Borepatch tagged me on the current cool kids chain letter, to wit:
1. What was your first car? Model, year, color, condition?
2. What adventures did you have in it, good or bad?
3. What happened to it, what's the end of the story?
My first car was a hand-me-down from my sister.
And contrary to Borepatch's suspicion, I didn't drive a Zamboni.
(Where he got the Zamboni thing I guess is due to my current "infatuation" with all things NHL.
Alas, when I started driving had you asked me what a Zamboni was, I would have guessed it was one of those folded-over pizzas....but I digress.)
The car of my sordid youth was a 1972 Plymouth Satellite Sebring...
(Mine was blinding white, visible from 12 miles away, but that's another story.)
It was a wonderful car- I could pack the ne'er-do-wells I hung around with into the machine and in less than an hour we're be breaking the underage drinking laws in Key West...
By virtue of the fact that I worked at the FBO at the local airport, I augmented the .68/gallon fuel with 100LL AvGas...
(This comes into play later in the tale.)
I did more than a fair amount of driving up and down US1...
I had a 30 mile (one way) commute to school that included 10 different 2-lane bridges, and being a high-school student, I was usually running late and burning up the highways.
I got pretty adept at high-speed driving on the bridges...
One of the good things about the bridges back then, they weren't wide enough for a u-turn, so if you did pass an FHP Trooper or a local cop, they couldn't turn around and chase you down...
And as a rule in the late 70's, they didn't call out SWAT for a roadblock to issue a ticket for doing 80 in a 65 zone.
Unfortunately, as time went by, and since I was dogpaddling in a pretty small population pool, the Burning Plymouth became rather well known, as evidenced when I was on a return trip from dropping off a friend in Big Pine Key and I was late for work at the local radio station (my other job).
I was on the 7 Mile Bridge and passing the tourists that were creeping along at 30 mph ten cars at a clip... The front end was a good bit out of balance, so when the machine got
moving upwards of 70 or 75, the steering would shake like a dog trying
to pass a peach pit.
I didn't notice the Monroe County sheriff's deputy car in amongst the station wagons and other vehicles.
About an hour after I got to work, the officer showed up...
MCSD: "Son... I saw you on the bridge this afternoon..."
Uh oh.
MCSD: "Do you have any idea how fast you were going?"
TBG: "Uh, no officer... I was concentrating on my driving."
MCSD: "Well, neither do I. You went by so fast I thought my car had stopped and I started to get out to investigate."
As luck would have it I knew this officer, and he'd recognized my car. He knew he'd find me at the station or the airport. I got a 25 minute lecture about speeding, especially on 2-lane bridges, and contrary to popular opinion, 17 year old males are not indestructable, and although the community would likely survive the loss of a local highschooler, it would go badly were I to take a family of 4 from New Jersey along with me when I went.
Alas, he also knew Dad, who found out about my transgression immediately thereafter and, well, let's just say there was "some punishment".
I did some damage to the car during the course of my ownership...
I had a load of
live rock and several 5 gallon containers of ocean water in the machine once, and tried to drive back up on to the highway from down on the shore access road... We were a bit tail-heavy and bottomed out hard...which is a nice way to say I smashed the shit out of the gas tank.
Did you know the gas tank on a '72 plymouth sebring was nigh on impossible to find back in the pre-internet days? And when the mechanic finally found one, it was re-dicking-fuckuously-expensive.
All good things had to come to an end...
The machine was in bad shape- burning that AvGas had taken it's toll on the seals and gaskets and I was putting in a quart of oil for every tank of gas I used...
Dad was not keen on me heading off to college with a car that was ready to fall apart...
I sold it to a local guy, not mentioning the oil consumption issue. (Caveat emptor, eh?) He came looking for me about a week later...
Purchaser: "Uh... Did you notice that the car burns, uh, quite a bit of oil?"
TBG: "Yeah... I noticed that. I usually put in a quart of oil every time I fill it up. That's why left you a case of oil in the trunk."
Not a happy camper...
I went off to UF with a florescent green VW Dasher with zebra stripe seat covers...
But that is a completely different story.
TBG- ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE
