For me, it was a 1967 Mustang fastback. I was 15 and didn’t even have a learner’s permit, yet I was still obsessed with owning a car.
I remember the whole deal like it happened yesterday. My dad’s best friend owned a junkyard just half a mile up Route 28 from the family Ford dealership. If I wasn’t at the dealership, I was at Robertson’s Auto Salvage, playing, hunting and scavenging.
At the time, they had a program where they were auctioning repairable wrecks. I was constantly looking for my first car.
One bright day, they received both a 1957 Thunderbird and a 1967 Mustang. This was in the summer of 1975, and both arrived there simply for the crime of being old, worn-out cars. Neither one had any real damage.
I debated back and forth between that T-bird and that Mustang. I finally decided that the Mustang had more sporting pretensions. It would be my first car.
I worked the deal around and around in my head and decided that my bid would be $102.02. This seemingly arbitrary number was carefully calculated: My bold bid would beat the guy bidding $100 as well as the rest of the competition trying to do the same.
I went home and presented this whole plan to my dad. At that point, all hell broke loose. He screamed that I was way too young to own a car and there was no way in hell that he was going to let that deal go down.
More fighting and screaming volleyed from my side, and then, finally, my mom broke in and told my dad that there were worse things that a 15-year-old could be doing than fixing up an old Mustang. He relented. I’d later learn that my dad called his buddy at the yard and made sure that I had the winning bid.
I sold the car less than a year later for $800 to pursue my serial restoration habit. I replaced it with another, better ’67 Mustang.
I would love to know where that first Mustang is today. I never saw it again.
Sometimes we do get that second chance, though. In 1997, the fourth car that I ever owned—a 1966 Shelby GT350—came up for sale. The 19-year-old version of me spent a summer fixing up that car.
The seller and I discussed prices and couldn’t reach a deal: He wanted $21,000, and I was firm at $19,000. I could argue that with two young kids, the timing just wasn’t right.
But there was more to it than that. Having been the guy who built that car, I knew what was wrong with it. I knew that it once had an automatic transmission—because I was the one who converted it to the incorrect Top Loader four-speed box. I also knew the location of every blemish and rust spot and how a 19-year-old kid had fixed them.
If this wasn’t my old car, would those issues have bothered me? Maybe ignorance is bliss. Maybe it’s all about the devil you know versus the one you don’t.
My son recently bought back his first car, the French Blue Triumph Spitfire that we featured on the March 2008 cover of our sister magazine, Classic Motorsports. The cover blurb asked if car restoration was so easy that a kid could do it. Tom, at the time, was just 12 years old.
Interestingly, this Spitfire was also the first car of one of our readers. When he couldn’t care for it any longer, we bought it—but with the promise that should we ever tire of it, the seller would have first rights of refusal.
A few years later, Tom lost interest in the Spitfire and became totally engrossed in an E30-chassis BMW. Knowing that we would probably regret the decision, we sold back the Spitfire.
I knew that the Spitfire’s owner had been sick, and when his wife called us recently, I feared the worst. I was right: He had passed away and left instructions that we be offered the car before anyone else.
I talked it over with my son and we decided that, yes, we wanted that car back. We made her a reasonable offer, and my son was lucky enough to get his first car back. My first Mustang, however, has still not been found.
As I continue to tear through the world’s supply of forlorn sports cars, I think back to all of those I have owned. Some I miss. Some are best left in the past.
How about you: Which ones do you miss, and which ones would you like to enjoy again?
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