October 7, 2003

• Cars I have Known and Loved

  
  

  As I approach my dotage, I find myself in a state of anecdotage-more and more, stories and tales from my youth come to mind.  Maybe this just means that the memory-enhancing drugs that I take (when I can remember to take the damn thngs) are startng to work.  At any rate, here are a few stories from yore–in this case, yore being the 60s and 70s–, all auto-related.  I hope you, gentle reader, enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.

  
  

  “My first car”–there’s an evocative term.  I suspect there is hardly a male alive in this culture who does not remember his first car.  More vividly, perhaps, than his first love.  Mine was a 1955 Mercury, black two-door hard top.  The front end was mostly chromed bumper and grill, the sound system was an AM radio with a range of maybe twently miles under good conditions, and the thing looked bullet-proof.  Under the hood was a 312 cubic-inch V-8 with dual Weber carbs. Gas mileage sucked, but who cared?  The stuff was like 25 cents a gallon.  And  it ran.  Boy, did it run.  I once had it up to 110, which scared the bejeesus out of my passengers.

  
  

  I got it in the first place for the most practical of reasons.  I had an after-school job too far away to walk, and hitch-hiking was out of the question.  So one evening–why this happened at night, I have no idea–we went to a used-car dealership.  The first car that caught my eye was a 1959 Lincoln about the size of Maryland.  The six-way power seats fascinated me.  But it was way impractical, as well as being way out of our price range.

  
  

  The Mercury was ours for $200.  I remember Dad making some quibble or other about the car,and the sales guy said defensively, “Hey, this isn’t a thousand-dollar car.”  At the time, a “thousand-dollar car” was a used car that was almost as good as new.  I do recall he had reservations about the automatic transmission–a bias which I share to this day–and the salesman assured him that it had been recently overhauled.  He may have been telling the truth–I never had any problems with it.

  
  

  The big Merc served me faithfully and well until that day in a shopping center parking lot, when we were t-boned by a 1958 Chevy.  I thought it was the other driver’s fault–I had been driving within the lines, she had cut across unoccupied parking spaces–but the insurance guy said it was on private property and hence was mutual negligence.  I got it fixed as cheaply as possible, and the  once-black car ended up with a pale green fender and aqua door, not the most pleasing combination of colors.  And you had to kick the fender, hard, at just the right place before you could get the door open.

  
  

  Not much later, I traded up to a 1961 Olds F-85, a metallic brown compact four-door sedan.  It was sort of a vanilla car–no mystique at all, but it ran and looked decent and the headlights worked.  That was all that was important to me then.  Come to think of it, that is all that is important to me now with my current vehicle, a 1988 Dodge Vista wagon.

  • 2:50 pm
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