My First Car, by Lou Ross

Do you know what happens when a car is too old to run anymore?

Someone sells it to a teenager, and for a few brief months at the end of a long life of service that old machine becomes newer than new again, an aged teacher of new freedoms, and the taskmaster of all the responsibilities that come with them.

That's the way it was with my first car.  It was a 13-year-old 1937 Plymouth with a bumper held on with bailing wire, a clutch that scrapped like chalk against a blackboard, and an inability to go to bed at night without first being tucked in.

That's right. It had to be tucked in at night. That's because it was more than a little sensitive to night dew, or rain, or anything that felt like moisture. It made a pretty good barometer, now that I think on it, for it would tell you when it was going to rain by a complete refusal to start.

As an ingenious engineer in the making (the older you get, the more ingenious you remember you were when you were young), I carried a blanket and a surplus army poncho to cover up the hood every night.

That old car got to liking being tucked in, and toward the end, I had to cover the hood every night. Most nights that worked, but when it didn't, well, a '37 Plymouth is light enough to get a friend, sometimes, my wife-to-be Carolyn, to push the car by hand to get it started. 

The memories that surround that car still start up for me a lot better than that Plymouth ever did.

Mostly, they are the remembrances of paying for the car -- the total price of $ 75., insurance, repairs, and operating costs. And they include the memories of how the car paid me back with interest.

I was 18 years old and a freshman at Wayne State University.  I was the first one ever in my family to go to college, so the family was proud; but my father was a Detroit City policeman, and with two other kids at home, there wasn't any budget for college
tuition, books, and least of all, anything as frivolous as the purchase of a car.

Yet then, as now, a car seemed like a practical necessity. I had to get up at 6 a.m. to ride the city bus in order to get to class by 8 a.m.  A car could save me hours every day, and give me the flexibility to take on additional weekend odd-jobs.

So when I took my first summer job at "Ford's," in the Dearborn Assembly Plant, getting a car was a wish, tucked just behind the demand of earning my fall tuition.

Not only did I earn the money that summer, but I learned a respect for assembly work that I carry with me to this day. 

For my job on the line was to guide the frond end sheet metal down onto the moving chassis-body conveyer. Then I had to drop to my knees onto the corrugated surface of the conveyer line, and wrestle a 3 inch bolt through a frame bracket, add a one inch chunk of rubber, two inches of spring to compress, and thread it into the radiator support.  Well, I had been varsity football and baseball player in high school, and that job took every bit of my physical endurance and more to survive.

In later years, I helped my two sons find work in Ford plants so they could gain the appreciation for plant life and develop a sincere conviction engendered by hard work, to complete their college educations.

At summers end, I was back on the city bus enroute to school when we passed a 1937 Plymouth on the street with a sign in the window -- "For Sale. $ 75.00." I got off the bus and bought it immediately.

That was my first mistake, for I hadn't gotten my father involved in the decision or even asked for advice in advance. He probably felt a little cheated, and was upset, especially since the car needed a new clutch that he could have warned me about. But my dad accepted my apologies and the inevitability of the decision, and he even paid for a new clutch out of his pocket.

For six months I got to school in that car, and saved an hour-and-a-half a day, as I anticipated. Much of that time, however, was invested in keeping it running, becoming truly intimate with the Plymouth under the hood.  And, there was a few minutes every night when I tucked it in with blanket and poncho. 

The car actually paid for itself. For I was at Carolyn's house one day when a TV repair truck backed into the parked Plymouth and damaged the bumper, or what was left of the bumper. The insurance company paid me $75, which was the original price of the car. Of course, I kept on driving the car with the dangling bumper, and a couple of years later scraped it out for $25.

All experiences eventually end up in scrap books, and that's literally true of your first car. Yet there will always be a clear picture of that '37 Plymouth, and what it taught me, in my mind. You don't forget a car you have to tuck in bed every night.