When, and how, did you get your first car?

As best as I can recall, I bought my first car during my freshmen year at Wright State University, so that’s most likely early in 1975.  I had used my mother’s big yellow Chevrolet station wagon, but really needed my own car so Mom didn’t have to go without as much.  I had a modest amount of cash saved, less than one thousand dollars, so I searched for something no more than that and found a light blue Opel Kadett with a manual transmission offered by a guy on Greenmount Boulevard in Oakwood that looked like a good fit.  

While not that many young men at the time could drive a stick shift, I had taught myself that art on my older brother Greg’s Chevy Vega, not that it was a very smooth process.  I remember grinding the gears, drifting backward a bit when starting up a hill, and the many times I stalled the car and listened to the car horns of unappreciative drivers.  I knew the drill.  Rev the engine a bit, let out the clutch until it starts to grab, and work that balance to slowly get going.  But I was getting nowhere.  Out of desperation for a solution, I had Greg explain what was really going on and learned about the operation of the clutch plates, how the clutch pulled apart when pushed and how the gears in the transmission had to line up at matching speeds to smoothly transition from one gear to the next.  That’s all it took.  Now that I knew what I was trying to accomplish, the rest was easy.  Almost like magic, the grinding and drifting and stalling disappeared.  I have a similar story about skiing, but that’s really off-topic.

Dad drove me to Oakwood to help me with my first car purchase.  What I learned that day was my Dad really liked to negotiate, unafraid to get up and walk out if needed.  It would have been a really good idea if he had let me know that beforehand as I wanted to strangle him when I thought I was going to miss out on my “dream car” because he couldn’t get another few bucks knocked off the price.  All ended well and I drove home with the car I would drive through most of my college days, lasting until I bought a Volvo 164E after I started working full-time at Wright State.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Has anyone ever rescued you, figuratively or literally?

I credit Dr. Zimmer, my long-time chiropractor, for rescuing me from severe pain, one of the two miracles in my life.  During a vacation in California, I threw my back out and spent an agonizing day laying in bed, barely able to roll over.  It was the day before returning home and the next morning things were no better and I realized I could never make it down the stairs, drive the car to the airport or tolerate a four-hour plane ride to Ohio.  As I laid there trying to figure out what to do, I thought about the position Dr. Zimmer sometimes puts me in while adjusting my back, that being laying on my side, bottom leg extended, the top of my foot on the other leg tucked up behind my knee, and turning my shoulders in the opposite direction.  This position forces my lower back to push forward.  I assumed that position and laid there for forty-five minutes.  Then I got up, all pain gone, carried two suitcases down the stairs, drove to the airport, and flew home.  Dr. Zimmer, plus some divi
Read more

Tell me your favorite story about Moses

Moses was the perfect cat.  He was loving, at least to humans, and everyone adored him.  I would take him to appointments at the vet and he would walk down the check-in desk where all the staff would pet him to his delight and there’s.  He never weighed more than eight pounds even though I kept his food dish full all the time.  He ate when he was hungry or when I opened his favorite treat, a can of tuna fish.   Moses was also a fierce hunter.  When I moved into a new apartment, he spent the first couple of days getting rid of every ant and spider he could find.  He could easily jump six feet in the air and I once saw him clear a six-foot fence with graceful ease as some neighborhood dog gave a fruitless chase.  He only had claws on his rear feet, but that combined with his teeth were more than enough to take out his prey.  Combined with remarkable see-in-the-dark abilities, he would routinely disappear for hours and that leads to my favorite story. I rented a house in Kettering for a s
Read more

Share some early memories of your son, Michael

Mike was raised by his grandparents in Pennsylvania until he was school age, so unfortunately I don’t have infant or toddler memories to share.  But from the time I first met him, and still true today, the thing that springs to mind is that he is a happy guy.  As he grew up he developed into a very extroverted, out-going child, loving to ride bikes around the neighborhood with a pack of friends, attend ice cream socials at school, and strapping on skates for organized events at Skateworld of Kettering.  We lived a quarter-mile from Indian Riffle Park and he loved the swings, monkey bars, teeter-totters, and merry-go-rounds. Mike is a very determined person.  When he decided that he wanted to lose weight back in grade school, he controlled his diet, including eating cans and cans of tuna fish, to shed pounds until he was rail thin.  Then he decided to begin lifting weights and went after that with a passion, putting on solid muscle and eventually benching over three hundred pounds in hi
Read more