Cars are a boy’s best friend. The love of cars starts with Hot Wheels or models at Christmas and evolves as you grow. Between the ages of 18 and 23, I owned three real cars.

Throughout high school I drove either of my parents’ cars. One was a Chrysler New Yorker that had push buttons to change gears and a huge bench seat the size of a small runway. The other was a 1956 Ford station wagon with a 289 T-bird engine. It sounds powerful, but it leaked oil like a thick, green waterfall and had a top speed of 60 miles per hour. We put in the thickest oil we could find and would put a tub under the car to collect the oil. We would then pour it back into the car.  My dad and I were going to rebuild the engine and fix the leak in the rear seal in order to teach me how to work on cars, but his untimely death made that impossible. I didn’t learn to work on a car until age 22.

After riding my bike to work in the summer of 1972, I decided that I would need a car to survive the Sacramento winters. I bought a real beater of a car – a 1959 Dodge station wagon. I paid $50 for it. It did not have a back window, but it had a great heater that would push out hot air with gale force winds. The turn signals didn’t work, but I compensated with hand signals. The worst part was I could never tell when the brake lights worked. There was a short in the wiring, and even though I replaced the fuse often, they malfunctioned more than they worked. The paint job barely covered most of the rusting body, so one day I bought a can of dark blue marine paint for boats and painted the car by hand. No sanding, no cutting. You could see the brush strokes.

After driving that for a few months, I bought a converted 1968 Chevy short school bus with 110,000 miles on it. The engine blew on the second day I had it. Still under a one-week warantee, I opted to have the dealer put in a brand new engine. The bus had been repainted a pale yellow, and I painted the inside baby blue with purple side panels and put in yellow and purple paisley hippie curtains. The final modification was a Pioneer 8-track sound system with six Jensen speakers. The Chevy van was popular taking my friends to drive-in movies and south to Magic Mountain. I owned this van until 1974. Transmission problems forced me to sell it.

I replaced the van with a 1967 green Ford Mustang. It was my pride and joy. I bought it in Davis, CA with three flat tires and absolutely destroyed ball joints and limped it home on the same questionable tires and a shaky suspension. The Mustang was not the hot car that it is today (collectible), but I absolutely adored this car. It was fast and the torsion bar suspension kept it stuck to the road. Radial tires were relatively new in 1974, so new tires, a new suspension, and new shocks made the car extremely stable. The paint just needed a little TLC and it shined like new! This is the car I drove to Portland when I moved in 1975. I never got a ticket in this car. However, I did total it when I collided with the four-wheel drive truck that crunched the front end.