[Lee Stewart]

Oh man does this bring back some memories. A 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser with the Breezeway option. My grandparents on my mothers side had one of these. They bought it as a four year old used car because I was 10 at the time.

Every summer my grandparents did the "snowbird" shlep from No. Miami Bch, FL up to Upstate NY in the Catskill Mountains (The Jewish Alps) to a small town (hamlet?) named So. Fallsburg where they had a bungalow. A lot of NYC families had them and they would park the wife and kids there for the summer while the husband worked in The City then came up Friday night and spent the weekend then rode back to The City Sunday night. My parents did this for me 2 or 3 weeks over the summer so I could spend time with them and get rid of me. LOL. Which meant there were a ton of kids there. In fact enough to form a 9 kid baseball team.

Other bungalow colonies in the area dhad the same thing. So we would practice during the week and have inter bungalow colony games on the weekend as each colony had a baseball field.

Well, someone had to drive the nine of us to and from those games and my grandmother, whose name was Nan was elected because not only did she have the biggest car but it had that breezeway feature. Not as cool as a convertible but definitely a help with 9 kids jammed into it. 3 in the front seat and 6 in the back seat with most on their knees hanging out of the open breezeway window.

Should I tell you the story about the time one of the kids got car sick?