Los Angeles has always been Type 3 friendly

While I'm waiting for my new Optima battery to arrive here's a photo Ivan Pang sent to me of a faded gulf blue '63 VW 1500 notchback parked in a garage a few houses away from where I live...in 1976.



It's good reference for the kinds of features a daily-driven VW 1500 would have had in Los Angeles back in the day: solid red rear lenses, bias-ply thin whitewalls, curb feelers, AAA sticker on the bumper, etc. The license plate's number sequence points to an original registration date of around 1965, so it may have been a gray-market car. It looks worn but all original, which is no surprise because it was only 13 years old! No telling whatever became of the car; it was long gone by the time we moved to the neighborhood 20 years later.

Ivan has lived in the area for many years and he has always tried to photograph old VWs when he sees them. He has been a part of the California vintage VW scene from its beginnings in the early 1970s and has owned lots of interesting old VWs over the years, among them a Rometsch Beeskow cabriolet. He still has a number of them, including a low-mileage '62 notchback.