Life Sketches by Terry Berkson

Crusing at 80 MPH with Aunt Ruta

I once took a trip from Brooklyn to Richfield Springs with my Aunt Ruta riding shotgun in my ’63 red roadster.

“Nice little car,” she said when I picked her up at Grand Central Station to drive her home. “But this seat is like sitting in a hole!”

“That’s the idea,” I said.

My previous ride had been a ’55 Ford, which had been giving me a lot of trouble. In fact, for several months I had been under it more than in it. While looking for a reliable and affordable replacement, like a Volkswagen, I tripped over the Corvette and fell in love. In need of some mechanical attention, it was selling for only $1,250.00 which, back in 1968, was a good buy. My dad lent me the money and dismissed the debt when I had paid half back. Over the years the car has proved to be quite reliable.

We left the city to take the Taconic Parkway to the “Rip Fan Vinkle Buddige” as Aunt Ruta called it. Later, we passed through Middleburg and Cobleskill and smaller towns like Preston Hollow and Lawyersville. I’d been making this trip so often that the Corvette almost knew its way by heart. Aunt Ruta had mapped out the course years before. There were no tolls except for the bridge crossing the Hudson.

She couldn’t get around that expense. “I’m not stingy,” she’d say, her small bright eyes twinkling in a squished up wrinkled face. “Just turifty.”

Her husband, Uncle William, had died several years before. In the fall she closed up her house for the winter, stayed with her son in California, and was now ready to live in Richfield Springs again. I had been elected to meet her at the train and chauffer her home. This was usually my dad’s job, but after 45 years of ferrying people around New York City, he and his taxi were now retired.

At this time I was attending Brooklyn College on the G.I. Bill and was supposed to be studying for a dreaded science exam. Aunt Ruta was a spry old lady then, a real motor mouth for the whole trip. When she wasn’t commenting on the countryside or gossiping or prying into my personal life, she was breaking wind and dripping gobs of her chicken salad sandwich onto my roadster’s black leather seats. It was hard to concentrate on the road. I thought driving faster might shut her up for awhile, so I nudged the accelerator toward the floor.

At 80 miles an hour we were passing everything in sight. The Vette was built to cruise at high speed and wind around the rising and falling parkway curves. Aunt Ruta stopped talking and slipped her hand around the grab bar. She was quiet for a long time, but out of the corner of my eye I saw that she was trying to read something on my dash gauges. The speedometer, I figured. She didn’t want me to notice her concern.

We rushed past scores of cars, eating them up like a hungry Pac-Man. I was sure she was looking in disbelief at the tachometer, which read 35. She was a spirited old lady and proud of her nerve. Uncle William’s cars never had tachometers. My speedometer, which she couldn’t see, was holding at 80 miles per hour. I acted very relaxed and took one hand off the wheel.

Aunt Ruta craned her neck toward the instruments on the dashboard as I goosed the gas pedal.

“How fast are we going?” she asked finally.

“35,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Your Uncle William used to do 50!”

Terry Berkson’s articles have appeared in “New York” magazine, “Automobile” magazine and many others. His memoir, “Corvette Odyssey,” has received many good reviews: “highly recommended with broad appeal,” says “Library Journal.”