta 600,
which had a side door that opened
to a second bench seat behind the driver.

And for a modern view of this remarkably fun car

here is short video of a restored Classic BMW Isetta.

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where time machines
get the best gas mileage.