Cars

I have owned and/or driven more than 40 cars in my life (and at least 10 motorcycles and maybe 15 or 20 bicycles but that’s another story). I started with the family station wagon, a 69 Dodge Polara with facing rear seats that my dad sold me for $400. Then one morning after an all night party I loaned it to some idiot I had just met and he went out and got it t-boned (wait who was the idiot here?). I drove it for a while after that but it was seriously compromised. I sold it to a junk yard for $25. 

 69 Dodge Polara (stock photo)

My mom gave me her car, it was a 76 golden-brown Plymouth Fury coupe, I was fond of it because it was the first car I owned with an ass-kicking stereo. It always ran rough though and one day it just conked out and I left it at the side of the road. I intended to tow it home but the cops got there first and I never could afford to get it out of the impound. My dad then sold me his 72 Buick LeSabre, again for $400. I drove that for about a year, it was a sweet ride, plush seats, power windows, no window posts (also called a hardtop sedan), AC, 350 V8, Powerglide Automatic, I loved that car but I traded it for a 76 Ford Granada with a bent frame when the differential went south. I sold the Granada for $100 to the junk yard about 6 months after that, wishing I had kept the Buick, busted differential and all. In the meantime I bought a roofing company (as an aside, it was called Miller Roofing and I kept the name), it came with a white 72 Ford F100 stepside, a 66 Dodge van, a 58 GMC/International 2 ton, and just for kicks a yellow 66 Toyota Corolla with four doors and three on the tree. I drove all of them at one time or another, with the Miller Roofing sign on the doors. I added a 72 Ford F250, gold and brown, it was a sweet sweet truck, but then I lost the roofing company in a crap game and got married around the same time. My wife owned a 76 VW Super Beetle, a good car but always broke down (I think it had bad fuel injectors). 

 76 VW Super Beetle

She also drove a 72 CJ5 that belonged to her dad, but he sort of gave it to us and I drove that thing for a while, until the rear axle seized up on the freeway so I put it in 4 wheel drive and dragged the back tires all the way home. He took it back and gave it to his stepson, who painted it red and fixed it up and sold it for a profit. I don’t know if my father-in-law ever saw any of it though (not, is my guess). A friend of mine had converted a  64 Dodge Power Wagon from 2WD to 4WD, we paid him $1500 for it, it had two bucket seats and a screwy system of cables and ratchets that somehow kept the back doors from flying open, and the biggest tires anyone had ever seen at that point. It had electrical problems, if you drove it after dark (because you needed headlights which drained the battery) you’d have to drive from one hilltop to the next and let it sit for about 20 minutes to recharge the battery enough to roll start it to the next hill. I worked on it every weekend for about a year so I finally gave up and sold it to my step brother-in-law for $50 down and $1000 total but he never made another payment, I guess I don’t blame him. Much. A 72 Ford powder blue F100 caught my eye when sitting point at Spedding Ford, I bought it without checking with my wife, big mistake, but it was my first time buying from a dealer, and at the time the nicest car I had owned (I financed it through the dealer, $106 per month, those guys were total crooks by the way). I drove that for about a year and then the motor blew up, well sort of, the oil leaked out and I kept driving it for like 50 miles not realizing what was up. Then it got repossessed because why would I make payments on something I could not drive, along with my wife’s 76 VW Super Beetle that the Ford dealer convinced us to put up to help secure the loan on the truck (I told you those guys were crooks), if only I had known better… We then bought an orange 71 VW squareback, with the pancake engine, that thing was so bad it would quit for no reason (probably clogged fuel injectors but I couldn’t figure it out at the time) and we’d sit at the side of the road for 5-10 minutes until it would start up again. We finally got tired of that, I can’t remember what happened to it but I bet it wasn’t pretty. A friend had stayed with us for a few weeks and left behind a 76 Ford LTD, green, it was a kick to drive but one day we took it out to the Colorado National Grasslands and drove up this dirt road for about 20 miles and got a flat and came to realize we had no trunk key. I found a nice sized rock, which opened the trunk, but there was no jack. We drove it along with the flat, eventually a very nice lady came along in a 75 F100 and loaned us a jack, the spare was low but not quite flat, so we changed the tire and made it to a station and filled it up. It turned out the car belonged to a used car dealer and they found it and took it back. In the meantime we started driving my brother’s 72 Chevy Nova, he had moved to Australia and left it behind. It needed to warm up for 5-10 minutes every day (probably the injectors, again, but, again, I couldn’t figure it out) even when the temperature was 100 degrees, so we gave up on that and drove a 74 Dodge Dart that my Grandfather had left to me and my other brother. He needed it worse than me so I gave him my share. My mom had also decamped to Australia and left behind her 79 Mazda GLC, so we drove that for about a year until the clutch went blooey. Not exactly our car, but not exactly not.

Back end of the 79 Mazda GLC

We traded what was left of it for a  baby blue 66 VW microbus, the last year with the split windshield, which ran pretty well most of the time until the engine blew up. I rebuilt it in the basement, I was desperate to make that thing work. We drove it to San Francisco that summer, it developed an electrical problem (the dumb thing worked on a 6 volt system) and I had to buy an extra battery and battery charger and charge the batteries overnight in the hotel. Plus the transaxle decided to take a flyer, I had to tie a bandana around the seat and the shifter just to hold it in gear. It broke down every day on the way out there and every day on the way back, including in the middle of the Great Salt Lake Desert when it was 120 in the shade. It finally broke down for good about 25 miles from home, we left it at the side of the freeway and later a friend towed me in. I parted it out for awhile, when I finally called the classifieds to sell the hulk the lady on the phone told me no need to place an ad, her husband would buy it for the $20 I was asking. And he did. 

 66 VW Microbus after it broke in the Great Salt Lake Desert

I then bought a 72 Buick Estate Wagon for $200, it had a 454 with a 4 barrel carb, it made the weirdest sloshing sound for a few weeks until I figured out the back window leaked into the storage bay under the far back seats. I never could quite get it fixed, I finally sold it for $100 to a friend of mine.

Back end of the 72 Buick Estate Wagon

I then bought a 72 Chevy pickup for $250, it had three in the tree, it wasn’t running when I got it but pretty much all it needed was a jump and a clutch, I procrastinated on the clutch though until one day I was at a stop sign and was waiting for it to engage when a cop pulled up and gave me a ticket for air pollution. I finally sold it for $125 to an old guy and his wife, I had to give him 3 on the tree lessons though before he could drive it off. We then bought a 72 Toyota Corolla station wagon, and moved to Los Angeles. We drove that thing for a few years until it got stolen outside a Ralphs, it ran like a top. It sat on the street collecting parking tickets for a month before the police notified me, by that time I had already bought a 76 Cadillac Seville. Two tone black and silver, 350 V8. Power freaking everything. I loved that car almost as much as life itself, on road trips you could engage cruise control and drive it at a constant 70 mph all day long, but then one day at LAX everything powered off for a brief moment then powered back on and it was never the same again. It got to the point where it couldn’t be driven after dark because the headlights would discharge the battery.

76 Two Tone Cadillac Seville

My wife convinced me, for the first time in my life, to buy a new car, so we went to Penske Honda and traded the Seville in on a  91 Honda Accord (we skipped the 80s almost entirely, car-wise), the negotiation took a long time and it was getting darker and darker and darker and finally I knew we either had to buy the car or walk home, we bought it…my wife took it and never gave it up…

 David's first driving lesson 91 Honda Accord

In the meantime I was driving a 94 Yamaha VMAX to work and back (I  had got $200 on the tradein of my 76 Yamaha 750 3-banger which I drove pretty much every day for 15 years).

94 Yamaha VMAX

76 Yamaha 750

The VMAX became too much to handle when I realized I needed to fill it up every third leg of my commute, also that I was doing 110 on the 405 when everyone else was doing 90, so I found an 86 (my first car made in the 80s!) Datsun B210 for $200 that sounded like a sewing machine when it got revved up, I bought a new seat and shifter handle at the junkyard and drove that thing for a year out to Calabasas and back, I always drove along Pacific Coast Highway so if it broke down I’d be at the beach. Then one day I was late so I took the 101, for some reason when I stopped for gas I decided to add water, and going down the Calabasas hill the damn thing blew up, I coasted all the way down the hill and off the off ramp and over the curb up onto the dirt. I walked across the freeway to the McDonalds and called a co-worker to come pick me up, as luck would have it a school bus pulled in carrying 150 coeds from Pepperdine, so I did not miss the beach so much after that. Near my office I saw a 76 Oldsmobile Delta 88 for sale, again with power everything and a trunk big enough to sleep in, were I so inclined, I bought that for $500 then found out reverse was intermittent and finally it went kaput. I used to do the Fred Flintstone thing, put my foot out the door and push it backwards out of parking spots. I got so I could either bounce it off a parking block, if necessary, but it was like 2 ½ tons so even the slightest incline in the wrong direction would carry it back into the space and I’d have to enlist help to push it back out again. I also became very good at parking only in spaces that were either sloped out the back, or I could pull through. One day my wife took it to the Post Office and got blocked in for half an hour and the next day the Make-A-Wish Foundation towed it off…

76 Oldsmobile Delta 88

I decided I needed another pickup truck, so I went to Metro Ford and traded the VMAX in on a brand new 97 F350 2WD crewcab, red with a matching camper shell and a carpet kit and dual gas tanks (I wanted green but they offered me a $4000 discount for the red one, what would you do? I drove the red one home…), it had been ordered but never delivered by an ambulance company. We drove that thing all over California, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, I once spent $198 to fill it up.

 97 Ford F350

Then in 1999 I hit the trifecta in the Kentucky Derby (Chris Antley and Charismatic!) and we went to Sunrise Ford and bought my wife a 99 Ford Mustang Convertible 35^th Anniversary Special Edition (it also came with a 3 CD Box Set called Mustang Reborn to Run).

 99 Ford Mustang Convertible 35th Anniversary Special Edition

We gave the Honda to our son as a graduation present. I always wanted to drive a Lincoln and I was tired of driving the F350 every day, so in 2008 when the Great Bush Recession hit, and GM, Ford, and Chrysler were flirting with bankruptcy, I figured it was now or never, so we went over to Galpin Lincoln and bought a 09 MKZ .

 09 Lincoln MKZ window sticker

I parked the F350 in the carport beside our garage, where it pretty much sat until 2016 when I sold it on eBay for $4500, it was 19 years old. The guy was from Las Vegas and he tried to talk me down because there was “rust” underneath and I said “whaddya think it’s 19 years old!” and I was fully ready to keep it but he went ahead and paid up, cash, it was near immaculate anyway for 19 years old. Which brings me to 2015. We went to the Fiat Dealer to trade in the Mustang on a15 Fiat Lounge, when they ran the Carfax the Mustang came up as stolen (Carfax sucks ass by the way). So they wouldn’t take it on a trade. We went ahead and bought the Lounge anyway, and the 99 Mustang Convertible 35^th Anniversary Special Edition (I still have the CD Box Set by the way, minus the packaging) we left sitting in front of the F350 in the driveway. I drove it until it broke down one day at the ARCO, then we donated it to Habitat for Humanity. I cried the day they towed it off. Which brings us to 2017, we sold the house and gave the Lincoln to our nephew and bought a Tiffin Allegro Red 33aa RV which we moved into and are now living on it for the next 5-10 years and towing the Fiat around behind it so we have something to drive when it’s parked. After that, who knows?