Kids will groan when you tell a story, complaining that they've heard it a hundred times. Then, one day, unaccountably, they'll ask you to tell it again. Go figure.
The MG
After working at a gas station through the summer of 1959, I had earned
enough money for a tonier car—a 1951
MG-TD, an elegant model whose styling was halfway between the super-boxy MG-TC
and the sleeker, more modern MG-A. It
was maroon, and since it was a version called the Mark II, it had chrome
headlights and additional trim. It was
the first car I ever bought with my own money, and it cost $500. Being 17 years old, I naturally spent $600 to have black-leather seat
upholstery installed. The car looked
great.
Unfortunately, oil regularly fouled the sparkplugs—at least once a
week—but I was then working part-time at a gas station and could easily clean
them myself to keep the car running. Other than that, the car had various kinds of mechanical breakdown about once every few months. Maybe weeks.
When I took it in to the European Motors
garage to be worked on for the umpteenth time, the owner/mechanic asked me if I
wanted to buy an Austin Healy. I said I
loved those cars, but I already had an MG.
He said, “Yeah, but if you bought the Austin Healy, you'd have something to drive when the MG is in
for repairs.”
When your mechanic makes
that kind of joke, you know you’re in trouble.
He made a small fortune off of me.
I liked to drive around with the top down, smoking a Crooks cigar,
and making an ultra-cool wave to other MGs on the road (lifting up the first
finger of the right hand while continuing to grasp the wheel with the other
fingers). This gesture was every bit as
necessary as my buckled-back driving cap.
I sold the MG when I moved north in 1963 to start graduate school at
San Francisco State. My father had convinced me that it rained too much up there for a convertible (not so), but what carried the day was learning what
a 21-year-old male would have to pay to insure a sports car in the Bay Area.
So I sold the MG for $1,000, thus losing only about two or three
thousand on the deal.
The Dodge Sedan
I replaced the MG with a 1955 Dodge sedan that John and Georgie Cooper
kindly sold to me for $50 since they knew I was getting rid of my MG. This was not only the cheapest car I ever bought, but also the most economical,
in that I never had any repairs or maintenance costs (other than adding a quart of oil every now and then) during
the eight or so years that I owned it.
It was a stick shift, but had some kind of magical second gear so that,
if you were stopped while going up a hill in San Francisco, you could easily
let out the clutch in second and keep going uphill without having to shift (and thus risk stalling the engine and rolling backwards down the hill). You could also go quite fast in second gear,
so in that respect it was my first automatic shift car.
This doughty auto performed admirably well into my graduate school years
at UC-Davis (near Sacramento), where I lived on a tree-lined road that also
served as an off-ramp for the freeway.
The house had previously been rented to my pal Michael Burns, and he
convinced the owner, Mr. Callori, that I was a responsible adult. Mr. Callori soon learned that I was not, but
he was infinitely patient. For example,
I rarely mowed the lawn, which could (and did) grow several inches high—much
higher, if you counted the weeds—but Mr. Callori put up with this eye-sore
behavior even though I lived next door to his immaculate house and yard.
Fronting the property alongside the road was a space to park cars, then
a row of huge shade trees, and between them and the lawn, a hedge of tall shrubs about 6 or 7 feet tall (since I never trimmed them).
One day, as I was driving home and pulled in to park under the trees,
the brakes failed and the car passed between two trees and crashed through the hedge. Luckily, the tall grass of the unmown lawn
slowed the car, which came to rest about a foot away from the house. A few beers induced some husky friends to
help me push the car back through the hedge, and the Dodge was soon replaced by a VW square-back
sedan. Even so, the Dodge
rested contentedly under the trees for several months.
As it happened, each day when I walked to school I passed a small
mom-and-pop market a few hundred feet to the south of my yard. One day, on the way home, I stopped in to buy
some beer. The pop of the ownership said
to me, “Hey, what are you going to do with that Dodge?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said truthfully, although my father
would have approved of this as a bargaining gambit.
“Well,” he said, “what would you take for it?”
“Two six-packs,” I said.
“Talls.” This added consideration
was a bargaining ploy that my Dad may or may not have approved of, since beer
was involved. In any case, the deal was
closed.
Later that day, more beer and a new shift of husky friends helped me
push the car down to the grocery-owner’s yard, which was next to the market. It was a pleasant little
house with a white picket fence running around the neatly mown lawn in the front
yard. Between the fence and the
roadway, there was room for cars to park under tall shade trees, and that's where we left the Dodge. Under those
trees, the grocery owner started working to repair the brakes, which took him
several days.
As it happened, I was walking home from school one afternoon just as he
finished the job. He gave me a friendly
wave as he got in the car to give it a whirl.
He backed the car into the street, but the car didn’t stop, and he
desperately made a high-speed U-turn, going backwards straight through his
white picket fence. I tried really hard
not to laugh, but was deeply struck by the symmetry of our experiences. He only swore a little bit, and
then vowed to finish the job. He and I pushed
the car back under the trees, where it remained for a week or more as he toiled
away on it.
Eventually, as I was walking home late one afternoon, I saw that the car was gone, so
I went into the grocery store to see what was up.
“Where’s the car?” I said.
“Well, uh….I sold it,” he said.
“So you got the brakes working,” I said.
“Well, uh, yeah. They worked.”
“How many times did you test them?” I asked.
“Well, uh … I only tried them once and then this guy came and bought
it.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Actually,” he said, “I feel kind of bad about it."
"Why?" I asked.
"The guy lives in Nevada.”
A deep silence pervaded the grocery store as we both somberly
envisioned this guy driving the car home over the Donner Pass of the High
Sierra. For the next several days, I
scoured the Chronicle and the Bee for news of a
motorist in a black 1955 Dodge sedan plunging to his death on the sharp
downgrade to Reno. I bet the
grocery-store guy did, too. Such an article
never appeared, but I took little or no solace in this. An article may have appeared in the Reno
newspaper.
I thoroughly enjoyed the beer.
Best car deal I ever made.
