A person’s first car usually holds a special place in their heart. Mine is no different. As a senior in high school having a means of transportation meant a certain element of freedom.
My first car was a 1964 Pontiac Lemans. Bought used for $450 is was the most beautiful vehicle I’d ever laid eyes on. Bucket seats and a three-speed on the floor made it a lot of fun to drive.
The only problem was that here in North Dakota winters can get very cold, which this vehicle did not always like. Cold morning starts were tough. To facilitate dealing with a stubborn engine I solved the problem by having two batteries. I kept one inside to keep it warm and if my car didn’t start I just swapped out the cold battery for the warm one. This worked great but was a bit clunky if you didn’t have any tools. To speed things along I usually didn’t clamp the battery down and just let it sit loosely in the tray. This was also fine except that occasionally when I would make a right turn the battery would lean over and ground out against the frame. This would cause the engine to die and all the lights to go off. The most impressive feature was that sparks would shoot out from under the hood while we continued to negotiate the turn. It looked very cool, especially at night! Once we straightened out, the battery would rock back, the light would come back on, and I would pop the clutch to get the engine going again. Always impressive with my buddies!
Of course, this is a classic case of ‘I wish I still had that car.’ It was tons of fun.
Jackson, the namesake of my childhood idol Michael Jackson, was my first car. Its original owner, my father, had previously named this gold, 1990 Toyota Forerunner “Buck.”
For most folks, the big questions in life are “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?”, and “What do I want to do with my life?” To a fifteen–year old red–blooded male in the South, one of the big questions is “Ford or Chevy?“
From the get–go it was a money pit, but I loved that car. Driving my new purchase home from Reno to San Jose, she blew a transmission gasket and had to be towed from Vallejo. I didn’t care—I had my ‘62 Ford Falcon with the deluxe chrome option—my first car.
My friend Adam helped me to negotiate a deal on my first car, which was a full–sized yellow Chevrolet Scottsdale truck. I bought it in Missoula, Montana with a loan to buy it for $1,700. I think it was a 1978, but I’m not sure. It was used at a horse stable ranch, which was evident because there was straw between the seats. It wore studded tires, with two spares attached to the bed. The owner welded a horse shoe onto the mechanism that screwed the spare tires to the sides of the bed in order to keep them standing up straight in back. There was a real eight–ball screwed onto the gear shift. The truck kicked ass!
My first car was a truck. I bought it after getting my first job with a contractor; I had worked for him for about two weeks and figured I had as steady a job as I could find in 1976. I bought the truck from a body shop guy who had painted it fire engine red and had replaced the bench seat with matching green bucket seats taken out of a Firebird or Camaro or some sort of muscle type car. This truck had three on the tree but first gear was still so low that you had to shift to second at about seven miles per hour. It was a 1959 Chevy long bed pick–up with wood slats for the bed and running boards next to the outside wheel wells. Someone had removed the grill and my buddy offered to replace it, but I didn’t want to pay him to do it. It didn’t matter anyway to me because I just needed it to work out of.
My first car was a silver 1972 Mercury Cougar, that wasn’t actually mine (a mere technicality) and my most vivid memories of it involved running out of gas, or trying to scrounge money so that I didn’t run out of gas.
My first car was a bug–eyed Austin Healey Sprite. I got it when I was 18. My first boyfriend was a blue–eyed artist named John. I got him when I was 17.
