Every car has a story. A list.
I have been reading The Autopian since it was founded. Really, I’ve been reading David Tracy for years, and he and his fellow wrenching enthusiasts have been sort of the gateway for me into caring for cars that Tony Bourdain was when it came to travel–a sort of acknowledgement that it’s a fine thing to do, wrenching, that normal, non-mechanical people can do it, that cars are machines, and every machine breaks now and again, and even if you can’t solve it, it’ll be okay.
Anyway, David Tracy put out an article this week about all of the cars he’s bought and sold, and it made me wonder if I could compile a list of the cars I’ve owned (including the ones Kelly and I have owned together). And here is just as good of a place as any to catalog them.
1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon. My first car, inherited from my stepmother, Mary. When I earned my driver’s license in 1997, the car was 18 years old, but to my teenaged self, it felt 118. It was, admittedly, a car from another era. Its small block V8 ought to have provided tremendous power, but because it came from a time of fuel efficiency, it barely coughed up more than 115 horsepower. Mine was gold with a beige fiberglass top. Actually, gold is an exaggeration. The car I drove was dull brown. It consumed oil as greedily as it did fuel, which I thankfully could purchase for $0.95/gallon in those days. When I worked and saved and had enough money for a replacement when I graduated high school, we put the Olds in the front yard with a “for sale” sign in the windshield and a price of $800. A couple came by to test drive it and stole it. Later, we found it in a pay-by-the-week motel in Statesville. Mary felt so bad for the couple (who had apparently lived in the Oldsmobile for a while with their kid) that she just let them have it.
