The old Ford infuriated me so much that I kicked the driver’s door, only for my foot to go right through the rusted metal and get stuck half in and half out of the door. As it turned out all three of my first cars frustrated me that much, but then what can you expect when the total price of all three was $750.

At 17, I quit high school and moved to Dallas to start my grownup life. I joined my friend Denny there and got my first taste of cars other than the ones my parents and my friends owned. Denny had four of them: a 1952 Chevy, a 1955 Oldsmobile, and two 1953 Studebakers. The Studebakers were identical except one was black and the other white, which gave us no end of fun confusing our friends. We’d drive the white one on one day and then the black one on the next. Denny had one set of license plates, which we rotated among the four cars, based on whichever one was running at that moment. He didn’t have the title to any of them. Between the two of us, we had one driver’s license, mine, and, of course, no insurance. Gas was 19.9 cents per gallon, but we still couldn’t afford it, so we siphoned from other cars. Fun though it was, I soon realized that the future for me was dim unless I had some proper education, so I said goodbye to Denny and hitchhiked back to Newport, Kentucky, with the intention of finishing high school.

My parents were off working on their undergraduate degrees at a faraway college for the summer but allowed me to live in our family home while they were away. I applied for my old job of cooking at the Big Boy Restaurant in Newport and was rehired immediately for the second shift, 3 PM to 11 PM. The only problem was that my parents’ house was two miles from the restaurant. I could get a bus to work but by the time cleanup was finished at midnight, the buses had long since stopped running. If I was lucky, one of my co-workers would give me a ride but more often than not, I had to walk, resulting in getting home dog tired at around 1:30 AM.

Two weeks into my job my friend Smoky Howard pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot driving a 1953 Ford four-door sedan. It had a flathead V8 engine and a standard transmission but no hope of ever being a hot rod. The paint had faded to a dull gray, that is, where it wasn’t red and brown rust colored. Smoky told me that he had another car lined up but had to get rid of this one first. I asked him what he wanted for it, to which he replied $50. I had $60 in my pocket and said “Sold!”. He didn’t have the title with him but like Denny’s four cars in Dallas, what 17-year-old cares about such trivial administrative details? I won’t say I drove home in style that night but at least I didn’t have to walk.

The Ford had rust everywhere, bald tires, and holes in the seat covers, in other words a perfect car for the summer. Smoky warned me that it leaked oil badly so I bought four quarts of recycled motor oil at a gas station. He wasn’t joking as I soon discovered. Every time I put gas into the Ford I had to add a quart of oil. Every time I left a parking spot there was a puddle of oil where the car had been sitting. I bought a cheap seat cover that looked like something you would put on a worn-out couch but at least it covered the holes in the front seat and it was ready to go.

I took my girlfriend for a ride as soon as I had some time off from work. To say she was unimpressed with my new ride is to considerably understate her feelings. A week later, on our way to get some dinner, I stopped to get some gas only to find that the starter had decided to fail. That’s when I kicked the door. After I extracted my foot, I asked another guy who was also getting gas to give me a push. I popped the clutch, and the Ford started right up. After a week of parking on hills so that I could get the car started and watching oil run out of the engine, I decided it was time to go back to walking and bumming rides. A friend offered me $55 for it and I handed him the keys. The engine blew up shortly afterwards when he forgot to refill the oil. He took off the license plate and left the car sitting on the side of the road.

Several months later, I was ready to try my luck again. My next car was a 1960 Rambler station wagon. During the summer, I rode a 90 CC Bridgestone motorcycle I bought from another friend. It was in good shape when I bought it but that only lasted until I followed another friend in his new GTO too closely. A car pulled out in front of him and his brakes worked much better than mine. The Bridgestone wound up on his trunk and I wound up on the GTO’s roof. There was no damage to me or the GTO, but the motorcycle’s front fork was kind of bent backwards a little. Fall was coming and after the minor wreck motorcycles didn’t seem to be it for me, so I rode it over to a motorcycle dealer who offered me $100 for it. I handed him the keys and walked back home.

It just so happened that my girlfriend’s mother had a car she was trying to sell. It was the Rambler station wagon. Its purple paint and black interior were in better shape than the Ford’s and it didn’t leak oil, but it too had a few drawbacks, starting with the front bumper and hood. Right in the center of those two was a telephone pole shaped dent where she had come to a stop after inadvertently hitting the gas instead of the brakes. Then there was the cracked windshield where someone had dropped a rock on it from an overpass. Neither of these kept the Rambler from running well, so I offered her the $100 I got for the Bridgestone and I now owned my second car. This time I had the title and had it legally put in my name. I still had no insurance, of course, but none was required back then.

Shortly after I bought it, I parked in front of my girlfriend’s nextdoor neighbor’s house one evening. When I came out to leave, the neighbor was waiting for me and launched into a tirade about my taking his parking spot. I was highly indignant. I would park anywhere I wanted, dammit, and there was nothing he could do about it! I got in the Rambler and started it up. It was dark by this time, and I put it in gear and started to pull out quickly to show how cool I was. Ramblers didn’t have a conventional gearshift lever. Instead, they had a push button selector. I hit what I thought was drive and stomped on the gas only to find I had selected reverse. The Rambler slammed hard into the front bumper of the neighbor’s 1955 Buick. Red faced, I put my car into drive and moved forward a bit. Getting out, I walked to the rear to see what damage had been done.

The 1955 Buick had two protrusions on the front bumper that looked a lot like the cone-shaped bras movie stars wore in the 1950s. Those two protrusions had put two holes in the tailgate of the Rambler without any damage at all to the Buick. The neighbor and I looked at the two holes, then at each other and started to laugh.

A few weeks I started the Rambler up and put it into the correct gear only to find that while the RPM went up just fine, the car didn’t move. I had no idea what the problem was, but I wasn’t about to put any money into a $100 car to fix it. A friend’s dad was a mechanic so I gave him the car keys and told him he could have it. A month later, I was talking to a co-worker at the Jewelry store where I now worked when I noticed a familiar looking Rambler sitting out front. I walked out to look at it and found that while the hood, bumper, windshield, and the two holes in the tailgate had been repaired, it definitely was my old car. My friend’s dad fixed it and sold it. He hadn’t asked me about the title when I gave it to him, and I had forgotten about it. When the new owner came back, I waited until he opened the driver’s door and asked him why he was getting in my car. He told me in no uncertain terms to go away since it was his car and not mine. I said, “Want to bet?” and pulled out the title from my wallet clearly showing me as the Rambler’s owner. His mouth dropped open, but to his relief I laughed and handed the title to him. No more Rambler station wagons for me.

After those two it was time to get a reliable car. I saw the one I thought would be perfect – a 1960 Chevy Bel Air. This one was a two-door sedan with two-tone paint, green on the body with a white top. It had a small V8 engine and an automatic transmission. The white wall tires had lots of tread left on them and there was no puddle of oil under the engine. The interior was good, with no holes in the seat covers. At $600 the price was right too. I bought it on credit and drove it home. This time my girlfriend was impressed. Only a little, but still…

Apparently judging reliability wasn’t my strong suit. The trouble with the Bel Air started a few weeks later. I was turning around at a wide place on a hilly road when reverse decided to no longer work. Eventually, with the help of some friends, I managed to get the car out of the turning spot and back home. I had to make sure to park it where I wouldn’t have to use reverse to get out, but that didn’t last long because the transmission soon went out altogether. I didn’t have enough money to take it to a transmission repair company, so I was stuck. My Uncle John listened to my tale of woe and volunteered to fix it for whatever the parts cost. We would take it from Newport, Kentucky, to Middletown, Ohio, about 30 miles away, to where another uncle, Uncle Hobert, had a garage and all the needed tools.

I couldn’t afford to pay for a wrecker to tow it to Middletown but again Uncle John came to the rescue. We would tie a rope to the front bumper of the Chevy and to the back bumper of Uncle John’s car and away we would go! I would ride in the Chevy and steer while John did the towing. I had to watch his brake lights carefully so I could get the Bel Air stopped when he slowed down. We got the Chevy to Middletown without any problems. Two weeks later, it was back on the road with both forward and reverse gears. Thank you, Uncles John and Hobert.

Then the floor on the left rear passenger side rusted through, letting the back seat passenger look at the road below his feet as I drove along. Then the exhaust pipe fell off. The entire exhaust system didn’t fall off, just the part in front of the muffler. Not only was it extremely loud, but by the time I got home, the hot exhaust had set the rear carpet on fire. I managed to get it put out with a garden hose before it did too much damage. A friend welded the pipe back together. A “borrowed” road sign covered the hole in the floor and I was on the road again.

I never quite believed the fuel gauge in that car. I always thought that it had a little more gas in it than it did. My non-belief came to a head when I ran out of fuel halfway across a two-lane bridge over the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Newport, Kentucky at rush hour. I was not a popular person that day. Another time it ran out of gas parked on Newport’s main shopping street. It was late and I had parked there to eat a couple of Coney Island hotdogs at the Dixie Restaurant. I decided to just sleep in the car and deal with the fuel situation in the morning. I woke up to find two parking tickets on my windshield. The cops hadn’t even bothered to wake me; they just wrote the tickets and kept walking.

About that same time, the battery decided it didn’t want to hold a full charge. After a date one night, the car wouldn’t start. It was late and raining a little, but we were only a few blocks from my parents’ house. I told my girlfriend that she could stay in the car while I walked to my parent’s house and borrowed their car. She said, no, let’s just wait a few minutes and see if it will start. With that she climbed into the back seat to take a nap. I settled behind the wheel and watched the rain fall. I closed my eyes for just a minute and when I opened them, the sun was shining. Oh, no! I turned the key, and the Chevy started right up. I was halfway to her house before she could climb back into the front seat. Even after my explanation of our innocent misadventure, her mother was not amused. With my next paycheck I bought a new battery.

The final straw came when I was driving home from work in heavy traffic and applied the brakes, only to find the brake pedal went to the floor and the car didn’t slow down. After pumping it three times, braking returned, sort of. I drove the Chevy to a brake repair shop immediately. After I explained that you had to pump it three times before you had any braking action at all, the mechanic hopped in, started it up, popped it in gear, and gunned the engine as he drove it into the shop. He drove it straight into the wall. There was more damage to the wall than to the Chevy but that was the end. The next week I traded the Bel Air for a brand new 1968 Mustang. This time my former girlfriend, now my wife, was impressed indeed. Time to grow up and stop driving old junkers. Except, being a male person, I didn’t, but those other cars are another story. 

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