The Repo Man, Dave Loggins, the Resignation of Richard Nixon, and Me

My memoir of my father is also in part a memoir of me as a young man. This excerpt is from the current draft.

Like Daddy, I had my own modest experience of collecting and repossessing cars. In the 70’s, when I was working part-time in the installment loan department of the bank where my father was a vice president, I went out with the collector, twice I think but maybe more. Al was a former Marine and Viet Nam vet. He had an intimidating countenance—acne scarred, grim or sardonic when he chose. He carried his service revolver under the passenger seat of the company Plymouth, though he never needed it when I traveled with him. When collecting a debt or repoing a car, he could seamlessly turn from lowkey persuasion to intimidation and back. I was quiet, bookish, and obviously naïve, and he gained some pleasure from shocking me with coarse language and stories. But I liked him and liked to help him on the occasional out-of-town trips to repo cars. He did all the work; all I had to do was to drive his company car back to the bank while he took the keys from the defaulter and drove the repoed car.

One of these trips must have taken place in the summer of 1974. I went on at least one trip with Al then, because on the radio was a song that was ubiquitous that summer, Dave Loggins’ “Please Come to Boston”; it hit the fourth spot on Billboard in August and finished the year at number 65. The man in the song pleads for a woman to join him in Boston, then Denver, then California: “Come to L.A. to live forever.” She refuses: “She just said, ‘No, / Boy, won't you come home to me?’”

Al passionately hated this song, and each time it came on the radio he grumbled derisively and turned it off. I don’t believe he ever explained his reason. At the time, gossiping coworkers thought he was seeing someone in Gastonia and financing his courtship on credit card cash advances; I received the impression, possibly quite erroneous, that the relationship involved a deep need not matched by affection. I was engaged to be married and was predisposed to like the song, though I remember it only because of Al’s dislike. That summer, the Watergate scandal filled the newspapers and preoccupied television. Minnie, a delightful cook and hostess at the bank’s cafeteria, came in for a good deal of ribbing for her continued support of President Nixon. In a quirk of timing, Nixon resigned on August 8 and left the White House on August 9, the day I was married.

One day, for a long-forgotten reason, I visited Al at his home and found him in the yard fitting the mechanism of a cuckoo clock into its housing of dark stained wood that he had made. Relaxed and absorbed in his hobby, he was a different man, like Dickens’ Mr. Wemmick at home with the Aged Parent. His father was a hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher that I never met but once I came across him preaching on the radio. My hearing was good then, but I couldn’t understand much of what he said; his speech was fast and strongly cadenced, the chant of an angry warrior attacking sin. It was probably then that I met Al’s sister, a student at Bob Jones University. She was concerned about Al’s lifestyle and his soul but clearly loved him deeply. One of our friends and coworkers, a young teller at the bank, hinted that Al’s war had been a bad one. A few years later he died young from complications of a head wound he received in the war. He had never talked about the war with me, and I didn’t ask.

Posted 20 July 2024. Questions or comments? Email me at [email protected]