I Really Wanna Be
If the middle-aged hippies are escaping from their real lives for the weekend, what about the significant number of young people who are clearly hippie wanna-bes? Male and female, they are almost uniform in appearance-late teens or early 20s, long straight dark hair, thin faces, jeans and T-shirts, a dangling necklace and usually some love beads on one wrist. It's like a flashback to my high school days, only then it wasn't retro, it was rebellion. I suppose if you want to recreate the 1960s in how you dress and act, then the perfect fashion accessory is a VW Beetle. To further the illusion, the cars they drive are typically well worn, with dents and dings and creases that give character. They look like the kind of cars a police officer in 1969 would have called "rolling probable cause."
Ja Voll!
A big part of a Volkswagen show is the swap meet. Here people can bring their old and worn-out parts so others can buy them to replace the broken parts on their own VWs. There are a fair number of large commercial vendors that show up to sell their wares, but mostly it's lots of guys who have a few hundred old VW parts to unload.
There are bargains, too. Where else can you get a full VW transmission for $25, or an engine case for $40? While most of the vendors seem to be fairly normal, there is a small subset of these swap-meet salesmen who bear closer examination. They are invariably male. Somewhere in their 50s to mid 60s. They are always wearing a blue or gray shop shirt with the VW logo on one side of the front and a name like "Karl" or "Gunther" embroidered on the other. They look like they've been sleeping under a park bench or in a grease pit for the past week and have a five-day growth of beard on their faces. They speak with a vaguely German or perhaps middle-European accent. In addition to the flies, they are surrounded by an aura of great knowledge, a bit like Yoda in the original "Star Wars" movies.
Many times they're standing before an old VW transporter that's filled with unusual and rare VW parts that are so obscure in their origin that only these grizzled VW veterans can even identify them. If you try to bargain with them, they look at you with great disdain; consequently they sell very little, and the rare parts they have become even more obscure. Where they have come from and who will take their place after they have departed from this life and the VW hierarchy is also a mystery.
Middle-aged Moms
I've been to a lot of car meets. Mostly they end up being a bunch of guys standing around talking about their cars. It was refreshing therefore to find that a good percentage of the cars on display at the Volksfest were owned and cared for by women. In fact, the winning cars in several categories were entered by middle-aged women who looked as normal as soccer-moms. This is almost never the case if you go to a British car show, where the cars are shown almost exclusively by balding old men. Is it because VWs are easy to work on and not terribly expensive to restore that they appeal to women? Is this a car that a woman aspired to or maybe owned when she was growing up? Is it a search for lost youth?