Rover Time, Part IX: It’s Drive Your Rover to Work Day

This is a big day for the Rover: It’s the first time it’s been at Hemmings since nearly a year ago, when it was a non-runner tucked away in our shop. I brought it in for its Massachusetts safety inspection yesterday, and after some fiddling with a couple of bulbs that wouldn’t light up because of tarnished contacts, it got a nice, new sticker slapped on its windshield. So I decided to drive it to work today.

There are still a couple of little things to fix. For instance, the speedometer. I had to guess at my speed coming up the 15 miles of two-lane highway between my house and Hemmings World Headquarters. Nobody passed me, and I didn’t get pulled over, so I couldn’t have been too far off.

This isn’t the car’s first trip – I drove to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, about two hours east of where I live, for a big Rover show a few weeks ago. But that was really a shakedown trip, because I knew that things would break, and they did. (Like the clutch hydraulics and the generator, for two.) Today marks its rehabilitation as a running, useable car, for the first time since 1976.

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Heather’s offensive little car

As you may recall, I bought my wife Heather a 1974 MG Midget little car last year. It’s down for repairs right now, but she’s been enjoying it on sunny days, driving it to work with the top down, experiencing the joys of classic car ownership, getting thumbs-up from co-workers and passers-by alike.

So I was rather interested in the recent news that little people across the country now want the word midget to be banned from broadcast TV by the FCC. The word’s derogatory, apparently.

So where does that leave us, the proud MG Midget owners? Do we hang our heads in shame that we have cute, tiny, fun cars with names that offend little people? Do we start calling our cars “vertically challenged?”

I guess now my unrealized dream of instituting a new holiday – Drive a Midget in Your Midget Day – will never come to fruition.

So I might as well now start a collection of cars with un-PC names. I’ll next buy a Studebaker Dictator. A King Midget definitely. Maybe a Dodge La Femme. Or a Jaguar SS. Can you think of any others?

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