Long before I had a driver’s license, I knew which team I was on. For me, cars and manhood were eternally welded together somewhere in the pre-existence. By the time I was thirteen, I was driving my father’s 1955 Willys Jeep Wagon whenever I could slip away, usually back and forth in front of our home. It was there that I learned to shift, park, and drive in reverse. I stopped driving illegally when I was fourteen and got an Idaho Driver's License. For the next eight years, I drove my father's cars.
Odd, but buying a brand new 1971 Chevrolet Vega provided a sense of pride and accomplishment. Mary Kay paid for it with money she had earned when she was a legal secretary and I was a struggling medical student. Chevy Vegas did not become noted for durability, and most had multiple recalls and only lasted for about 20,000 miles. This one got me to where I had to be for almost nine years and even survived a quarrel over the right of way with an 18 wheeler one morning in St. Louis while I was driving to the hospital. It didn't run too well afterward. I replaced the fuel filter that had become plugged with rusty metal flakes that were stirred up from the bottom of the gas tank when the semi hit us. The only other occasion it ran a little rough was when I sputtered up my driveway and looked under the hood and found that the carburetor was attached to the engine by only one very loose screw where four were intended. The screws were replaced and tightened and I drove on. In the end, the rusted little Vega had over 110,000 miles on it when it finally died. The engine was a slant four which quickly became balanced after it was started and actually ran smoothly until it was turned off. Then it went into a self-destruct mode as the pistons fought against each other and the whole engine became momentarily unbalanced, causing the engine to rock the whole car whenever the ignition was turned off. This quirky behavior would eventually lead to the demise of this great little car.
When we moved from St. Louis, in 1980, I wanted to drive the Vega to Idaho Falls but didn’t think that it would make the trip. I gave it to a dental student who drove it until he finished dental school and passed it on to two other dental students before the engine fell off its mounts and was abandoned in a parking lot in St. Louis. By then I was a urologist in Idaho Falls and was driving a 1978 Buick Estate Wagon Limited Edition to work. It was a big, comfortable car and I felt ok driving it until our friends pointed out that we had two BMWs — “Big Mormon Wagons.” After seeing National Lampoon’s Vacation, I felt like Clark Griswald. When the Buick's hoses started to leak and break, we took it to Bob Brown Chevrolet in Rigby. Uncle Bob told us that there had been an engine fire in the car before we bought it in St. Louis from a Ralston Purina executive. I figured that was why that man gave us such a good price without telling us about the fire. Uncle Bob casually mentioned that my brother-in-law, Gary, had ordered a new silver C3 Corvette. Well. I ordered a new C3 Corvette and sold the Buick, after replacing all of the rubber belts and hoses and telling the new owners about the engine fire.
Silly me. I thought that the new Corvette would be a fast sports car. I don’t go around town racing rice rockets, but I do like to be able to pass a spud truck when I push on the gas. My new 1981 C3 Corvette turned out to be a cute cream puff with about the same performance as the Buick Estate Wagon. The 1981 model year was the first since Corvette’s earliest days to offer a single-engine option for all models — a 190 HP engine. To put this into perspective, my Sea Doo GTR-X has 230 HP — that’s 40 HP more than my first Corvette.
My niece, Natalie, put this to the test last summer when she was riding my Sea Doo and was challenged to a friendly race by some teenagers passing by our dock. Natalie is a beautiful young grandmother and thought they were just being friendly and waving at her. By the time she realized that they wanted to race, they had gone past and were about 100 yards ahead, going down the reservoir at full speed. Let’s just say that after she quickly caught up, she really smoked them. They were all really having fun and bowed down to her as she turned around to thank them. Still grinning, she told me when she returned, “Uncle Roger this is the best day of my life!” That would never have happened if she had tried to pass a spud truck in my first Corvette.
Road and Track reviewed the 1984 C4 Corvette and gave the impression that it was a world-class sports car loaded with technical sophistication. It was touted as a truly stout automobile to replace the Corvette C3, described as being a “blowzy old doyenne of the boulevards.” Well. I traded my fiberglass fossil in on the new techno street rocket — the first Corvette model to replace the Stingray. The C3 Corvette I had traded in only lasted 2 weeks. I was told that the new owner went through a power pole backward, somewhere south of Rexburg, at 70 mph during a rainstorm. I still wonder how he got it to go that fast. As for me, with the new Corvette, I mostly drove very responsibly, never got a speeding ticket, and recently learned that the 1984 C4 Corvette had 205 HP, still 25 HP less than my 2018 Sea Doo, but that's still 115 HP more than the Chevy Vega and enough to pass most spud trucks.
So which of these cars is my favorite? Which car would I like most to drive again for a trip down nostalgia lane? Passing spud trucks and rice rockets is over-rated. My favorite car is the one that cost a fraction of the other cars, the one without air conditioning, the car that I gave away -- the one that got me through medical school and died alone in a parking lot in St. Louis. If you are lucky, you had a car like this, a car that was faithful far beyond reasonable expectations and took you to where needed to be so that you could be where you are today.
Comments