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It was a grand idea: Mass-produce a car that almost everyone could afford. A family car, a people’s car — it would hold two adults and two kids plus have decent luggage space with speeds up to 60 mph. The plan of a kind and benevolent individual? No, that was Adolf Hitler’s plan.
Hitler approved the design proposed by Ferdinand Porsche, an Austrian automotive engineer. In 1937, the German government formed the automobile manufacturing company that was to be managed by a Nazi organization called the German Labour Front. A new factory was started in 1938, but before the people got their first car, Hitler had invaded Poland. The new factory began to produce military equipment and vehicles.
Two of those vehicles were the Kubelwagen, a Jeep-like vehicle, and the Schwimmwagen, an amphibious vehicle. During World War II, more than 12,000 prisoners of war were working at the factory. The Allied forces bombed the Volkswagen factory and left it in ruins. After the war, the British government was responsible for the Volkswagen plant and tried to sell it, then give what was left of the facility and company to the U.K., U.S. or French auto companies, but there were no takers.
Volkswagen was reorganized under the West German government in 1948, and the recovery started. Car sales were booming in America, so in 1949, the first VW “Beetle” (or “Bug”) was exhibited in this country, but only two were sold. U.S. sales greatly improved when the Volkswagen Group of America was formed in 1955, but it was the 1959 advertising campaign, “Think Small” by Doyle Dane Bernbach, that made VW a major U.S. player, and suddenly the country was infested with Bugs.
Walnut Creek resident Grant Reiling bought this issue’s 1952 VW Bug convertible in 1986. VW had sold just two cars in this country three years earlier, and Reiling’s car has pretty much the same specifications as the one designed as the original “People’s Wagon.” It has the original 25-horsepower motor with a four-speed manual transmission and the split rear window. Living in Minneapolis at the time, Reiling saw an advertisement and called the Long Beach owner and quizzed him about the specifications of this car. While the car had been restored, it wasn’t restored to show-car condition.
“My girlfriend and I decided we would drive out there (from Minneapolis) in her Saab 900 Turbo. She had a tow hitch on the back. We drove out there and towed it back over the mountains to Minnesota in October (1986).”
Then Reiling decided to complete his college education at the Rhode Island School of Design. During this time, the VW sat in his grandmother’s Minnesota barn for the next five years.
“After graduation I started bringing the car to Volkswagen shows in Minnesota, where there were maybe two or three split (rear) windows in the entire state. Consequently, there weren’t any other examples for comparison,” Reiling said.
By 2007, Reiling had moved to California and begun taking his car to shows where he learned of the deficiencies of his restored VW.
“Those running boards are too new for that car, the wrong fender, the list kept growing. It was fun going to the shows, but I cringed with all the things people were saying I needed to fix on my car.”
But Reiling took all those suggestions to heart, and it recently came back from a 2½-year full restoration and won Best in Class and Best of Show at this year’s Vintage VW Spring Meet in San Jose.
The rest of his story: Reiling has disabilities.
“I was shot in the shoulder when I was 15. I was born right-handed.”
He was accidentally shot by a neighbor kid who had gotten hold of his father’s gun. The bullet when through his clavicle, which ended Reiling’s righthandedness. He lost a lot of blood and spent that summer in the hospital recovering with additional surgeries. If that isn’t bad enough, after college Reiling had found a design job and was doing well.
“One day (in 2003) I was playing racquetball with my buddy after work. The game got super-intense. I lunged after a very difficult serve and ended up hitting the wall with my right shoulder. Many medical complications followed, including a traumatic brain injury with paralysis confining me to a wheelchair. Doctors told me I’d never drive a clutch-operated vehicle again — much less one without synchromesh in its gearbox (double clutching required).”
Doctors told him to get used the wheelchair because that would be his life.
“I had (years of) physical and occupational therapy to learn how to walk and talk and use my left arm again. My wife at the time was my biggest champion.”
And now Grant Reiling has beat the odds. A positive-thinking Reiling says, “I consider myself the luckiest unlucky man you are ever going to meet.”
Have an interesting vehicle? Contact David Krumboltz at MOBopoly@yahoo.com. To view more photos of this and other issues’ vehicles or to read more of Dave’s columns, visit mercurynews.com/author/david-krumboltz.
