Question of the Day: First Car Trip of Your Life?
It’s likely that most of us don’t remember the first time we ever rode in a motor vehicle— in most cases, that would be the ride home from the hospital after being born— but I’ll bet that most can figure out what that car, truck, motorcycle, or Comfortractor was. In my case, the first car I remember was my dad’s ’67 Ford Custom 500 sedan, but I happen to know that my first car ride was on icy Minneapolis streets in January of 1966, and that the car was a 1956 Oldsmobile 88. How about your first road trip?
Sadly, the family Olds had bashed a deer a few weeks before I was born, and— being a ten-year-old car in Minnesota— was pretty rusty, anyway. It was gone not long after I made the scene, so have no memory of the roar of its mighty 324-cubic-inch Rocket V8. My dad still misses that Olds. All right, now let’s have your stories!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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My earliest recollections were of busting through snow drifts nearly up to the hood of a 72 International Scout. We lived on a road that never got plowed and the snow would drift several feet in the open fields. A car could not maneuver our road in the winter time. Dad had mounted some military surplus tires, memory is shady but it seems like they were around 32-33" tall and very skinny. Probably no more than 9" wide. That Scout was nearly unstoppable. We blazed many a trail in the backwoods with that beast, and the 10k lb winch mounted on the homemade front bumper got us out of some bad situations in very remote areas. I also have some very strong memories of riding in his 65 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible. Red on black with black top and white wall tires. He was also a music junkie and ripped the factory radio out in favor of a state of the art JVC stereo and speakers. We would drive up to the lake about 40 miles away and cruise the strip on warm summer nights. Top down, radio cranked to some 50s rock station, matching sunglasses (even though I could barely see over the dash). Truly good times.
I was taken home from the hospital in a late 70s Toyota Corolla (I think it was a Corolla). But a few days later, on the Sunday on which I was baptized, Grandpa surprised everyone by giving my parents, and his three other children, each a brand-new, state-of-the-edge 1984 Ford Escort. (I was his sixth grandchild, but the first to be born with his last name. Hence the generosity.) Ours was baby blue with a manual transmission.