Ode to a Chevy - (and other cars owned by us)

As I was loading up some old photos, I noticed that there were pictures of some of our old cars we have owned. The very first car wasn't my car at all. It was Blaine B. Pulley's Impala station wagon. When I first started dating Janene, I wasn't old enough to drive. That meant that if we went on a date, she had to drive her dad's car. It's a lot cooler than you would think. Just remember I'm a 15 year old junior high kid dating a high school girl! So our date to the Gold and Green Ball... that was in her car. Antelope Island with all my guy friends ... that was in her car too. It had this cool red quilted naugahyde (just where do they hunt all those naugas to get their hides anyway?) interior. Blaine always took great care of it.

Here's Janene, the driver of this fine vehicle, posing in one of her homemade bikini's. And she was with me, not all these other guys hanging around. By this time I had been dating her for over a year and was almost ready to drive myself. Janene let me drive the car home since I had my learner's permit ( and she was an experienced adult driver).

When I finally got my license, this is what I got to drive. It was our old family car - 1960 Ford Fairlane Wagon. The very wagon that had almost hit a cow north of Moab. You know the cow - the one that put my head at the bottom of a Tupperware tub full of Mom's potato salad and sent my father chasing after it screaming unrepeatable epithets. This was the car we had driven down the Brianhead road with no brakes. It had an automatic transmission that would not shift down to the lower gear once you had gotten going fast enough to pass it's shifting speed. All of us kids remember Mom making us put our heads down with pillows around us ( that was in case we crash landed) as Dad negotiated the hairpin curves with the tires squealing. Full disclosure - this is not the actual car, it's a stock photo. It is the same color. One night driving this car home from Robintino's at 2:30 AM, the car's engine seized up and became part of history. It went to Bountiful Auto Wrecking after we discovered that the crankshaft had crystallized and broken in half. For a long time afterward, everybody just called me Crankshaft. Dad, honest, I wasn't even pushing it very hard. I had already found out that there was no way to get it to lay rubber on the road in previous tries.

As a result, I had to get a new car. I picked out this Maroon Chevy Impala and my Dad co-signed on a loan for me. It was pretty gnarly with a 283 cu. in. V-8 and a stick shift and was equipped with an awesome new-fangled 4-track tape player and a bench seat. I could could cruise down Orchard Drive with the windows open, Janene by my side, with Jimi Hendrix wailing "All along the Watchtower". I was a 16 year old kid in heaven. On one of our dates, we went out to the Little Sahara sand dunes and got a flat tire. I taught Janene how to change a flat tire on that trip ( kind of Tom Sawyerish, don't you think). She has been doing all the hard work since. On our way back, we were driving at 70 miles an hour and had forgotten to fully latch the hood after putting the jack back in it's place. The hood flew open just as I was passing a semi. Suddenly I couldn't see a thing. I've always wondered what that truck driver thought as a couple of kids went screaming by with the hood fully open, only to immediately pull over to the side. Later, when I was going to school one morning, I was waiting to turn left at the intersection of 15th South and Orchard behind my best friend Bob Sedgley. Bob had this cool red '59 T-Bird that was a real chick magnet. I watched in horror as he pulled out to turn left (laying down rubber as he went) at the same time that Paul Wetzel pulled out from the opposite side of the intersection - going straight! He t-boned Paul's dad's car, which in turn spun completely around and plowed into the side of my new car, Paul helpless to control it. I never did get it straight what Bob was thinking at the time, but that was the end of cruisin' in that car. It was the end of Bob's T-Bird and Pauls dad's car too. And I still owed money on the car.