So here's the meme. Long answers or short.
1. What was your first car? Model, year, color, condition?
2. What adventures did you have in it, good or bad?
3. What happened to it, what's the end of the story?
It was a 1972 Mazda RX-2, blue, 4-door though not as nice looking as this one:
My parents bought the car because with young drivers in the family, they were tired of replacing clutches. They gave it to me in `78. By then it had 76,000 miles on it and the seals on the Wankel engine were beginning to fail. It would often take a solid minute of cranking the starter to get the engine to fire and the resultant flames out of the exhaust pipe were impressive. I soon coughed up $600 for a replacement engine. The air conditioning switch failed, but I pulled out the wires and soldered in a toggle switch. Looked ugly as hell.
I once beat a kid who had a 327 Chevy in a drag race at a stoplight in South Carolina. He was probably joking when he challenged me. I did know that the car started to feel unstable above 105mph, but I still beat him to the next light.
The real drawback of the car was that it was a subcompact which barely got 17mpg. Between `72, when my parents purchased the car and `81, the price of gas nearly quadrupled and there had been two oil shortages where having to fill up regularly was more than a matter of how much gasoline cost. In 1981, my Mazda had about 100,000 miles on it, body rust was apparent and the transmission was making unhappy sounds. I traded it in on a `81 GLC which got nearly twice the gas mileage but was nowhere near as much fun to drive.
(My GLC was a bit of a lemon, enough so that just under five years later, it was history.)
When I was at university in the early 60s I rode motorcycles. To transport my 2 racing motorcycles I had a clapped-out gutless 1955 Bedford camper van. The racers went in the back and we could sleep in the fold-out roof compartment; and all that on a student budget :-)
ReplyDeleteIt clapped out around 1967 trying to climb the hill just before the Brands Hatch racing circuit. So we rode the remaining 2 miles to the track on the racers, open megaphones and slicks on a public road. Good job we didn't get caught :-)
It was a Chevy, '67 or '68, with an engine that had to be replaced twice. It went round-trip cross-country and then the DMV claimed that it was not a Chevy, it was a Chrysler (it has just dawned on me that it was the VIN on the second engine), so it is largely rust somewhere now.
ReplyDeleteIt had two names.
The first car I got to drive a lot was a '57 Rambler in my senior year in HS. It wasn't mine, but I had almost exclusive use of it. Six cylinder engine and three on the tree wasn't a very exciting car for a teenager, and although the reclining seats got a little action, there wasn't anything else about it to recommend.
ReplyDeleteTrue "first" car was a '64 VW Beetle my parents bought for me for HS graduation. Had some fun, tore it up pretty well, including popping the top off a piston many miles from home prompting an exposure to the Greyhound system which I don't wish to repeat.
First car that I bought was the '68 Cutlass convertible I traded the bug for. That's the one I celebrate, and that's the one I'd love to have again.
LRod
ZJX, ORD, ZAU retired
My first car was a '61 Austin Healy Sprite. Tiny, no heat, one of the screw on window assemblies has a translucent panel but at 17 who cares. After graduation my parents got me a '60 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 to go to college with. From the smallest to the biggest took a little adjustment. Thank goodness both were convertibles.
ReplyDeleteMy first car was a 50 Willys CJ jeep. Drove it all thru high school and still have it today. All still original with the flat head four.
ReplyDeleteMy wife still has her first car, a 68 Mustang GT fastback 390.
Both are stored in my sons barn up in Idaho.
Neither are for sale at any price lol
Mine was a 1953 two-tone blue DeSoto. Dark blue roof. Powder blue body. "Missing link" transmission— not quite standard shift, not quite automatic, either. It was called "Fluid drive."
ReplyDeleteWhat you'd do is start the engine, step down on the clutch, move the clutch handle on the steering column, and put the car into drive. The car would start in low gear. For it to get in higher gear, you'd have to take your foot off the gas pedal and wait until you heard a click. To get it back into low gear, say on a hlll, you'd step down hard on the gas and the car would get the idea and shift.
To shift into reverse, or from reverse into forward, you'd have to use the clutch and the shift lever again.
In those pre-interstate days, it was a 13 hour drive from where I went to college in Ohio back to New York. Friends and I took turns driving while the rest of us slept off the previous sleepless night before exams. I woke up to hear a loud clank. The car had thrown a rod.
My pal the driver and his girlfriend left me twisting in the wind, and quickly hitched a ride outta there and back to New York. Eventually, the cops came by and called a tow truck. The repair bill (towing and rebuilding the engine) came to $135, a veritable fortune in 1957. And who the hell in the world of students had ever heard of a credit card back then?
My own college girlfriend, who stayed with me, was a terrible cheapskate. She had saved all the pennies she got in change from anything in empty Marlboro boxes, and she had all her Marlboro boxes in a shoe box that weighed enough to sink a boat. She offered to pay my $135 bill in pennies, but the garage owner wasn't having it.
Finally, I called my parents who drove from New York to Washington, PA, where the car had broken down and paid the bill.
The car was later sold to a baker for about what the repair bill had been.
And you wonder why I'm cranky?
Very crankily yours,
The New York Crank
My first driver was a '51 Chev 2-door fastback, purchased for $125 in the spring of 1961. A sophomore in high school at the time, I used the car for transportation to school and to deliver an early-morning Oregonian paper route (800 papers daily, 950 on Sundays). Had to support the car, you know.
ReplyDeleteThis was the car in which I taught myself how to execute a four-wheel drift in the rain and live to tell about it, how to make smooth double-clutch downshifts so as not to tear up the drivetrain, and how to scrub off excess speed when the brakes fade.
On a hard run back to Portland from Government Camp, while trying to keep up with a Porsche 356 that was apparently being driven by a madman, the no. 5 piston went south (if south is straight into the oil pan), and that was the beginning of the end for that particular car. An engine cannibalized from a '49 convertible replaced the destroyed original, but it was more gutless than the original so I sold the car to a friend for 50 bucks.
My first car was a 1968 Ford Mustang. I was in high school, with a good job, and had little else to save up for but a car. I drove it for a couple years before getting tired of it's unreliable starting in cold weather and rust-bucket state. No, I wasn't driving it in 1968... Sold it for $300 "as is" and never looked back.
ReplyDeleteAh my first. Sigh. I was living 3 miles in on a dirt road from nowhere. My sweetie and I got married and my parents traded in their old junker for a brand new 1972 VW Bug as a wedding gift."Still only $1999.00" back then.
ReplyDeleteAlso for their peace of mind, we actually had transportation.
I later sold it to buy a Transporter (bad move).
That bug went everywhere, road or not.I miss it.
w3ski
@JAEBM,
ReplyDeleteHow about a blog article telling us about your type-ratings/ different planes you have flown? I'll consult my logbooks to be able to reply. :-)