(first posted 12/14/2016) Welcome to Eugene. Feel free to stay on the bus, either literally or metaphorically. If it’s the former, no hard feelings; Eugene is not for everyone, and we’ll be back in fifteen minutes or so. But if you’re “On The Bus”, then let’s step out here in the center of downtown, also known as Kesey Square. That’s the statue of Ken Kesey, Eugene’s hometown cultural and literary hero, reading from his most famous book “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. And what’s that across the street? How serendipitous indeed: a vintage VW bus, the official transporter of Eugene. They do have a shared history, on several levels, but mostly in how they both pushed boundaries in their time.
Just like it’s usually impossible to identify the absolute source of a new design direction in cars, so it is with cultural trends. But Ken Kesey was something akin to, well, the VW bus. Like the Transporter borrowed heavily from the Beetle, but re-packaged its donor’s mechanicals into a creative, innovative and influential new shape, so Kesey borrowed from the Beat era of the fifties and transformed its fading intellectual energy into something new and highly influential. Kesey himself said: “I was too young to be a Beat, and too old to be a hippie”. Perhaps the VW bus could say it was too old to be a Beetle but too young to be a minivan.
The transformation of the Beetle into the Type 2 was the result of an outside agent: the Dutch VW importer Ben Pon. Visiting the factory in 1946 intending to buy Beetles, Pon saw an improvised open-bed parts mover that inspired him to draw a sketch of a van. With a little time and refinement, VW eventually put the Type 2 into production in 1949, and the world has never been quite the same.
There had never been anything remotely like the VW bus. The profound space efficiency of a box with the fundamental characteristics of a passenger car in an economical and well-built package was about as original and revolutionary as it gets in the automobile industry.
It’s modern, full width and length body was a dramatic departure from the norms of the times. It’s hard to overstate how rarely a truly revolutionary vehicle appears and is so instantly accepted, due to its overwhelming utility. Not only was it vastly more space efficient as a delivery van/transporter, which is what it was first to be conceived as.
But its ability to also transport 8+ adults for only a slight premium in cost and performance over a sedan made it indispensable in so many settings.
A vehicle with so much versatility had never been seen.
Its profound adaptability in so many roles make it difficult to pin down exactly what the VW Bus was or wasn’t. But its final and starring role as perhaps the greatest an icon of both practical transport and cultural transformation is undisputed.
In a curious (or not, as some might say) coincidence, Eugene’s status as the home of both Ken Kesey as well as VW buses was cemented early. This pictures shows some of the 20 VW buses that made up Eugene’s bus system in about 1960 or so, called the Emerald Transportation System. It was a driver-owned collective, formed in 1958 after the last private bus company went bankrupt. Undoubtedly some of these buses were recycled into genuine hippie buses after this noble effort finally petered out after some years.
Kesey, here leaning against a VW bus, also defies stereotyping. He spent most of his life on the family farm outside of Eugene, married his high school sweetheart (and stayed married to her until his death in 2001), and was a champion high school and college wrestler. He was transformed by an outside agent too: as a volunteer in a CIA-financed study at Stanford in 1959, he was exposed to numerous psychoactive drugs. His book “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” was based on his experiences working the night shift at Menlo Park Veteran’s Hospital, often under the influence of LSD or other psychotropics.
His early sixties “Acid Tests” on his rural spread in the Santa Cruz Mts. in the Bay Area were seminal events that spawned a cultural revolution. And the cross-country trip by the Merry Pranksters in his colorfully painted 1939 International school bus “Further” created a legend and was the basis for Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”. Not everyone may have an intrinsic sense of connection to Kesey or the hippie movement, but its deep and lasting effect can’t be disputed; we’re all eating organic food, concerned about the environment, and taking yoga classes now. Or will likely be eventually.
It’s no stretch to say that Further is the granddaddy of the whole VW hippie bus phenomena. The VW was the smallest and most economical scale bus with which tens of thousands launched their own personal Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests, generally pointing West, unlike Further’s original voyage east to spread the new gospel of the Bay Area.
By the late sixties, used and tired VW buses that had played another pioneering role as the first compact van in America were readily available. With a copy of John Muir’s seminal “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot” under the mattress in the back, where seats once ferried little old white haired ladies on outings in the church’s bus.
Those same sturdy pleated vinyl seats once ferried me and my family every year to our summer vacation in a village high in the Alps, thanks to the Innsbruck University Hospital’s 1953 “barn door” Kombi Bus, complete with driver. Here I am discussing its finer points speed with the driver, Herr Birkelbauer.
The “barn door” refers to the extra tall rear engine door that also had a shelf for the spare tire above the engine, a feature that was eliminated in about 1955, when the spare migrated to a compartment behind the front seat.
Did I say engine? From today’s perspective, the early VW bus engines simply defy our standards of what that implies. The earliest buses used the same 1100cc 25 DIN hp as the Beetle. The key as always was in the gearing: the Type 2 used the reduction gears that hang from the end of the swing axles that the Type 81 Kübelwagen used with great success during WWII. After 1953, the 1200 cc boxer with 36/30 (gross/net) hp powered this and most of the fifties and early sixties Buses.
I have vivid memories of watching the ground move by ever so slowly, as the Hospital’s bus worked its way up the final steep pull to Ladis, in second gear. First was just something to get the most heavily loaded bus to overcome the initial inertia, hardly faster than a walking gait. Fourth topped out at about 45-48 mph for the 25 hp version, and 50 mph for the 30 hp 1200, on absolutely level ground.
Not to shoehorn in on Ken Kesey, but it seems like my life and the VW Bus’ are highly intertwined too: My earliest memories are of black over red buses in Austria in the fifties. In Iowa, German friends of ours with two children took my whole family (of six) on a memorable outing in their Westfalia, and I rode in the compartment over the engine. Much roomier than the little luggage well in the Beetle I used to get dropped into as a toddler. Or did I share it with my brother? Ten people, one Westfalia: previews of coming attractions, squeezed into the bowels of Buses. And loving it.
And then, there was the Smokemobile, a 1965 Bus that a fresh-out-of-college high school teacher who allowed his sophomore class to commandeer for rolling smoke breaks in the neighborhood around Loyola HS in 1968. The Smokemobile was the second car I ever drove, and the first with a stick shift, at a rather unusual location: on the grounds of the Maryland School for the Blind, on a Wednesday night, after our community service work there. Next thing I knew, I was driving it all over the place (without a license). Some teachers just don’t know where to draw the line with their students.
One of the odd characteristics of the first generation bus was to watch its rear end lift as it did its facsimile of acceleration, mainly in first gear, just like a BMW motorcycle. An artifact of the reduction gears, it provided a visual counterpoint to the usual rear-end squat of automotive acceleration. It was one of those definitive quirks that added to the Bus’ eccentricity and personality. If you can’t accelerate, you might as well lift up your ass to the world.
Even in our preppy button downs, ties, suits and Weejuns, and having only a faint awareness of Kesey, I knew the the Smokemobile was eminently cool. It primed me for my own departure from Towson a few days after my 18th birthday, even if that was with the power of the thumb instead of a bus. How I wished it were so; achingly so. Actually owning a bus in those days was like having a McMansion in the nineties: instant status within a group that tried so hard to reject that concept.
I won’t bore you with my experience in VW buses during my freewheeling rambling days; five years, actually. But lets just say that when hitchhiking during that period, one’s mood always jumped a bit when that distinctive shape appeared down the road a ways. The odds were mighty high that it would slowly ease over, the double doors would pop open, and welcoming faces from within beckoned. There was always room for one more on the bus. And the whine of the engine and reduction gears were the signal that another adventure was about to begin: “Hey; we’re heading for Big Sur; wanna’ to come?”
Forgive my random ramblings, but then that’s what VW buses are all about though. Before we end, I should point out that although the VW bus is the spiritual transporter of Eugene, its presence in the daily streetscape has dropped off considerably.
Lousy gas mileage, poor performance, and don’t even ask about the emissions from the few hard core drivers still plying the streets. That’s not to say they’re rare either, and I already had several in the can. But for some reason, I kept holding back. My first CC bus needed context. There’s more than enough on the back of this one, even if it is now a bit out of date.
So when I finally stumbled upon this one on Kesey Square, I knew it was the one. And contrary to stereotypes, it wasn’t driven by an old hippie. I was heartened to see this nice Westfalia camper being driven by a cheerful young woman. Although I shouldn’t have been, I was still a bit surprised when I looked into the rear of her bus: a crucifix, with an effigy mounted to it. Her artist mother made it, and it was being transported, of course. Well, it all makes perfect sense somehow, as long as you’re on the bus.
Postscript: This may have been my first ode to the VW bus, but it’s hardly my last. Here’s some of the others, and related material.
CC 1960 VW Bus: On The Road and On The Bus (Hanna’s Road Trip Bus) PN
CC 1961 VW Transporter: A Rolling, Hard-Working, Living-History Mobile PN
Auto-Biography: The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxie 500 PN
Alter-Auto-Biography: 1971 Ford Econoline- Van Of A Lifetime PN
Oh they live. 🙂
We passed this one on I10 from Phoenix to L.A. in the Palm Sprngs area in 2011.
Saw one going south on I-25 between Albuquerque and Los Lunas on the second weekend of September 2016. He was pushing it along and showing it no mercy! Not sure of the year.
Wicked! I also think the older license plate in an odd location is neat as is the “Hire a Vet” sticker.
In my part of the world, road salt ate just about all of them. Every now and then, one will pop up around here………..stored away or imported from a more metal friendly climate.
I still travel a lot for work and as such, now and then I’ll see a surviving example either parked somewhere or as a real treat, motoring down the road.
Great, now I’m gonna have Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant” stuck in my head all day! – Seriously though, nice write-up Paul.
My dad had 2 of those, a 61 VW Westfalia, and a 67 passenger van much like the Green and white one above. Ours was blue and white. I remember the 67 better, because we spent our summers touring Europe, and sleeping in it.
My grandfather Shafer bought a new one in 1959 for a mail route. It worked great for that.
Rare is the time I see one now; the last one I remember seeing was in Arkansas back in October. A badge on it said “Busaru” so I figured that and how it was accelerating meant it had had a Subaru heart transplant.
You’ve given a nice taste of what the VW bus experience was.
Wasnt the Westphalia a camper conversion? that looks like a standard Kombi, theres a few around here there is an active club for VWs a friend has a 66 split screen still has reduction hubs so its fairly slow even with a 1600 engine top speed is about 60mph and hills frighten it.
Kesey’s bus was named ‘Furthur.’
I’d say that pic above spells it “Further”. (FWIW, Kesey used to come in to the John Deere store where I worked in the early Nineties.)
I was going to write a funny comment about how not everyone from Oregon is a hippie and then I realized I was smoking a bowl. ?
It’s probably a conversion. possibly a Sundial. The Westphalia’s had louvered windows, the conversions kept the stock windows. I owned a ’66 Sundial conversion and it had the windows like in this van.
Brother back in the day had a ’56 panel van which I helped him replace the 36 hp engine with a ’53 25 hp Beetle engine with a $75.00 junkyard engine around 1970. We indeed used the idiot book as our guide. It could hit 60, according to the speedometer (just) if completely flat, but lost speed rapidly on any sort of incline. It had no seats or anything else in the back, so was probably was light as they got.
We never used a floorjack to change engines, just 2X4’s and a lot of muscle using 2 or sometimes 3 people.
I did some extended traveling with friends in a bus in the early 70’s and it was a pleasant experience, as long as you weren’t in a hurry, and weren’t getting blown around by big trucks, and it wasn’t cold enough to need the heater, and if you weren’t in hilly country. Oh, and you had to turn to the music up real loud because of the noise, but we’d have probably done that anyhow.
Kesey also wrote ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’, made into a decent movie with Henry Fonda and Paul Newman. Great book.
Wasn’t the bus in the story embedded in the original The Whole Earth Catalogue named Urge?
I passed a Orange pop top camper buzzing along out on the Texas plains 2 weeks ago. It looked to be in very good condition (restored no doubt) with California tags heading south.
There is another pop top camper a couple of streets over from where I live, it looks to be due for restoration.
There are few vehicles that have this many facets to their personality. Engineering? Utility? Interesting backstory? And cultural icon, both to young families and to hippie culture.
There is something about the styling of these early buses that just made us love them. It is funny, but even though they were around in decent numbers in my midwestern youth, I don’t ever recall riding in one of the early ones. The Mrs., on the other hand, rode in these *a lot* as her father ran an independent VW service business back then.
Thank you Paul!
A 1960 factory built VW camper was my first (that my folks knew about) vehicle.
All those windows, all those windows that opened. Goggles for when the windshield
was open. Why yes, those windows were open to let the smoke out.
The last engines VW built, Brazil IIRC, would have worked wonders in one of these
rigs. The only real problem was the missing 25 HP.
And mine came with a crank. Not a crankshaft but a crank to start the engine when
the driver got stoned and left the lights on. Handy.
The whole air cooled VW fleet just needed to evolve, the engines and computer systems we have today would make them a winner today.
Peoples Car Indeed
Interesting local history.
Is may just be me, but when I look at the statue photo without expanding it, Mr. Kesey’s beret looks like hair – Donald Trump’s hair.
Around 35 years ago, a friend of mine, who was a Corvair nut, took the engine from my ’61 Corvair Lakewood station wagon – which had unfortunately been totalled – and put it in his 70-something VW camper bus – with the pop up top. He added a few performance touches to the ‘vair powerplant ( I can’t remember what exactly after all these years). He purchased a kit that allowed the entire Corvair drivetrain to be mounted – including the Powerglide. He and I and another guy drove it to Canada on a camping trip. It was pretty fun to drive.
My uncle Bob brought a VW bus home from England . He was in the Air Force It did not
take him very long to dump it and haul his many children around in a 63 Chev Biscayne
wagon. My Dad said that he’d burned up about four engines in that bus
Any Child of the 50’s or 60’s oughta remember this sight : .
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To – day in my back yard =8-) .
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-Nate
Great post – superb picture of the square with the VW in the background…
Yes, they are truly time capsules. I found my ’58 Sundial bus out in the woods where I live in Alaska. She was tipped over and 30 year old spruce trees had surrounded her for her long nap. She’s now back on the road making new adventures. Maybe our paths will cross someday and we can share a campfire.
It took a certain outlook to like a VW bus. You had to have a certain attitude. Laid back and not in a hurry, you’d get there, anywhere, eventually. That was in such contrast to the average driver’s mentality, which was always in a hurry.
In some ways they remind me of my Harleys, which were great for settling into a mellow pace on the road. Opposed to the road warrior attitude of my Japanese Superbikes which always made me feel that I had to ride faster.
Nothing says happy childhood memories like having Dad read you “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” at bedtime.
It would be like being Shirley Jackson’s kid and having her read “The Lottery” before lights-out, right?
With at least the better engines, 1500/1600, you could be in a hurry, sort of, and do it. The problem was, the buses didn’t like to do that. They would, but not for all that long. They ran hot, ok, what does the temp gauge say? Oh, there isn’t one. But it’s not boiling over, right? Of course not, it’s aircooled. Doesn’t mean it can’t run hot or overheat, just that you won’t know until it’s too late. Do 55 and it will last a while. Do 75 (1600, maybe) and it won’t.
While a way cool machine, it was far better delivering 1800 pounds of whatever at 35MPH in urban Europe, than trying to do 75 MPH in united states desert in July.
Trust me, I know.
On the other hand were the multitudes that used these as beasts of burden across America fully loaded and in my case flat towing another VW and never had any problems .
German cars are very particular about how they’re maintained ~ tune them sharply and keep a weather eye on the oil level and you’ll be fine .
This who had problems invariably were either out of tune or worse, were missing critical air flow control bits, always saying ‘of, that’s not important’ and then blaming the car after they beat it to death .
-Nate