My Life in Cars: Part 1
A Rambler, a Volvo, and a Mazda Rx7
Come take a walk with me down Memory Lane as I recall the cars of my life. I have owned a total of eight cars. Three were purchased used, and the other five were brand new off the dealers’ lots. These are the cars, with some amusing anecdotes about each. Please note: I am most definitely NOT a motorhead.
My first car was an off-white 1962 Rambler station wagon. I bought it when I was 18 in 1973 for $800 from a guy my dad worked with. It had fully-reclining front seats which, my dad told me, were illegal in the state of New Jersey. (I was born in New Jersey but by then we lived in southern California.)
At one point, the reverse gear went out on the car’s automatic transmission. I drove it around for a while with no reverse gear. That was exciting.
Eventually, I took it to a name-brand transmission service station and they quoted me $2,000 to fix it. Somebody told me about an owner-run service shop. When I took it to that guy, he fixed it and said, “The bands just needed tightening. No charge.”
When I was at UC Berkeley, I was lived in a third-story walk-up apartment on Telegraph Ave. just over the border in Oakland. The bottom floor was a porn shop. In the apartment that shared the top floor with mine, a speed freak vet had his motorcycle disassembled in his living room. He was working on it. When I left the apartment three years later, he was still working on it.
I parked the Rambler on the side street next to the apartment building. One morning I got up and it was gone, stolen. I reported it to the police and that was that.
I started taking the bus up Telegraph Ave. to the university, but I didn’t like waiting for buses. So I began simply to walk it. It was good exercise and gave my brain time to relax.
About six months later, we got a call from the police. They found my car! Apparently some kids took it for a joy ride and dumped it on a side street in Emoryville. Eventually somebody reported it as a derelict vehicle and that’s how it finally returned to me. It had a broken windshield, but once I replaced that, the car was as good as … well, not as good as new, but as good as it ever was for me.
Although I had my car back, I continued to walk to school because I’d gotten to like it by then. And trying to find somewhere to park near the university was excruciating. As I recall, there was no on-campus parking for students; it was all on-street parking. They were talking about turning the famous People’s Park (where the hippies hung out and protested in the 1960s) into what we contemptuously dubbed People’s Parking Lot, but it hadn’t happened by the time I was graduated.
I had a roommate who had a little Toyota pickup truck that he parked on the same side street. One morning he went down to drive to work and the damn thing wouldn’t start. He popped the hood and immediately noticed that the battery was missing. But here’s the funny part. As he searched around the vehicle for clues, there was the battery sitting in the gutter next to the truck! Apparently, the thieves pried the cables off with a screwdriver and clumsily punched a little hole in the battery. So they didn’t want it anymore. My friend installed it back into the truck and drove it to the auto parts store to buy a new battery. Quite convenient!
Somewhere along the line, the turn signals in the Rambler stopped working. Being an electrical engineering student, I quickly determined that the problem was in the switch at the steering column. Rather than fix it the right way, I just got a switch I had lying around, attached it to the dashboard wiring, and wrapped it with a clump of black electrical tape so it jutted out from under the dashboard like a plant stalk. It had three little plastic buttons that I wired for left, right and off. When I finally traded in the Rambler at a dealership, they gave me something like $100 bucks for it. As I was signing the papers for my new Volvo, somebody from the service garage dropped in and said, “Nice job on that turn signal!” (I asked what they did with virtually worthless used cars like that and they told me they dumped them in Mexico.)
When I started making some real money after college, I bought a brand new Volvo 242 sedan.
Quite the sporty model for a young person starting out on their own in the world, huh? I kid.
Shortly after I got the car, a young jock at work, whom I knew slightly, also bought a new car: a hot, beautiful Nissan 280Z sports car. One day he came to me and said, “I’ve got some friends coming in from out of town this weekend and they won’t all fit in my car. What would you think of swapping cars for the weekend?” “Hell yeah!” I said, and we did.
On Monday, he looked sheepish as he handed me back my keys. He mumbled, “Umm, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but we took your car up to Lake Tahoe skiing. I have to mention it because my dumb-ass buddy knocked his ski against the car and left a little scratch. I buffed it out a bit but if you want to get it fixed properly, I’ll pay for it of course.” I magnanimously laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it. Cars get scratches and dings.”
What I didn’t mention to him was that I had damn near totalled his car!
What happened was, right after we swapped, a friend and I were driving north on the 101 freeway in South San Francisco, heading into the city just after dark. I wasn’t familiar with the car or its stick shift yet, and I am near-sighted, and my night vision ain’t so great.
We were tooling along in the right-hand lane having a great time. Suddenly, my friend called out, “Hey! I think that car in our lane up there may be stopped!” “Shit!” I yelled and smashed the brake and cranked the steering wheel.
We spun out across all four lanes of the freeway and wound up pointing the wrong way, just a few inches from the concrete center divider. It was a miracle that there happened to be a break in traffic and we didn’t hit anybody or cause further havoc. I was able to pull a quick U-turn and continue on up the road, shaking in terror. By all rights that car should have been totalled, and us injured or killed. My guardian angel was my co-pilot that night.
I think the reason why I moved on from the Volvo was that somebody told me, “You’d better sell a new car within five years or else keep if for a long time, because the resale value drops off a cliff at five years.” Besides, it was time for something sportier.
Next up was a Mazda Rx7, the one with the Wankel rotary engine.
A young Black woman I worked with at Intel had had a cool black Rx7 that I thought was just bitchin’. Eventually, I got my own, but in brown. (Brown? Geez, what was I thinking?) It was my first car with a manual transmission (one of only two ever) and it was lots of fun to drive.
Too fun, in fact, because I started getting speeding tickets. I got me one of those radar detector gadgets and never got a ticket after that, but the bloom was off the rose for me.
I was into country music at the time, so I traded in the Rx7 and bought an old Chevy S10 pickup truck. I guess I was trying to be Joe Normal.
The truck was cool for while, although it never ran very well. But before long, it got too rough on my bad back (herniated S5-L1 disc). I needed to find something more comfortable.
I sold the old truck to a fellow at work and within a week, he had it purring like a kitten. Did I mention that I’m not a motorhead?
The saga will conclude in Part 2, coming soon…
Note: The photos in this article are examples of the models scraped from the Internet. The colors are the same as on my actual cars.
— Lannie Rose, September 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
GPT-4 (bing.com/new) used heavily for research, but not at all for writing (except as a thesaurus)
