A few car pics, and some memories.
There are cars we come across that flood our memories at first sight. The connection is immediate; the result of a deep personal relationship. Maybe it was a family car or that of a close friend or relative; with many rides to remember. Other times there are cars one has bonded with, but the details are fuzzy and distant. For me, such is the case with the Volvo 122S (Amazon). And this nicely preserved one unlocked some tightly guarded memories. Recollections from some sweet honey days. Literally.
Not that I had forgotten about my relationship with the 122S. I had always liked the model and knew of it since an early age. After all, one belonged to a friend of Dad’s with an eclectic taste in cars. A type of character that appears in just about everyone’s lives.
In our case, it was Ivan. A coworker of Dad’s with whom he constantly tried to start business farming ventures. As for Ivan, I only have vague recollections of him and his family. What I don’t have trouble with is picturing his car stable: first and foremost, a Volvo 122S, the family car. Then a VW thing, followed by a mighty Jeep Comanche whose brutal 4×4 force was indelibly printed in my mind in one of Dad’s outings (a story for another day).
Any old Volvo 122S always brings to mind Ivan, immediately. No surprises there. And I was quite glad to come across this rather nice one over the weekend, sitting rather pretty on a rare undercast day. Not many of these are around in these lands. Not by fault of the cars themselves, but mostly because they were never that common to begin with. Yet, their survival rate is high. A testament that ‘Amazons’ in the tropics performed just as well as they did up North.
But as I took the pictures, some deeply buried memories started to emerge. Did I have some sweet memories attached to the 122S I had forgotten about?
Very sweet memories, it turned out. The old Volvo was taking me back to the honey harvesting days of my teen years, about which I remember little. I do have general sketches and impressions in my mind, but it’s like putting together pieces of a past life. I remember the hot weather in the claustrophobic adobe house where we worked, the exhausting labor, and the down-to-earth demeanor of the folk around me. It was a particularly peculiar enterprise of Dad and Ivan (and they had their share), one to which my brother and I got dragged into from the beginning.
And so, for a few months in the mid-80s, Mom, Brother, and I traveled to the bee farm by the countryside to meet Dad and Ivan, who were already at work. As city kids, the trips were quite an experience, as all seemed rather alien to us. To visit the Salvadorian countryside was to discover life in the most rustic of forms (something that hasn’t changed much since). Of course, that was part of the interest of Dad’s; to show us a simpler mode of life.
It was during my teen years, in those trips with Dad, that I started to come to grips with the stark contrasts of living in the tropics. City dwellers prided themselves on the modernity of their shops, wide boulevards, and concrete buildings. Yet, any bit of land left on its own would turn into a jungle if left alone for a short while. And no matter how much we wanted to delude ourselves, nature was all around us, even in the city. Lurking, ready to sprout again. Filthy and contaminated, perhaps. But there, at easy reach.
And is that mix of rustic and modernity that’s played in my head ever since. And Salvadorian dwellings, in the city and in the countryside, are a clashing mix of the two to this day. Even if I had to admit that the ones in the countryside win on the charm department.
Back to Dad and Ivan. There are few things as nice as tasting fresh honey or chewing on a honeycomb stuffed with honey. That was the easiest thing to attain in the bee farm. And while the idea of being stung terrified my brother and me at the start, it never occurred (I would remember that). Admittedly, we never got close to the beehives on the outside. That was the beekeeper’s work. What we were there to do, and to help Dad with, was to process the honey. And that’s where the sweet fantasy world ended.
Talking about the clashing of the rural with the modern, Dad and Ivan’s honey harvesting had a lot of that. The final part of their process involved filtering the honey through a strange contraption of Dad’s. Some kind of gravity pressure concept, that didn’t really work. So instead of gravity pulling the honey through a fabric filter as he envisioned, human hands had to squeeze -hard- the honey to make it pass through. And that’s where my brother and I got involved.
It was grueling work. Particularly for a couple of teens more interested in rock music and whatever TV show was popular at that time. The Knight Rider, probably.
So instead of the precious moment Dad had imagined with his two sons, chatting away, enjoying honey harvesting in a postcard-perfect image; the reality was two irked teens who kept hiding away from work. Not that there were many places to hide on that farm. But we did try, believe me.
But well, the Volvo 122S was part of those days, usually parked next to Mom’s Hyundai pickup in front of the bee farm. I don’t recall Ivan ever complaining about his Volvo, and as I said earlier, looks like these Scandinavian wonders worked as nicely in the tropics as they did elsewhere.
Curiously, this one happens to be a gray import from the US; with a Volvoville badge from Amityville, NY. That might explain its rather original condition and the lack of curious embellishments our locals are fond of. That said, I wonder what this one’s story is. It is not like these Volvos are rare over here. Maybe someone who didn’t want to suffer the restoration process?
Here’s another one, captured about two years ago in a curious local museum about which I already talked about. And this one has the very same green tone Ivan’s used to have. None of that fancy two-tone schmancy nonsense.
My teenage self might have rejected the honey-harvesting life, but thankfully, I developed no ill will to honey or Volvos. Both of which I enjoy very much. And as life makes us a little wiser over time -or kills us while attempting to do so- I got involved with some of Dad’s later endeavors, and have rather nice memories of those. Let this text and 122S images be a testament to those mended ways.
Further reading:
The VOVO (as it says on its bonnet) brought back farm memories for me too.
If both parents were working during school holidays when we were pre teens we would go to ‘Aunties’ farm. She wasn’t actually related but parents friends were all Aunty or Uncle.
Their car was a Volvo 120, but I remember very little about it. I do remember asking my dad why the Volvo and our VW 1500 notchback had rear reflectors separate from the actual tail lights, still don’t have an answer apart from because they are.
Nice car, and an even nicer story about your youth. But if the car is indeed a US import, it’s not quite original, I think. The grilles and slotted wheels are from the 1965 refresh, which also included revised badging (missing on this car) and all-new seats (which I can’t see in the photos). But I’ve never seen a ’65 or newer 122S with two-tone paint.
EDIT: I just looked more closely … the front hood Volvo lettering, in gold, and the script B18 (engine) badge on the grill are pre-1965. So it could be an older car that was originally two tone.
Teens will put out and work if they’re getting paid, but man, do they not like to work like this for the general (but somehow abstract to them) benefit of the family.
I had a good friend in 7th grade whose mom drove a 122 wagon; she was a bit ahead of the times in terms of suburban moms driving Volvo wagons.
I am not sure of that. My dad convinced me that hard, manual labour was good for the character. To whit, I did most of the work on our hobby farm. I fell trees, bucked up logs and split wood at the age of `14. I also did volunteer work until I realised I could charge for my time!
When I left home at age 19, dad sold the hobby farm because his free labour source had left.
In London UK about 15 years ago I bought a ’67 122S which had been slightly customised, having a mid ’50s Chevrolet (I think) grille and slightly modified wings to give it more of an American look I suppose. I normally like my classics to be original but I didn’t mind the look of this. Enjoyed driving it for a few years but then sold to fund my ’55 Citroen TA Commerciale which is still going strong
photos didn’t load ?
and a shot of the front
trying again
Try reducing the photo size. If a photo is 1,200 pixels or less in the bigger dimension, it should load here.
The Volvo 122 I remember was driven by a family friend who loved Volvos. He had a lot of them through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Their 122 was that Grey Poupon mustard color that was popular for fifteen minutes. Since we saw them more than once weekly, I knew a lot about them growing up. Having an uncommon imported car was pretty common growing up surrounded by Post-WWII dad born in Europe and then coming over to Chicago. Swedes, Dutch, Norwegian, German, all those cars were being driven by blue collar dads of the kids I grew up with. Volvo was one of those.
I like your take on Savadorean nature. Even in the old brownfields around Chicago, where once sat gargantuan steel mills, rail yards, and chemical plants, the wilderness has creeped back into once, heavily urban areas. I remember my dad, who worked the third shift for Ford, telling incredulous neighbors that he saw deer near the Calumet Expressway. He swore he saw deer all the time late at night. Well, as Cook Country bought out farmland and let it return to nature, we ended up seeing lots of nature returning to the South Suburbs and the brownfields around Wolf Lake. Nature will return even after having been banned for a century of pollution. It’s good.
Thanks for the peek back into your teenage years Rich, and of course the lovely Volvo too. Based on your descriptions, El Salvador and Sri Lanka have a fair bit in common, especially the urban/rural divide.
Thanks Eric, have resized and trying again
Thanks Eric, have resized
and the front view
and the rear, I only seem to be able to post 1 photo at a time
Nice car, especially the two tone .
My late father in law had a 1965 (IIRC) Volvo Amazon 122 in Guatemala City, C.A., I never did find out the back story on it but he had the engine rebuilt and the pistons were $100 each, serious $ for a blue collar guy over 50 .
It also had a single VW Bug carb in lieu of the dual SU’s it originally came with, the intake manifold was crudely cobbled up by a local welder .
It seemed in okay shape, the windshield and backlight grommets were perished, his solution was to drill holes in the rear foot wells where the rain water puddled .
I remember these being very stout and good in the snow Down East where I grew up .
-Nate
A co-worker had left El Salvador in the 70’s, I got to know him later. His family was pretty well to do, they owned a coffee plantation, he would tell me stories about pay day, they had a building where workers were paid, but the paymaster would have to be unpredictable when to go there else the threat of being robbed of the payroll was ever present. He would go back to visit his mother but she would never know when he’d show up, apparently there were people he’d rather not see that would be looking out for him to return (and this 30 or more years after he originally left). Never having lived in such a place but I have no doubt that his stories were true.
Don’t think he owned a Volvo, but he was into cars, he owned a Dodge minivan with the 5 speed…when it went (think it broke a gear) he had a hard time finding a replacement in the US.