Way back in 1967, I decided to build a Meyer's Manx --a dune buggy based on a VW chassis. This became my principal activity during part of my senior year in college, to the point where the college's Dean of Engineering once saw me and remarked "Terry, I see you've taken time out from building your Manx to come visit us!"
My good friends Paul Muns, Paul Sutton, and Margie Driskell were instrumental in helping me with this project, but they also had a sense of humor almost as perverted as my own. Thus, while attending Naval Office Candidate School the following year in lovely Newport RI (during the dead of winter), I received a photograph of my prized possession, as modified by my friends: most notably, the Manx now sported a "flower power" hand-painted top, in contrast to the original black and tangerine motif.
Now picture this: newly-minted Ensign Gray drives his "hippified" Manx onto Naval Station San Diego every morning, where Marines dutifully salute the officer's vehicle. Now, more than thirty years later, I remember that image as yesterday.
In due course the Manx was sold after I "retired" from the Navy and went to work for Bell Labs in New Jersey. I didn't think a dune buggy would work out too well in Jersey winters. Selling the Manx was the practical decision, but a heart-wrenching one (and who knows, maybe even the wrong one...)
The Manx may have been gone, but it was not forgotten. Years later, I received a gift from my favorite high school teacher and mentor Don Sickler. It was a scale model Manx, complete with a careful replication of the flower print paint job on the roof! Then just a few years ago, I received a very interesting email from Muns Design Works, the artistic enterprise of Paul and Margie Muns. Attached to the email was the image you see here, a computer-synthesized rendition based on one photo Paul had of the car.
And now you know the story of the Manx with the flower-print roof.
For more information about the Meyers Manx, click here
T. E. Gray
21 Feb 1999