Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Mottled together with your first crush, your first bike, your first pet, and those slightly blurry overexposed memories of waiting for the bus as a child, there are magic snapshot impressions of your first car.

You can conjure the names and faces of the people with you when you looked at it and bought it, the first friends you gave a ride to and the first work you did on it. If the smell of your first car could be bottled, you could pick out that olfactory profile from a hundred other blended vinyl and rayon and foam and dust and cologne and cigarette and cocker spaniel scents.

We can no more explain why a particular car stopped us cold in our thoughts than we can articulate why when Susan in the second row smiled, you felt a rush in your chest like a small herd of horses suddenly broke into a run in your ribcage. Cars grab us, reach out with their patina and chrome and yank our minds out of school work or chores or sports thoughts, to set us crafting daydreams at the wheel.

Two cars barged into my teenage head and set up as squatters demanding the right to appear in three dimensions in my parents’ driveway. The first was a yellow ’67 Camaro RS convertible with a black nose stripe and white top. It would sit weekdays at a small industrial park near my house. The second was a green MGB, an early one with wire wheels and a black interior. This one parked at National Liberty Insurance Company down the hill from my neighborhood, a company whose grounds we played on for years, sledding on a grassy hill there in winter, and skateboarding on their perfect asphalt in the summer (this was before we became an ultra-uptight nation, chasing away every potential lawsuit and guarding each piece of private property like the secret to eternal life were stored inside).

Under the wiper blades of each car I placed a note in magic marker offering to buy said vehicle. Neither owner called, yet I became so obsessed with the MGB that I stalked the car one day, venturing to its spot in the National Liberty lot half-hourly until the owner appeared. He was a guy in his late 20s or so—I was 15—and he was politely dismissive. He had just bought it himself to “fix up,” the universal phrase capturing the plans of the old-car buyer until successive breakdowns turn that goal into a “must sell” classified ad.

MGs had their spokes in me and I put out the word that I wanted one. A friend of a friend, older, had a ’71 Midget that my father and I went to look at. It needed a bearing in the transmission and was not really drivable other than to show it would work if fixed. The owner, Craig K—who had got himself an excellent 340 Dart Swinger—gave me a ride and I had to have that car or die. My father was less impressed.

The seller called me a few times to put the pressure on and I was more receptive than my parents. One day, he just brought it over.

There it was. My mother prevailed on my father and I turned over all the money mowing laws and shoveling snow had yielded plus a little more—my mom was a great advocate.

The photo above is the smitten youth, no different from readers here and schemers worldwide, prowling the four-wheeled world from flea-bitten roadside car lots to single-malt auctions where movie stars and billionaires gather to fulfill the very same dreams, forged years earlier when a certain car captures your waking mind and makes you a car nut. Forever.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.