The First Car

Ask most people to tell you about a memorable experience in their life, and you're bound to hear the relatively-short story of their first kiss, first love, (first?) marriage or birth of their first child. But there is one subject that is guaranteed to make those same people lay their heads back in their chairs, don their rose-colored glasses and look toward the sky as if preparing to tell a story as significant as The Birth of a Nation. That subject is the person's first car.

The length of the ensuing tale is directly proportional to the age and running condition of both the car in-question and the person telling the story. Most twenty-somethings can tell you a good story or two about their first car, but not the same way someone three times their age can. It's as if people keep these stories fresh in their minds, just waiting for members of the younger generation to ask the right questions or complain about their own first car.

The stories are almost-always comical: I've heard of a mid-'70s Corvette that could destroy anything on the road today despite having less horsepower than any Toyota Camry made in the last ten years, an automatic 6-cylinder Mustang that the small-town cops could never catch and a Volkswagen Beetle that shuttled its owner back-and-forth to school (10 hours away) on just two gallons of gas. A room full of professional painters could not come up with the superlatives people use to describe the color of their first car: red cars were candy apple red, black cars had a gloss so deep you could use the door panel as a mirror to shave in and the other colors were either rust brown, pea green, puke orange, sky blue or banana yellow. The stories usually contain financial lessons: saving money earned from the paper route the person had from birth to age 16 to raise the $25 needed to buy the car, working 3 full-time jobs, making straight A's in school, helping tend the farm and saving enough money to turn grandma's hand-me-down into the boulevard-prowling Beast of the Northeast - at age 15 and being responsible enough - at age 15 - to know that all that was needed was basic transportation to get from point A to point B.

But don't laugh too hard at the people who tell these stories. There usually is some wisdom hidden somewhere deep within. Remember, it wasn't their generation who popularized leasing, 72-month loans and 100% financing.

The picture above is me at age 16 posing with my first car, an '85 Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon. I could talk about that car all day, but I'm not old enough yet.