The photo shows the International Scout II we bought in the story below. It is parked in front of the teacherage that we lived in while I was teaching in the two-room school in Avola, BC. Here is the story:
We had just settled in to “our new home”, the teacherage in Avola, and were in need of some supplies before the school year started. That mean’t taking a drive to Kamloops, BC which was two hours away. Our old 1967 International Scout was not in the best of shape and needed some work, and I thought while we were in “Big City” Kamloops, I would stop into some garages, to see about getting some repairs.
Before leaving Avola, I put in two quarts of engine oil into the old Scout. About 90 miles down the highway, I had to stop and put in an additional quart of engine oil. (The Scout had a drinking and smoking problem.)
As soon as we got to Kamloops, I stopped in at a garage and there I was told the Scout would need new rings, valves, and have all of the gaskets replaced. That would take several days of work (at $21 an hour!, I had written in my diary followed by an exclamation mark).
Before committing to anything, I drove to another garage. There, after examining the Scout, the mechanic told me that with all of the many miles I had on the car, it might be smarter to put in a whole new or rebuilt engine into the car, then he added that a new engine would only cost me about $50 more than getting a ring and valve job, and a new engine would be guaranteed. Then he checked the price of what a new International engine would cost, it was $1,200. Yikes!
What to do, what to do? I didn’t want to sink that much money into my old vehicle. It was starting to have so many other things wrong with it (a rusting body, a leaking roof, gas tank, and tail pipe, not to mention the electrical problem, etc, etc). Maybe, we thought, it was time to look around for a new vehicle, so that is what we did.
Amazingly, at one used car lot we found a fancy looking white Scout II, with decorative red panels on the side. It was only two years old, and the guy said he would buy our old Scout for $1,500. I didn’t tell him that was what I had paid for it, years before. I couldn’t really pass the deal up. However, he did reduce the price he would pay for our old Scout to $1,022, after he examined it a bit closer, but that still seemed like a generous offer, so we agreed to buy the 1974 Scout II for $4,000.
Of course, buying a new vehicle so unexpectedly did present some new problems, one of which was paying for it. We had been living for the previous three years in an isolated fly-in logging camp, and had done all of our banking through the mail. We had the money to pay for the new Scout, but not with us, and there was no branch of our credit union in Kamloops, so we had to drive down to Kelowna, BC which was two hours away, to get to a credit union branch for our money.
I was afraid to make the drive to Kelowna in our untrustworthy old Scout, for fear it would die on the way and I wouldn’t get any money for it, so we ended up renting a new 1976 Chevette to make the trip. Our drive to Kelowna went without incident, and we withdrew the money at the credit union without any problems, then drove back to Kamloops and bought the Scout II.
Once the sale was completed, we felt like royalty driving back to Avola in our shiny newly purchased Scout II. It had been customized. It featured a V-8 engine (our old Scout was just a 4 cylinder). It had new radial tires, “headers” (fancy individual exhaust pipes off of the engine), custom bucket seats, and was of course a four wheel drive, like our old scout. Its ride was smooth like a car, not rattling and shaking like our old Scout.
The old 1967 Scout we had traded in had given us a lot adventures and good memories, before it had started to deteriorate. It had a unique solid removable top, that I have never seen on any other Scout (photos below). I had bought it used when I was a Conscientious Objector working in the Indianapolis Goodwill Store. It was our vehicle when we got married, and it was the vehicle that had brought us and our possessions up to Canada when we had immigrated.
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