David Mills A Love of VWs
~ by Lee Edgren
“ I first one, a 1961 VW Bug,
was probably six years old when my dad bought the
and limped it home with me riding behind the back seat in the luggage compartment. My dad bought the Idiot’ s Guide to VW Repair. He and my brother took the engine to the basement and rebuilt it. We had a decent car for the first time ever.”
As he recalls it, this was the beginning of David Mills’ s long and somewhat improbable romance with air-cooled VWs. Mills, now 47, laughingly describes himself as the only person in his family without a post-secondary degree. The son of potter John Mills and his first wife Margaret( Maggie), David had an early and probably life-shaping
38 Our Brown County May / June 2017
exposure to the unconventional and resourceful characters who gravitated to Brown County during the late 1960s and early’ 70s.
You may have seen a green 1976 Westfalia van with hippy flowers painted on its sides and a plastic goose on its roof. Mills recently got it running again after it spent three years off the road. It is just one of the attention-getting rides belonging to Nashville-based photographer Fred Sisson, whom, Mills said, he has finally been able to thank“ for introducing me to all the things that made me drop out of college to do all the things I love.”
David’ s first vehicle was a van that had belonged to“ Doc” Kurtz, another legendary Nashville figure and its first“ Old Time” photographer.
But the second was a squarebacked VW.“ I watched my brother get old enough to drive and fix up Beetles as transportation. I had my first square back in high school. That was the replacement for Doc’ s photo van.”
For a while, it looked like David was headed toward a conventional life of teaching.“ I thought I was going to teach math or physics, but I hated every minute of it.” While in school, he worked for an auto parts store.“ They did a lousy job of helping people with imports. I was sure I could do better. So I dropped out of school and, with a loan from my dad, went to Columbus and opened a parts store. I lived in my girlfriend’ s parent’ s basement for free.” He was 20 years old.