Stories:The Goddard Auto Club

Author: Charles Dickson (C3PO)
Ever since getting my first used car, I've fixed up a lot of crappy old cars. A lot of them I intentionally got to fix up and sell, others were "free" cars from people that I knew who had heard that I would take old run-down cars and keep them going. I've had so many crappy old cars registered, that one time when I was at the MVA the lady at the counter was looking through my record on the computer and after scrolling through the list of titles in my name for a while she said "You sure have had a lot of cars."
When I was working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in 1990, somebody who knew about my habit said that they had seen a bunch of old cars parked around a building on the edge of the base, and I should go and check it out. It turned out to be one of the employee clubs on base, the Goddard Auto Club. Back in 1972 a bunch of employees had gotten permission to build a 3-bay cinderblock garage on base, complete with lifts and various useful tools like a tire mounter and balancer, oil collection tanks, etc. I promptly joined this club and embarked on a decades-long lifestyle of working on my cars there. 
There was a safety rule that you couldn't work out at the garage alone, so I often got Vygis to come out with me, particularly for late-night or overnight projects. He loved it because while I was working on whatever project I had, he could pull his car into one of the other bays and spend the entire time doing his own work. Generally, my projects were so long and inconvenient that I owed him plenty for all the times that he came out to keep me company, so if he ever wanted to go to the Auto Club just to work on his own car, our roles would be reversed, and I'd go to hang out with him whenever he requested it. As he was a non-employee of GSFC this was of course against one of the central rules of the club, but we really didn't care.
At one point, the Auto Club acquired a club president who, unlike all previous officers, took a strong interest in fixing the place up, maintaining it, promoting the club and actively recruiting new members. He was a ridiculous PITA, but he also saved the garage on more than one occasion, because the base had gotten the impression that nobody was taking care of the place and at one point had slated it for demolition. When some bureaucratic snafu required us to update the electrical service to the garage, that guy went and got all the supplies himself and roped in volunteers to pull wire through conduit. We painted the place, fixed the roof, installed a new compressor, built a shed. Through all of these projects, Vygis often showed up to volunteer, until the club president had to acknowledge that he would overlook his non-member continual use of the facility, and often referred to him as an "honorary" member.
The GAC allowed for "retirees" to continue to be members, so when I quit from GSFC in 1991, Vygis and I just kept on going to the garage. It was quite a scam, I could get into the base as a "retiree" GAC member, and then I would sign Vygis in as a "guest" (remember that this was on a government base). The security guards there were by an large sleeping through their jobs, but there was one guy who noticed what was happening, and decided (justifiably) to put a stop to it. Naturally, this simply enlivened the game for us. Now, whenever we hopped into our vehicles and headed to Goddard, Vygis would hang back while I checked out who was at the sign-in desk at the main gate. If it was the "Bad Guard," we would have to cool our heels somewhere for an hour or two. The guards at GSFC would always rotate their stations several times a night, so by the time we came back the sign-in desk would be staffed by one of the more unconcerned officers from whom I could get the guest badge without a second glance. I think that once the Bad Guard even caught us out at the garage and made Vygis leave, although a few nights later we got in again. 
We kept this up through our Bum Life years, and even after getting respectable jobs and houses. Once my wife and I started having kids though, the time for late night car repairs ended for me. I sold off the last of my junkers and got cars that were, for me at least, relatively new. Vygis continued to lack the lavish funds necessary to maintain his high-milage vehicles any way other than DIY, so from around 2008 onward the only reason we went to the GAC was for his repairs, although our visits got fewer and fewer. Vygis would remind me pointedly of how many months had elapsed since he'd last been able to change his oil on the lift, or of an approaching Tour, or of the abysmal condition of his suspension, and we'd go out to the garage one more time. By 2012 I'd let my membership lapse and Vygis had gotten his practically brand-new white Honda which needed very little work. The Oldsmobile ran by that point, he had it parked behind his new house, and he would occasionally bring the Gold Honda to work on in my driveway in Laurel. I'm not sure how we would have handled actually restoring the Olds or any of the other impossible car projects he had stacked up around several Maryland counties, and I guess we'll never know.
Category:Stories
Category:Author:Charles Dickson
Category:Nicknames:C3PO