By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – Two years ago, Jerry and Alice Vaillancourt were ready to get rid of their big truck.

She wanted something small, easy to handle, fun.

“He said, You want to look at the Volkswagen?’ I didn’t say no.”

That’s how Alice got her dream car, a new green Beetle.

She decorated its black dashboard with a few toy VWs. Family saw it, liked it. The bugs have kept coming.

The dashboard and rear window are covered with the little cars, in all sizes and colors. She gets them mostly from grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“It’s a good thing that everywhere they go they don’t see them,” she said. Each one is held in place with a stamp-sized square of Velcro. “Just one time one took off and rattled back and forth.”

She’s propped some of the little car doors open. A yellow VW Beetle taxi has its trunk raised, ready for toy luggage.

Family members have brought them home from vacations in Florida, Jamaica, New York and Virginia. One leopard-print car has sentimental value. Her stepson picked it up on vacation and died in a motorcycle accident a week after he gave it to her.

A great-grandson gave Alice the latest one, a red car slightly roughed up from play, missing all four wheels.

There were two VWs sitting on her birthday cake back in March.

Alice, 75, says she was already an avid collector before the bugs, having filled her house with Precious Moments collectibles. She keeps a duster in the trunk to keep her little cars looking tip-top.

“When I go shopping, some young people will go like that, thumbs up,” she said. She gets a kick out of it. “They all stop and look at them. They all think it looks cool.”

Alice wasn’t a fan of the VW Beetle its first time around, back in the 1950s and ’60s. She couldn’t afford one back then, so why fuss over it?

“I guess I’m going back into my teens,” she said.

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