Uncle Artemus (the good looking one in the middle) and my two younger brothers with my '63 Chevy Nova Deuce. circa 1980Big Mama and I were talking the other night about teenage responsibility. You know the kind of conversation people like to indulge in who are old enough to have teenage kids but don't.
Stuff like...
"Well if it was my kid he wouldn't be doing that."
and
"He needs to get a job and learn some responsibility and stop playing that damned GameBoy all the time."
and
"When I was his age I couldn't wait to get a job so I could get a car and be independent."
and
"Yeah, me too. I had to buy my own car and my own gas and insurance, etc. etc."
Blah, blah, blah, old peoples' crap ad nauseam.
That led to a conversation about our first cars in which we reminisced and talked about what wonderful piles of junk they were and so forth. All very romantisized in hindsight.
We've been married for fifteen years this April so believe me, Big Mama has heard about my first cars before, but it's one of those conversations that's fun to drag out and dust off every couple of years, just to remind you of what a goofy but lovable and very good and responsible kid you once were. So unlike these no-good hoodlums that run the streets today.
All of that got me to thinkin' about this particular car, technically my second; one out of a long line of pieces of crap that was easily the goofiest looking piece of crap I ever owned. I am proud to say though, that all of my pieces of crap died of natural causes, none were wrecked. I told you I was a good kid.
This one was a 1963 Chevy Nova Deuce, four door, four cylinder, born the same year as I was which I thought was pretty cool. When you popped the hood the motor looked about as complex as a hamster in a cage wheel; just a big empty engine compartment with a grease encrusted blob with some wires coming out of it floating in the middle.
It was a good thing there was room to get around in there too because the only way to start the thing was to turn the key on, pop the hood and grab the rubber handled screwdriver kept for just this purpose and lay it across the posts on the solenoid (mounted on the firewall) creating a frightening Frankenstein-like electrical arc, melting chunks out of the screwdriver, slamming the starter motor into action and hopefully turning the engine over; all the while yanking at the throttle cable to feed it some gas. If it flooded (which it almost always did) you were screwed. You had to wait five minutes and try again.
This car also had a penchant for flat tires. Since I never had any money but did however have friends who lived in a junkyard (literally, no kidding) they kept me stocked with a couple of spares in the trunk all the time. I went through about one every two weeks and pretty much got to be like the dad in "A Christmas Story" and could change one in less than ten minutes.
There's nothing like being a scrawny dork of a sixteen year old out in the high school parking lot every day changing flat tires and trying to start your car with a screw driver. Yeah, chicks really dig that. Big Mama said she thought the paint job on this car was fun and back in the day she definitely would have dated someone who would drive something different like that. But then again she married me so her taste is questionable by default.
I hated this car, at first. But skinny sixteen year old beggars who bussed tables and mopped nursing home hallways for a living can't be choosers. It ran (sort of) and it was cheap, so I bought it. I aquired this rolling Lee Greenwood-mobile from my step uncle for I think about $200 bucks. It had been painted that way for a bi-centenial parade in 1976. It was 1980 when this picture was taken and nobody had ever thought it necessary to de-flag the thing. It actually would have been a pretty cool car if not for being a four door and having that idiotic..er, patriotic paint job.
It was a real attention getter and the last thing I wanted at that age was unwarranted attention. I lived in a VERY small town (1100 souls) in the Illinois flatlands and every time I drove through one of the neighboring small towns people on the street would nudge each other and point or stop, stand at attention and salute as I chugged past. I kid you not. It's funny to think of it now but at the time I was mortified and cursed my star spangled beater mobile every time it happened. They stopped doing it in my own town when the joke wore thin after a few months, but it never seemed to get old in other places.
Although I sure didn't like it at the time, I'm thankful now for the lessons that owning cars like that Chevy taught me. I think maybe kids have it a little too easy these days with cell phones and Mom and Dad running to the rescue every five seconds, it makes it harder to learn self reliance and problem solving skills. The only thing more humiliating to me than driving that car in the first place would have been calling my Dad unneccessarily to come rescue me before I had done everything I could think of to deal with a problem myself. And if I had whined to him about the paint job his anwer would have been brutally simple. "So paint it."
I once saw a guy paint his truck in the high school parking lot during lunch hour with a brush and a can of white Sears house paint. Looked pretty good too until a few days later as the rain washed it all away in big runny streaks while we stood watching out the window of English class. Seemed like a good solution to me, I'm just glad he tried it first. Ahh the lessons of life.
It's these kind of experiences that give us good stories in our middle years to pass on to our overindulged, entitled teenage offspring. Who of course could care less and wish we would just shut up and go away.
"Oh yeah? Why in MY day..."
Stuff like...
"Well if it was my kid he wouldn't be doing that."
and
"He needs to get a job and learn some responsibility and stop playing that damned GameBoy all the time."
and
"When I was his age I couldn't wait to get a job so I could get a car and be independent."
and
"Yeah, me too. I had to buy my own car and my own gas and insurance, etc. etc."
Blah, blah, blah, old peoples' crap ad nauseam.
That led to a conversation about our first cars in which we reminisced and talked about what wonderful piles of junk they were and so forth. All very romantisized in hindsight.
We've been married for fifteen years this April so believe me, Big Mama has heard about my first cars before, but it's one of those conversations that's fun to drag out and dust off every couple of years, just to remind you of what a goofy but lovable and very good and responsible kid you once were. So unlike these no-good hoodlums that run the streets today.
All of that got me to thinkin' about this particular car, technically my second; one out of a long line of pieces of crap that was easily the goofiest looking piece of crap I ever owned. I am proud to say though, that all of my pieces of crap died of natural causes, none were wrecked. I told you I was a good kid.
This one was a 1963 Chevy Nova Deuce, four door, four cylinder, born the same year as I was which I thought was pretty cool. When you popped the hood the motor looked about as complex as a hamster in a cage wheel; just a big empty engine compartment with a grease encrusted blob with some wires coming out of it floating in the middle.
It was a good thing there was room to get around in there too because the only way to start the thing was to turn the key on, pop the hood and grab the rubber handled screwdriver kept for just this purpose and lay it across the posts on the solenoid (mounted on the firewall) creating a frightening Frankenstein-like electrical arc, melting chunks out of the screwdriver, slamming the starter motor into action and hopefully turning the engine over; all the while yanking at the throttle cable to feed it some gas. If it flooded (which it almost always did) you were screwed. You had to wait five minutes and try again.
This car also had a penchant for flat tires. Since I never had any money but did however have friends who lived in a junkyard (literally, no kidding) they kept me stocked with a couple of spares in the trunk all the time. I went through about one every two weeks and pretty much got to be like the dad in "A Christmas Story" and could change one in less than ten minutes.
There's nothing like being a scrawny dork of a sixteen year old out in the high school parking lot every day changing flat tires and trying to start your car with a screw driver. Yeah, chicks really dig that. Big Mama said she thought the paint job on this car was fun and back in the day she definitely would have dated someone who would drive something different like that. But then again she married me so her taste is questionable by default.
I hated this car, at first. But skinny sixteen year old beggars who bussed tables and mopped nursing home hallways for a living can't be choosers. It ran (sort of) and it was cheap, so I bought it. I aquired this rolling Lee Greenwood-mobile from my step uncle for I think about $200 bucks. It had been painted that way for a bi-centenial parade in 1976. It was 1980 when this picture was taken and nobody had ever thought it necessary to de-flag the thing. It actually would have been a pretty cool car if not for being a four door and having that idiotic..er, patriotic paint job.
It was a real attention getter and the last thing I wanted at that age was unwarranted attention. I lived in a VERY small town (1100 souls) in the Illinois flatlands and every time I drove through one of the neighboring small towns people on the street would nudge each other and point or stop, stand at attention and salute as I chugged past. I kid you not. It's funny to think of it now but at the time I was mortified and cursed my star spangled beater mobile every time it happened. They stopped doing it in my own town when the joke wore thin after a few months, but it never seemed to get old in other places.
Although I sure didn't like it at the time, I'm thankful now for the lessons that owning cars like that Chevy taught me. I think maybe kids have it a little too easy these days with cell phones and Mom and Dad running to the rescue every five seconds, it makes it harder to learn self reliance and problem solving skills. The only thing more humiliating to me than driving that car in the first place would have been calling my Dad unneccessarily to come rescue me before I had done everything I could think of to deal with a problem myself. And if I had whined to him about the paint job his anwer would have been brutally simple. "So paint it."
I once saw a guy paint his truck in the high school parking lot during lunch hour with a brush and a can of white Sears house paint. Looked pretty good too until a few days later as the rain washed it all away in big runny streaks while we stood watching out the window of English class. Seemed like a good solution to me, I'm just glad he tried it first. Ahh the lessons of life.
It's these kind of experiences that give us good stories in our middle years to pass on to our overindulged, entitled teenage offspring. Who of course could care less and wish we would just shut up and go away.
"Oh yeah? Why in MY day..."
