My daughter telling me of her car woes brought back memories of my first car and all of the stories associated with it. Since some of these stories may be amusing or informative I figured I would take the opportunity to tell them here.
The first car I owned was a blue 1968 Rambler Ambassador. For those of you who don’t remember the 1968 Rambler Ambassador, it was a “full size” sedan and the first car made by an American car company that offered air conditioning as standard equipment (although you could ask them to delete it to save a little money). Ours had the air conditioning. It was my father’s car which I inherited when he died in 1975. I traveled cross country twice in that car, once as a passenger with my parents in 1972 and again on my own (with a few hitch hikers along the way) in 1975.
Some time in the later 1970’s an old friend of my parents, who was an independent taxi owner in NYC, died in his cab. His family didn’t want the cab which was too old for a new owner to register as a yellow cab in NYC, although his wife did manage to remove and sell the meter and medallion, so they gave me the 1974 Ford Crown Victoria. Owning one car in Manhattan is a challenge, owning 2 is impossible so I passed the yellow Ford on to a brother who had worn out the crank socket on his old Peugeot after the starter motor had died. He didn’t keep the Ford for very long, either.
Owning a car while living in a Manhattan apartment is a challenge, but since I was working at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at the time I was able to get a parking permit for the Bronx Municipal Hospital Center parking lot. I usually left the car in the BMHC lot and took the subway to and from work, although sometimes I would drive the car the 1/2 mile to the subway and leave it parked by the entrance overnight while I rode the subway home. I can’t count how many times I would get to the subway, jump out of the car and run to the subway entrance, only to reach into my pocket for a subway token and notice that my car keys weren’t in my pocket because I had left them in the car, with the motor still running. Fortunately, I always remembered before I got into the subway so I never left the car running all night.
Keeping the car running as it got older was sometimes a fun challenge. Like the time I was picking up my friends Beth and Ingrid to drive out to the Fire Island ferry. As I pulled up in front of Beth’s apartment on West 74th Street there was a flood of steam coming out from under the hood. I popped the hood and saw that the lower radiator hose had split, so I told Beth to call Ingrid and tell her we might be a few minutes late picking her up. I then pulled my spare universal radiator hose out from the trunk, along with 3 gallons of water, and I proceeded to replace the bad hose and refill the radiator with water. We got to Ingrid’s only a little late, and I got them to the ferry on time, although I took the next ferry because I decided to go to an auto parts store to get another universal radiator hose, just in case.
There was also the time I drove up to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, on Labor Day weekend to pick up a friend who had spent the summer up there doing dinner theater. She had just turned in the keys to the house she had rented for the season, and the sun was going down as we started the drive back to the city. I stepped on the brake to slow down, and when I released the brake pedal there was an awful racket coming from the front left tire. I pulled over to the side of the road and jacked up the front of the car to see what was happening. The car had old drum brakes and one of the brake return springs, which pulled the brake shoes away from the drum, had broken so that brake didn’t fully release. Unconcerned I went into the trunk of the car and pulled out my brake tools and brake repair kit which included the needed replacement springs. I got the brake fixed and we were back on the road shortly.
I kept that car running until the early 1980’s, when my mother gave me her newer 1978 Pontiac Sunbird, and I couldn’t keep 2 cars in Manhattan, so I drove the old Rambler to a junk yard and left it with them.