I dearly loved the car. It was my first foray into independence. With a job and an apartment and this car, I was a free man. And then a good-looking girl friend on top of it all. I had it made.
At some time in the past, the driver side rear fender had been hit and crumpled a little. The tail light (which was vaguely rocket-ship shaped) had been replaced, so it stuck out at an angle from the fender.
The day after I got it, I decided to wax it. When I did, the paint almost all came off. It had evidently never been waxed and the paint had oxidized. Even though that was extremely disappointing, I still enjoyed the car. I had it for about a year and a half, maybe two years and drove the wheels off it.
I bought it in order to be able to go to work for the telephone company. Even though I did no maintenance on it, it always started and always drove.
Ella learned to shift on that car. When Ella and I started going together, I would drive with my arm around her. Like a lot of girls of the era, she would shift while I operated the clutch. It was a fun thing and one I remember with a great degree of fondness.
I drove the car back to Fort Gordon in Augusta, GA, when I went back to AIT after Christmas break. I would drive guys to town for a dollar each with the provision that if they were drunk when it came time to go home, they had to find another way.
At times I would take up to ten guys to town. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I really hurt the car doing that. But, of course, I was 20 and somewhat oblivious to car maintenance.
On the way back to Fort Gordon I picked up Billy Brewer, a guy in my unit, in Sulphur, LA. On the way home before I went to Germany, I took him and a guy named Lincoln home.
Lincoln was a black man who lived in Mississippi in what I found out, to my amazement, extreme poverty. His family didn’t even have running water in their house. People in the army all wore the same clothes and it was a tremendous equalizer. You get to thinking that everyone is the same and they aren’t.
I loved that car. Ella and I would fill the back floorboard with empty Dr Pepper cans and various wrappers. By the time Dad got rid of it, the front seat was pretty split,
But it did us well as we were dating and we did a lot of kissing in that car.
Other than maybe my 1956 Chevrolet pickup, I never had a car that was quite as much fun.
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You are welcome to say anything you want as long as it is nice. If I don't like it, or it is ugly, I will take it off, place it into the garbage disposal, grind it up, and allow it to be flushed into the Gulf of Mexico where it will be eaten by a fish and then excreted where it will lie on the bottom of the ocean until it is covered up by other comments.