First Love

I know that I have probably loved cars since I first realized what they were! My Mom tells stories of standing on a corner with me when I was five and of me naming the cars as they passed. I remember the first car our family had was a very used 1946 Dodge 4 door sedan. I recall standing up in the front seat between my Mom and Dad as we drove down the road! The package shelf in front of the back window on that old Dodge was huge, and there were times when I'd nap up there. Seat belts, child safety seats, automatic door locks? Never heard of any of them back then. My God, we are lucky that any of us that were born in the 50s even made it to adulthood!! As I grew up, I continued to love cars and couldn't get enough of them. I remember that during the summers of 1964 and 1965, when my friends David, Richard and I would head to the NY World's Fair, the first place we'd go to would be the transportation area. We were really in our glory riding in a new convertible on the Ford Magic Skyway (even better if it was a brand new Mustang), or traveling to the future of transportation at the GM Futurama, or looking at Chrysler's take on the future..the Chrysler Turbine! The great thing all these pavilions had in common was at the end of the ride, you got to look at, sit in and generally ingest that manufacture's 1964 line of cars! Wow…what could be better for three teenage boys! Sometimes I think that the first sixteen years of my life were just the buildup to that magical day when I could start Driver's Ed! I remember going down to the DMV the first time to take the learner's permit test. I'm sure I had worn out the study book, as I would fall asleep reading through it. By the time I took the test, I could quote from memory the distance one needed to keep from the back of the car in front of you at any speed. The test was a breeze, and then it was just a wait till my first class in the car, so I could get my hands on the wheel. I think it was only shortly after that first class that I convinced my Mom to take me out for a little practice. We lived in Jackson Heights at the time, and the relatively undeveloped area around LaGuardia Airport was the perfect place – I thought. That was until I made a turn on an unfamiliar road and suddenly discovered that I was on the entrance ramp of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway! I'd probably spent a total of twenty minutes behind the wheel of a car, and here I was trying to merge with traffic that seemed to be flying by – a real baptism of fire! I survived that first session, and ended up being the first one in my Driver's Ed Class to pass the road test. I even remember the date – December 17, 1966! The only problem was my 17th birthday wasn't till January, but living in NYC, the only way I'd get a regular license was with a Driver's Ed Blue Card, and the class didn't end till February! That was a real long two month wait, and because I had my junior license, I didn't want to drive at all and jeopardize getting my full fledged license so the only time I got behind the wheel of a car was the 10-15 minutes a week in Driver's Ed. Painful! I learned to drive on my folks' new 1966 Ford Galaxie 500 4-door hardtop, and loved the way the 390 V/8 got that big car pickup. As with all new drivers, I'd find any excuse to get behind the wheel, and was always the one driving to and from any family outing or errand that came about. Then the moment came to get my own car, and frankly it was about as different from the Galaxie as a car could be and still have 4 wheels! My first car was a 1955 Chevrolet BelAir 2-door sedan. Today, that would be a prized vehicle to an old Chevy collector, but in 1967 it was just an old car. The car was a bilious two-tone green, had a stove bold 6 cylinder engine, a three speed manual transmission on the column, and power nothing! I bought it from friends of my folks for $50, and had to pick it up at their house in New Rochelle. For a cocky 17 year old who had been driving legally for only a couple of months and thought he knew everything, (yes, back in the dark ages when we were teenagers, we too thought we knew everything) driving my first stick shift car from Westchester to Queens was a humbling experience. Starting, slowing, and ultimately stopping a three speed stick shift car was nothing like what I'd imagined, and was an endeavor I was ill prepared for! I managed to make it home in one piece, but stopped as little as possible (like for the toll on the Whitestone Bridge). For the next three weeks I worked on my car and tried to make it look as good as possible. I compounded and waxed the car (at one spot down to bare metal), but I couldn't make the two tone green look any better than bilious. In an attempt to make it look "sporty," I even put a $20 racing stripe on from the trunk to the hood, but the stove bolt 6 was still a boat anchor. I did, however, get much better at the operation of the stick shift, and by the end of that three week period, I could even start from a stop on a hill in a pretty efficient manner. You may notice that I've used the term three weeks several times, and may wonder how, all these years later, I remember exactly how long it took for me to get comfortable with my new car. Well, it wasn't a measurement of reaching a comfort level…it was it's life span. Three weeks after picking the Chevy up, while on the way to work at Alexander's Department Store in Rego Park, I ended her life. It was early on a summer morning, and as my friend Richard and I drove down 34th Avenue in Corona, Queens, and with the morning sun shining in my eyes, I plowed my '55 Chevy into a '52 Chevy that was sitting dead in the road! What was the likelihood that two old cars (one 15 years old and the other 12 years old) would meet in this way on a summer's morning? I hit him hard (pushed him a half a block), hit my mouth on the huge steering wheel (about 5 stitches later in the day), and pretty much ripped the trunk off the '52, while doing a hell of a job on the front end of my car. If I live to be 100, I will always remember that the gentleman's name I hit was Lemberg Nelson, and as he got out of his car after the accident, the first words he spoke were, "Oh my neck". That was the end of my first car, and even now, over 43 years later, I still remember the events of that day better than I remember what I did at work last Friday! The end of a first love is always hard, especially if it gets ended in a traumatic way. For a car nut, the end of your first car is a memorable occasion, and it my case, the fact that it was a short term relationship made it even worse. There have been lots of cars since that Chevy, and I've had them all much longer than that first car, but that's how my first ownership adventure went.