A COLLEGE STORY

This is a car just like the one Mark Andersen drove in college, except his had four doors.  His future wife, Karen affectionately called it "Tweety Bird." 

The car was a Dodge Dart.  Mark said, “It overheated from the day we drove it home from the car dealer.  We had several things done to it, but it still overheated if you drove it too fast.”  

One year, Mark was at BYU in Utah, and Brian Andersen was at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah.  Brian's good friend, Gary Allred was also at BYU.

At the end of the school year, Mark and Gary drove to Snow College to pick up Brian, so they could all ride home together.  They pulled a small U-Haul trailer to get everyone’s gear in.  The car broke down and had nothing to do with the overheating problem.  It just happened that they were near where Gary Coates' parent's lived.  Gary's cousin, Rod Coates was a mechanic, so they had him work on the car.  Gary's parent's even let them take one of their cars to a neighboring city to pick up the part.  The three guys all stayed overnight with Gary's folks while the car was being repaired.

Then it was off toward California with a loaded car and trailer.  Tweety Bird didn’t like that and immediately started overheating.

In Mark's words, 

"If we went over about 35 miles per hour, it would start to boil over.  We called Dad to see what we should do.  He said he would get in his car right then and head toward Utah to meet us.  He drove 500 miles in the time it took us to drive 275 miles."

As Mark and I discussed this incident, we wondered how they found each other in Wells, Nevada. This was before cell phones.  Mark said maybe they both stopped at pay phones along the way and called Grandma Wilma Andersen, and she may have kept both "cars" informed on each other's location.   He doesn't really remember.

How did we get along without cell phones?