I was recalling, in a recent column, several Volkswagens I knew personally during the 1970s and '80s.

I referred to the one Ed Gosnell drove to classes at East Tennessee State University as a "rattletrap of a bug." I said his ability to land dates with pretty co-eds despite his car was worthy of academic study.

The car was missing a lot of things — chief among them the passenger and back seats.

Ed was 25 and had completed a tour of military service; I was just an 18-year-old college freshman. We earned minimum wage at a Jiffy Market selling gas and hot dogs.

His frugal lifestyle and my willingness to give up work hours afforded me more time off than I probably should have taken.

It snowed before our shift ended one night, and I went home with Ed rather than chance the longer drive to my house. The ride to school in his VW the next morning was made memorable by more than the ice and snow and the five-gallon bucket I used for a seat.

Along the way, we stopped to pick up one of the cute co-eds my friend had been schooling in the fundamentals of racquetball.

"Where's she going to sit?" I asked. "There's only one bucket."

Perched precariously on my lap, the girl held tightly to me while I clutched the dash handle and side strap. She giggled the whole white-knuckle way.

What a thrill.

Never before or since that day have I been more interested in learning how to play racquetball.

Ed, now a faculty member at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., read my earlier column and took exception to my shallow description of his old Volkswagen. It might be the most eloquently phrased exception I've ever received.

"That rattletrap VW that you mention was in actuality a marvel of engineering magic," he e-mailed.

Before the VW, Ed drove a converted bread truck. Besides guzzling gas and having manual windshield wipers, he remembers the truck being ill-suited for campus parking.

Someone offered him a brand-new Volkswagen engine in exchange for the bread truck. "But what good is the engine without the rest?" Ed asked.

He was invited to gather parts for the rest of the car from a field — an uncommon way to shop for automobiles, even in rural East Tennessee.

"Thus," Ed continued, "began an engineering feat unmatched in modern history (to my knowledge)."

He and a friend built the car, piece-by-piece, from VW parts they found lying in that field. A chassis here, a front end there, wheels, and a body "that had literally been stripped of every piece of interior adornment not needed to actually hold the thing together," Ed wrote.

The finished product had just one door handle — which was adequate, Ed says, since he only needed to open one door or window at a time.

"It was a piece of art," he continued, "... a bonding of all things relative to young, poor college students.

"It was, my friend, glorious.

"And that passion that I put into its construction, the nurturing I gave each and every time something fell off of it, the pride and confidence on my face each and every time I drove that car, all that, my friend, is what really helped with the co-eds," he concluded. "(And I like to think I was just a tad cute, but that is another story.)"

It's good to know Ed's work ethic remains strong. He pulled half my shift for me on this column.

Mark Rutledge can be contacted at mrutledge@coxnc.com