My Auto Biography

The first car I ever drove was my brother’s 66 Chevrolet Impala. It had a 3-Speed Stick shift on the column, and my dad took me out in it one day to teach me how to drive. He was a lousy driving instructor. He didn’t trust me on regular streets, so he told me to drive down Firestone Blvd along the freeway to the La Mirada Drive-in, and kept screaming at me all the way. Then he had me pull into the drive-in parking lot, and made me practice parallel parking over and over again, until finally I backed into some hedges. Then he got pissed, and told me to drive home.

I also had my first accident in that car. He was going to let me take it to school one day, if first I dropped him off at work. He had taken a part-time Security job at the Metropolitan State Hospital. I had spent all weekend washing the car, inside and out – my dad had started using it for work, and his job on the railroad left him often literally covered in grease. Just as I was making a left turn into the Hospital off Bloomfield, a man in a ‘49 Chevy tried to pass me, and T-boned into the driver side of the car – caving in the door and taking me completely by surprise. He tried to tell me and my dad that I had neglected to signal for a left turn, but the blinker was still going while he was talking.

Just before graduation from high school, dad took me down to Green Motors and bought me a ‘69 VW. It was raining that day, and we couldn’t really afford it, but he had just sold our house to get money for court. He had gotten arrested for drunk driving, and thought the judge was going to “sock it to him.” My sister and her husband lived in the house next door, and they wanted to move anyway, so it all worked out. We sold our house and moved into theirs, and they got the money for a down-payment on a new home in Huntington Beach. Except my mom hated this house – she much preferred the old one. And then it turned out dad only had to pay $500, so he bought me the car.

This was my favorite car. It was Peru Green and had white leatherette interior and cocoa mats, and I installed a Craig Pioneer Cassette player into the glove-compartment, so it couldn’t be seen from the outside and stolen. My favorite tapes were “Blood Sweat and Tears” and “3 Dog-Night” and “Bridge over Troubled Waters – by Simon and Garfunkel.” I used to play them all the time, when Jim Stewart or Dave and and I would cruise up to Whittier Blvd and eat at the Drive-in at Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant.

I had that car until I went in the Navy, and then my older sister bought it from me or something. I don’t really remember. I don’t think they ever liked it as much as I did, and eventually traded it in on a BMW.

When I got out of the Navy, I bought a 4 cylinder Honda 550 with the Savings Bonds that I had sent home for four years. I drove it out to UC Irvine every morning, while I was attending school there, when the weather was nice. I didn’t mind a little rain, but if it was too wet, I would take the VW that my brother had swapped for my dad’s VW fastback after he died.

Thankfully I wore a helmet. One morning, during my fourth year in college, I was cruising in the fast lane of the Santa Ana Freeway, and just coming into Anaheim when the traffic began to slow down in front of me. It was very overcast, and the freeway was still wet. That Honda had a big, beautiful disk brake in the front, and I had allowed plenty of room between me and the pick-up in front of me, so I was casually pressing on the rear brakes while feathering the front brake, but I hit a patch of oil on the wet freeway, and ran smack dab into the back of the pickup truck. I’m not sure how fast I was going when I hit, but I flew off the bike and right over the back of the truck at an angle and then skidded on the freeway on my helmet for about 20 feet. When I finally came off the helmet, I somehow landed on my right knee.

I just lay there for a moment, and somebody helped me stand up. I couldn’t keep my feet though, because the freeway was so slick. After a while, we picked the bike up and put it into the back of the pick-up truck, and the driver of the truck drove me to the nearest gas station. The front wheel was all bent up, and my helmet was cracked, and my knee hurt, but that was it.

I never drove that motorcycle again. I sold it to my brother-in-law, and he fixed it up and drove it for several years. I have driven other motorcycles since then though. I still think they are cool.

One of the reasons I sold the motorcycle was to get an apartment. I wanted to be closer to UCI, so I rented a small studio apartment at Oakwood Gardens in Newport Beach. I tried taking the OCTD bus to school every day, but that got old very quick. So I bought an old ‘69 Opel Kadett Station Wagon for $800.00 to get to and from. It was the ugliest car ever, but it ran like a clock.

One day my sister asked if she could borrow the car, to take my mom somewhere. When she got home they were still laughing, because they had had to drive in the slow lane on the freeway, and even been “passed by two nuns in a Volkswagen.”

I still had that car when I began working at Golden State Sanwa Bank in Downey. After a while, I decided I wanted to buy a new Mustang, so I went down to Keystone Ford but the salesman high-balled me on all the Mustangs but made me a great offer on a ‘79 Ford Granada.

My Granada was a beautiful car, nicer than the one in the photo above, and I kept it washed and waxed all the time. It had a small V-8, with an automatic transmission, air-conditioning, and power-brakes and windows – the whole nine yards. I was tired of driving cars with manual transmissions by this time.

I can’t remember why I ever got rid of that car. It was after I left the bank. I traded it in on a Chevy S-10 pickup, and the dealer only gave me $800.00 for it. I was delivering auto parts at the time, and trying to save enough money to go back to college and get my teaching credential. Finally I had enough money saved, and got accepted at Cal State Fullerton, and even quit my job, but on the first day of school the counselor in the Teaching Department told me that I had not been accepted into the Teacher training program, and I needed some experience working with children.

So I took the money I had saved for school, and signed up for an NRI correspondence course in Microcomputer Technology. I passed the course with flying colors, and this time I enjoyed learning electronics. It was a hands-on course, where you actually build things, like oscillator circuits and amplifiers, and assembled and tested a complete computer, which I then used to learn Assembly language and several other programming languages. I already knew how to program in Basic, from dinking around with my Commodore 64, and I spent so much time at the computer store, that the guy finally hired me to his service department.

Well, that was the last car I owned. After I quit working to take care of my 80 year old mother, I wasn’t driving very much, and the car just sat in the drive-way. Occasionally somebody would ask if it was for sale, but I didn’t really want to sell it. It still ran beautifully, but the plastic had begun to fade and crack inside and the paint was weathering badly, and the battery went dead. Finally, my nephew said he wanted it, and I told him he could have it. I told him the battery was dead, so one afternoon he stopped by with a new battery, and it started right up.

~ by dobee on February 14, 2007.