On Tuesday, November 30, 2004, at 07:09 AM, Keith Turk wrote:
> Okay I'm bored... what's up with you guys.... how bout your first car?
>
> Mine was a 56 Chevy 2 door wagon... worked my butt off on it and it
> was still
> very average... but I paid for it myself and did I mention it was
> average?
>
> Keith ( hey the other side of this is that we could bench race your
> favorite
> problem...)
Okay - Briefly,my first car was a 1959 Thunderbird 352 2bbl with
Ford-o-matic 2-speed. Not much off the line, but damn, good top end
(135 on the speedo and no speeding tickets ever to calibrate that
number). I bought it from a friend of my dad, flew from Chicago to
Indianapolis (where it had set unattended for six months in the airport
parking lot) and drove it home with year-and-a-half out of date Florida
license plates on it. I got home Thursday evening, and spent all
Friday installing better seat belts in it (my first modification was
safety gear, really!)
I drove it with those expired plates for a few months while I waited
for the title to clear, and never got stopped until the day after I
finally got my "License-applied-for-in-Illinois" sticker (stopped for
no license, by the way, and when he saw the paperwork I was released,
no ticket, no further hassle).
Power window buttons on the console, an air conditioner that never did
work, and tires that were so Florida-designed that I could get stuck on
a downhill parking lot with an inch of snow. But it was fast, and I
paid for it out of my pocket -- Dad had told me how, when he was a kid
(thousands of years before), he always had to share a car. He'd wake
me a 5AM to move mine rather than drive it -- he honored me that much.
Ah, to be a kid again. . .
Jon Wennerberg
Seldom Seen Slim Land Speed Racing
Marquette, Michigan
(that's 'way up north)
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