by Kurt Rheinheimer
My grandmother’s ’63 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 was the fanciest, newest car I knew, and it took us to the very best places we ever went.
When I was a teenager and my mother, father, sister, brothers and I came down from Baltimore to Radford, Va. to visit for the summer, the Olds was the first thing we saw there in the driveway at the corner of Fourth and Harvey streets. It sat long and white and stately, and dwarfed my grandfather’s 1950 Ford parked next to it.
Where it took us – in wonderful luxury and comfort – was to places like the Clover Creamery for ice cream cones. To Claytor Lake State Park to swim in the lake and tie June bugs onto string and fly them around in a circle like tiny model airplanes. And all over the back roads of southwest Virginia to discover the region’s mountains and streams and sights. It was the perfect multi-generational family car.
But I’m not sure whether it ever made its way to Mountain Lake before, many years beyond its heyday, it became a car star in “Dirty Dancing.” By that time – 1987 – the Olds had been passed down to my cousin and her husband, and subsequently sold to the person who sold it to the movie people.
I suspect Jerry Orbach, his movie family along with him, was the first to drive it into Mountain Lake Resort. But not until long after my brothers and sister and I and our cousins had done the work to have that car ready for its role. We’d trained its seats to hold a lot of kids, trained our grandparents to aim it all over the Virginia counties of Montgomery and Pulaski and Giles, trained that big Olds to be at ease when its big moment came.
The memories of my grandparents – Fred and Lillian Hurt – remain keenly alive in the mountains, and in those of us who survive them. And among the physical markers, memorials and mementoes to their lives, the Olds 88 about to make its comeback in the new edition of the movie is perhaps not only the most public, but also among the most private. Yes, everyone watching the movie gets to see “our” car, but it is only we four surviving back-seat kids who know the precise scent of it, who know the feel of the upholstery when you put your hands on the back of the front seats to reach up and ask to stop for a Dr. Pepper, who know the kind, gentle expressions on the faces of the first adults who sat up front and aimed that car so carefully through those days of our lives, so very long ago.
