My aunt’s red 71 also holds a special place in my heart.
I have unfortunately never come across any pictures of it so all I have are my memories.
And one memory forever stands out in my mind!
Let’s face it… Beetles kinda sucked for heat! And they certainly didn’t have a real front window defroster or ability to produce relatively quick warm air to defrost anything.
It was during the winter of 1974 when my Cio Cia Pat was watching me and we were going somewhere. She got me into the back seat of the car (no car seat or booster seat or even seat belts worn back then) and then started to scrap the heavy front on the flat front windshield.
I remember her leaning over to the passenger side to scrape while the little car desperately tried to warm up.
We sat there for a bit and then I saw her look back at me in the rear view mirror and say “Hey. Watch this!” and suddenly it started snowing in the car!!!
The frost scrapings fell down on to the vents but of course, there was no warm air to melt them and she turned on the vent and it blew all the little bits of ice everywhere and it made it look like the snow was falling inside the car too!
I remember being utterly amazed that she could make it snow in the car, my 4 year old self not putting two and two together on the the scraping of the frost and the blower.
I’ll never forget that.