Flipping through old family albums, I suddenly come across a photo of an old Opel 1.2-litre with a man leaning on it. Only after a while do I find out that it is my grandfather with his new car.
I want to introduce you to my grandfather. He died in 1972, so that will be a rather one-sided acquaintance. Anyway, he was an unadulterated Jacobs. And, sorry VAG-Week conspiracy theorists, an Opel driver. Guus Jacobs, I recently discovered, drove an Opel 1.2-litre before the war. While looking through old family albums, I came across this photo of my grandfather, proudly leaning on a brand new Opel with a Limburg license plate. My grandfather came from Het Gooi and lived in Sittard for a few years in the late 1930s, only to return to Naarden just before the invasion of the Germans, where he became chief of police after WW2.
That’s why I know this photo must have been taken in the late 1930s.
In the meantime I have also been able to decipher the location, which was 59 Leyenbroekerweg in Sittard, the address where my father must have been born on January 10, 1940. The house still stands, although my grandfather has been dead for half a century and my father barely knows he is alive these days. Stones live longer than humans.
When I was recently at Opel in Rüsselsheim, where they keep a copy of most Opels, I couldn’t resist asking the curator if they also had a 1.2-litre. And they have. So that half an hour later I posed on the hood exactly like my long-dead grandfather. Only that couple and the dog were missing.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl