IT was bug-eyed and bowlegged, it buzzed like a nest of bumblebees and looked something like a bathtub on wheels. It was a tart of a car that made a statement -- back in that bygone day when you could still make a smile your statement and people wouldn't take you for loony.
The Meyers Manx dune buggy was born in 1964 in the garage of an apartment building a block from the seashore in Newport Beach.
It was an in-between kind of car -- in between tailfins and hot rods. And it fit an in-between era. Jack Kennedy was killed a few months earlier while Bruce Meyers shaped a mock-up of the left front fender of his red-orange original. The Civil Rights movement was in tumultuous pitch. But Americans had not yet glimpsed the great shadow clouds of cynicism that lay on the horizon with the quagmire of Vietnam, the Watts riots and events to follow.
The worm hadn't turned, not yet. It was a time when this part of California still meant -- symbolically at least -- beaches, boundless spaces and play. Perpetual gridlock was in the future, Bob's Big Boy hadn't been sold to a national chain, "Gilligan's Island" debuted on the tube, the drive-in theater was a neighborhood fixture. If something was good, it wasn't yet "awesome" but "righteous."
Thus, the Manx dune buggy summed up a righteous moment in the spirit of Southern California. It never gave an inch to doubt.
"Fun, fun, fun," sang the Beach Boys in their hit that year.
This was not a car with a design studio behind it. No suit-and-tie corporation bankrolled the venture. This was the sketch-pad creation of a man who perfectly fit this era, a free spirit in flip-flops, baggy trunks and Coppertone cologne.
Born in Los Angeles, Meyers knew nothing about barriers, he didn't have a rule book. But he could surf. He could draw. He knew the dirt roads that wound into Baja, and he knew where the beach crowd partied. He was a surfboard glasser and a one-time boat builder who understood how to mold fiberglass. In Southern California in 1964, these were rich talents.
Actually, Meyers did not design the first dune buggy. Street cars with hand-built bodies were already lumbering over the Pismo Beach dunes when he took in the scene a year earlier. He wasn't the first to use fiberglass for a car, either. But in a flight of imaginative fancy, he brought them together.
