by Joe Rector

Created on: November 19, 2008   Last Updated: December 17, 2008

My wife Amy and I hadn't been married long. She owned a new model Dodge; I was the proud owner of VW Beetle. I was in my first year as a high school English teacher, and she was a college student. My wife also had joined the army reserves to help pay the bills of a newly married couple. She attended training exercises on weekends at the local base.

One Saturday morning she took my VW to training. Her vehicle used too much gas. It was a chilly spring morning, and a light rain had begun to fall during the early morning hours. Amy left the house early since the twenty-mile drive would require extra time to cover in the rain. I worried about her safety because the "Bug" had four slick tires that could gain no traction on slick rainy country roads in the hills of Tennessee.

Not more than twenty minutes after Amy left home, the phone rang. On the line was my wife, and she was crying. She told me that she'd had an accident only three miles from the house. I made sure she wasn't hurt and told her I'd be right there.

Amy had lost control of the car on a slight curve. She began to slide on the asphalt, and then slipped onto the grassy edge of the road. That put the car into a spin, and it narrowly missed a telephone. Next it careened over the edge of a small embankment and came to rest with its wheels buried in the muddy and freshly turned dirt of a man's garden.

The only problem with our VW was that it was caked in mud and buried so deeply that a wrecker had to pull it out. Our insurance coverage included that cost of $75.00, a small fortune to us in those first months of our marriage.

Our biggest problem was with the man who owned the garden plot. He asked for our insurance information. As it turned out, he saw the accident as the perfect way to make a profit on his vegetable garden. This man filed a claim for loss of crop in the garden where our car had come to rest. He billed the company for $90.00 in losses. In the mid-1970's, that was a wad of cash for the loss of a couple of rows of corn, beans, and green onions.

I worried about the effects of the accident on our rates, but both my Amy and I had good driving records that mitigated any hike in premiums. We felt fortunate to have vehicle insurance that paid bills for the wrecker and absurd claim. Without that coverage, we'd have been on a diet of beans and rice for several months as we paid off those charges. We spent the money instead on a set of four tires for the VW.

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