Many of us are concerned with the issues surrounding the automobile industry, but these will pass. Here’s hoping we each have stories about our own cars that we remember longer. Would you care to hear one or two of mine?
In the summer of 1961, between our sophomore and junior years, Bill McCormick, a widow-peaked, tallish to the point of already-stooping delinquent who everybody knew was a bad actor and who, just a few months later, would figure prominently in my first minor-in-possession bust, talked me into buying my first car, an ominously large greenish-black rusted-out 1947 Plymouth sedan that could have easily handled our entire high-school cheerleading squad in its torn brown-fabric back seat, a thought that had crossed my mind when I first saw it, not that any one of the five of the women involved would have been caught dead in it, of course, much less the whole squad at once.
Well, it was OUR first car, really, a car Bill and I both needed to get to work in the lettuce fields, our shared summer profession of choice, chosen because the owners by Federal law had to hire us first, displacing in the doing their real workers, the Mexican laborers. Bill had $50 he was willing to front to buy the car so he and I took the Greyhound Bus from Salinas, California to San Jose, bought a San Jose Mercury, looked in the classifieds, called the woman who owned the cheapest car on the list, verified with her that the car ran, hitchhiked across town, found her and it, bought it for the $50 Bill had, and drove it home. We used it for much of that summer as planned and my parents never did ask about it, although it was often parked either in our driveway or somewhere on the street down the block. I think they were just happy I had stopped asking to use their car, or maybe they just couldn’t believe I’d every buy anything like that.
Eventually the long summer ended and we felt compelled to dispose of the car. That was an interesting dilemma, as we hadn’t been old enough to actually register the car and hadn’t, (insurance had never even been considered), and, not really owning it, we didn’t know how to sell it. We decided to abandon it, but in order to make the abandonment look legitimate, we figured the car would have to be dead…I mean, nobody abandons a working car, right?…and if it WAS working maybe somebody would come looking for us somehow. So Bill and I went to the back of the field we were working in, drained the oil, and then drove it down the highway until the engine seized, happily abandoned it where it was and walked away. As I said I’m not sure of the logic that prompted much of the above sequence but I’m sure it all made more sense at the time, or maybe it was just the alcohol. Whatever…it worked, and we never heard anything about the car again.
A year later, in my junior year at Palma High School in Salinas, California, I got my first real car…all mine, I mean. It was a red 1957 Volvo PV 544, 
a car with two primary characteristics. First, compared to other stuff I wanted, it was inexpensive. Second, it looked a lot like a 1948 Ford, which in turn bore passing resemblance to the ’47 Plymouth Bill and I had just danced with. The first characteristic, affordability (coupled as it was with built-in parent financing, obtained through consistent whining), sold me; I tolerated its appearance, even though cars that looked like ’48 Fords that looked like ’47 Plymouths were nowhere near as desirable as ’34 Fords or even ’40 Fords, both of which were normally retrofitted with large-block Chevy V8s and didn’t look much like themselves soon after my more-ambitious friends, who drank less and therefore had more money than I, got them.
I’m making too long a story out of it – anyway, the PV 544 was a fine, peppy little car, the first four-cylinder car I had ever heard of, and initially was reliable to a fault, a condition I eventually changed. I tried to drive it into the ground, customized it with metallic blue paint, black upholstery and huge rear tires that would have been more at home on something in a monster car rally. I ran it into things, usually when drunk, and eventually failed at driving it between a school building and a kids’ merry-go-round, said failure flattening one side of the car and putting a narrow crease completely down the other. It was not as nice a car when it departed my company soon thereafter.
My second all-mine car, purchased immediately after the departure of the Volvo in 1965, was a baby-blue 1957 Thunderbird with a white porthole top….the only car I ever bought primarily because a woman I liked happened to like it. Turns out she liked it more than me and got rid of me, and I in turn got rid of it, the primary motivation I had for owning it being gone. But before it went away I customized it with a audio-reverberation unit that made the radio sound as if it were playing at the bottom of a well, making it outstanding for (literally) cruising Main, hanging U’s at Mel’s Drive-In (Salinas actually HAD a Mel’s Drive-In and it really WAS on Main Street). I also found we could adapt the removable porthole top of the car to other purposes, like bringing it into a rented motel room while we were attending a bowling tournament in Fresno, covering the inside with plastic painters’ tarps, and filling it with ice, seven-up, and Bali-Hai wine, the percentages favoring the latter. In this specific instance we then drank all ten or fifteen gallons of said mixture, refilled it and drank it again.
My last memory that evening, having had several Texas Tumblers of the stuff at least and beginning to nod off, was that of Bobby Guitierez, who had matched me drink-for-drink, jumping off a second floor balcony into the motel’s swimming pool. I remember thinking that it didn’t matter much whether he hit the pool or not ‘cuz he wasn’t bowling with my team in the tournament, but he probably would have been OK anyway; Bobby was too damn mean to die from something as trivial as hitting a pool-deck from a second-story, if he did.
My third AM (all-mine) car was a 1957 MGA, which I purchased right after the car lot which had mistakenly financed its purchase churlishly re-acquired the T-bird. This was my first hot-rod, or at least it looked hot-roddish when I was finished. It had started out matte black but soon became canary yellow with black tuck-and-roll upholstery, sporting a chrome roll-bar that I never quite finished paying for. The sound system was a too-cool eight-track cassette, and, other than the car being electrically just as bad as every other British car of its era, it was way fun to drive, right up until the point that a drunk PFC from Fort Ord (near Monterey, CA.), driving his buddy’s borrowed truck, rear-ended me at high-speed in the middle of the night on the Monterey-Carmel highway and put me in a ditch and my poor little car in a wrecking yard.
Subsequently I’ve owned many other cars, mostly better, and, on balance, have treated most with an increasing level of respect, being slow-to-learn but not totally dense. I even owned and properly cared for an AC Cobra, SNAKE88 by name, for awhile…a separate story if not a book.
And today, of course, I live in a fine motor home, an ’07 Tiffin Allegro Bus, living here with four others besides myself (albeit three of them are dogs and cat), and all five of us depend on this vehicle to get us where we need to go and to house us when we are there, wherever “there” is at the mo, and I treat it better than any car I ever owned, better than I’ve sometimes treated myself in days of yore, and I intend to keep that up, and to gold-plate the little darling if the price of gold drops. I understand the importance of maintaining my vehicles now, and often make my daughter’s life more complicated (as dads will do) by continuously asking her how HER maintenance of her car is going. I finally get that cars are important as more than just transportation, too. They say reams about you and your life. A person who cares well for his car is likely going to take good care of other things, too….maybe even you, if you are in partnership with them either personally or professionally. Thus when our older son acquired a new BMW a few years back I knew this was a good thing…good for him to have a nice car, and good for his view of himself.
Cars are indeed iconic, aren’t they? – truly integrated into our being at, seemingly, the deepest levels. I wonder if this has something to do with all the hoopla around the auto industry bailouts and bankruptcies of late. We are talking about one of the largest underpinnings of our economy when we talk about the auto industry, but even more than that we are talking about companies we grew up with, companies that gave us the cars that we first loved, hated, and, eventually, learned to care for. Why, we wonder, can’t these companies that created these cars and helped us earn these memories do just a little better job caring for their responsibilities…their bottom-line? If they learned, couldn’t they stay intact, rather than parting themselves off and disappearing? If we learned to do better, can’t they?
