Darby Milnor of Hoffman Estates has the bug. So does Wilma Growney of South Barrington, Dan Kirkpatrick of Rockford and Shell Tomlin of North Aurora.
They all have the Volkswagen “Bug.”
Among them they own 10 Beetles:
– Milnor has four-a 1964 convertible, a 1966 sedan, a 1971 Superbeetle and a 1978 convertible, to complement his pair of VW Kharmann Ghias.
– Growney, who bought her first Bug in 1966, also has four, including two her children drive.
– Kirkpatrick and Tomlin have only one each right now, but they have owned seven or eight between them over the years.
The four are typical of a small but diehard breed of auto owners who remain loyal to the car designed by Ferdinand Porsche and championed by Adolf Hitler.
Ask why they hold such an allegiance to the Beetle, and they offer up a variety of responses.
“It’s unique and economical, and just a darling car,” Growney said.
“It’s cheap and simple,” Tomlin added, “and really fun to drive.”
“I grew up with the Beetle,” said Milnor, who is 30. “My sister and grandfather had them, and my father always had one as a second car. It was my first car and my only car. Today, I could drive any car, but I prefer my Bug.”
Adding to the appeal is the increasing rarity of the Beetle, which has not been sold new in this country since 1979.
The cars still are made in Mexico, where the 21millionth Beetle rolled off the assembly line last year, and in Brazil, where production resumed last year after a seven-year hiatus.
The return of the Beetle to Brazil, where it is known as the Fusca, gave a glimmer of hope that the car might be brought back to this country, especially because there was talk that the Brazilian cars would be exported to Germany, which has stricter emissions standards than the U.S. But, alas, for Beetle lovers, that will not be.
“There is absolutely no chance of it returning to this market,” said Maria Leonhauser, spokeswoman for Volkswagen of America, in Auburn Hills, Mich. “The engineering of the car produced in Mexico and Brazil is geared only to those countries,” she added, referring to less stringent emission control standards there.
That said, Growney, Milnor, Kirkpatrick, Tomlin and countless other Beetle aficionados are preserving their Bugs.
Growney does so through her association with Milnor, service director of Autobarn Ltd., a Volkswagen/Subaru dealer in Highland Park. Milnor has serviced all of her Beetles.
Milnor, Kirkpatrick and Tomlin also tap into a nationwide network of Beetle owners through the Volkswagen Club of America, headquartered in North Aurora.
Tomlin is president of the club, which boasts 12 chapters and more than 2,000 members, including Beetle owners in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan and the U.S.
Kirkpatrick is the president of the Stateline Volks Folks of Rockford, one of the organization’s chapters that serves northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin with members in Chicago and Milwaukee.
Club meetings and conventions give Volkswagen owners a chance to trade not only stories, but also VW parts.
“When you drive cars that are, on the average, 20 to 30 years old, you keep extra parts,” Kirkpatrick said, helping explain why a parts swap meet was one of the highlights of the club’s annual national convention last summer in Orlando.
Milnor, a member of the Stateline Volks Folks, takes full advantage of trading opportunities. “My 1966 was restored by trading parts with other club members,” he said. “A friend of mine has a split-window VW, a 1953 model. He restored it the same way, by trading.” Milnor said that the Bug’s rear window was made up of two openings, thus the split, until March of ’53, when the oval window was adopted.
In addition to owning Beetles, Milnor is something of a Volkswagen historian. He said the Bug’s lineage dates to designs produced by Porsche in 1934.
“They started building prototype models in 1935, and by 1938, the car was taking shape in a form we recognize today,” Milnor said. “I have a clipping from a Chicago newspaper (the Daily Times) dated June 3, 1938, and it shows a photo of a car that anyone would recognize as the Beetle.”
He added that the accompanying story stated that Hitler wanted the new German autobahn to be “black with Volkswagens.”
But the Beetle suffered a major setback when the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, was destroyed by Allied bombers in World War II.
After the war, a German engineer named Heinz Nordhoff assumed control of Volkswagen and helped put the company back on its feet. The first post-war Beetles were built from parts dug out from the rubble of the wrecked factory.
According to Walter Henry Nelson’s 1965 biography of the Beetle, “Small Wonder,” the first Volkswagens exported to the U.S. met with skepticism and scorn. Just two were sold in America in 1949, the first year the car was offered here.
But interest in exotic foreign autos soared in the 1950s, and soon the Volkswagen didn’t seem so strange. A decade after the first Beetles arrived on U.S. soil, the cars were selling to Americans at a rate of 150,000 a year.
Sales continued to grow throughout the ’60s. “In 1968, Volkswagen sold 399,674 Beetles in the U.S.,” Milnor said. “That was their peak sales year in the U.S., and also the first year Volkswagen made available an automatic transmission, which was actually a combination of a manual and automatic transmission.”
By then, Beetles had become the ultimate symbol of reverse snobbery, according to Nelson’s book. They were driven by the likes of Britain’s Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden, Charles Lindbergh and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Actor Paul Newman, who bought his first Beetle in the early ’50s, appeared in Volkswagen ads in 1968. And John Lennon became the Beatle with the Beetle.
In the early 1970s, more than 300,000 Beetles still were being sold yearly in the U.S. That popularity helped the Bug reach total sales of more than 15 million worldwide in 1972, when it overtook the Model T as the top-selling automobile of all time, a distinction it still holds.
But trouble was looming. Toyota, Datsun (now Nissan) and other Japanese carmakers began whittling away at Volkswagen sales figures. And in the mid-’70s, the bottom dropped out of the VW market in this country, with Beetle sales dropping to 78,412 in 1975.
Contributing to the swift decline was the equally rapid rise in the car’s price, which rose by more between 1970 and 1973-when they went to $2,299 from $1,839-than they had in the car’s previous 21 years in the U.S. At its U.S. debut in ’49, the Beetle sedan sold for $1,480 and the convertible cost $1,997.
By 1977, the Beetle was marked up to $3,699 and annual sales dropped to approximately 12,000. That year, Volkswagen quietly stopped selling the Beetle sedan in the U.S., though the convertible was continued for another two years.
The final sticker, in 1979, read $6,170.
Much of the price hike was due to increasingly stringent U.S. emission controls and safety standards, Milnor said. “To meet safety standards, they had to change the seats (to make them more rigid to the floor, according to U.S.-mandated crash standards, so they would remain in place in frontal collisions) and install collapsible steering columns, among other things,” he said. “They also had to add emission-control devices.
“It became economically infeasible to equip what was essentially a 40-year-old car to 1970s and ’80s standards,” he added.
No hard and fast figures exist on the number of Beetles still on U.S. roads. Milnor said he has heard estimates of as many as a quarter of a million. “And there are undoubtedly thousands more sitting in garages, unregistered and undriven,” he said.
Growney’s four Beetles are a red 1971 sedan, a teal blue 1975 sedan she shares with her college-age son, a 1978 white convertible that her daughter drives and a 1979 white convertible she reserves for herself.
“The only member of the family who doesn’t drive a Beetle is my husband,” she said with a laugh. “He drives a Lincoln Town Car.”
She and her husband paid $1,500 cash for their first Beetle in 1966, a stripped-down model that didn’t have a radio.
“We were newly married and just wanted a really economical car,” she said. “Ever since, there’s been a continuous stream of Volkswagens in our family.”
Growney’s affection for the car is not unusual, Kirkpatrick said. “I don’t know too many VW owners who can stop at just one. They drive one and keep the others garaged.”
Kirkpatrick should know. Though he waited until the early 1980s to buy his first Beetle, he has owned “four or five” since. He’s down to one, he said, because “every time I get my hands on one, someone makes me an offer for it.”
Barring a change in direction from Volkswagen of America, there will continue to be a finite-and diminishing-number of Beetles available in this country. But Growney would like to make sure she always has at least a couple.
“I’d like to own VW Beetles forever,” she said. “There’s a real romance to them, and besides, they’re a part of our family.
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For more information on the Volkswagen Club of America, contact the club at P.O. Box 154, Dept. T, North Aurora, Ill. 60542.
