Cape & Islands News

Saab story

Saab and Vonnegut are now both history, Sully lives on driving a Toyota

By Walter Brooks

Kurt Vonnegut (left) and Steve Sullivan both have a Cape Cod Saab story to tell.

Kurt sat in his Saab to write short stories.We have written many times about our favorite satirist, Kurt Vonnegut, who lived in West Barnstable when we first moved to Cape Cod.

And one of my best friends, Steve Sullivan of West Brewster, has been a Saab auto enthusiast for decades, and they both have a Saab story to tell

But Vonnegut and Saab are gone, so I'll tell you about Kurt's experience with that once popular Swedish car.

Steve has since switched to Toyota after owning many Saabs. Kurt ended up hating Saabs, but Steve loved them until the end.

Back in the late 1960's Vonnegut, my wife and I were on a Cape Cod committee to organize a group to protest the Vietnam War, and weirdest of all, Vonnegut was then the Cape's only Saab salesman.

Kurt was yet to be the luminary he became after Slaughterhouse Five was published, and he made a living mostly by writing short stories for the long-gone Saturday Evening Post which became Welcome to the Monkey House. He'd write the stories sitting in his Saab parked on Route 6-A with a "For Sale" sign on it. Ironically, Bill Breisky was then an editor atthe Post before became a newspaperman, bought a Connecticut weekly and later became the editor of the Cape Cod Times.

Vonnegut was a great writer and a lousy car salesman.

His Saab sales skills were such that he wrote the following:

Have I Got a Car for You!

I used to be the owner and manager of an automobile dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, called “Saab Cape Cod.” It and I went out of business 33 years ago. The Saab then as now was a Swedish car, and I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature. Old Norwegian proverb: “Swedes have short dicks but long memories.”

Listen: The Saab back then had only one model, a bug like a VW, a two-door sedan, but with the engine in front. It had suicide doors opening into the slipstream. Unlike all other cars, but like your lawnmower and your outboard, it had a two-stroke rather than a four-stroke engine. So every time you filled your tank with gas you had to pour in a can of oil as well. For whatever reason, straight women did not want to do this.

The chief selling point was that a Saab could drag a VW at a stoplight. But if you or your significant other had failed to add oil to the last tank of gas, you and the car would then become fireworks.

Read the rest here. 

Read all about Kurt here.