The Book
A collection of stories provided by four or five dozen folks for whom an automobile is more than transportation: collectors, journalists, enthusiasts, celebrities, historians, sociologists, regular folks, anyone really. We want to include the most interesting and revealing stories about cars, the relationships, contexts . . . whatever makes it fun . . . from those with the ability to tell them.
As our colleague Matt Stone discovered when he compiled his book My First Car, these stories can be more fun and more colorful than fiction. The cars become fascinating tools to get to know remarkable people. Our book will take Matt’s theme the next couple steps to include stories of one’s favorite, and most lusted-after cars.
We will ask three questions:
- What was your first car?
- Of all the cars you’ve owned, what was your favorite?
- What car comes to mind when we say “CARGASM” – that is, what car really rings your chimes?
We’ll shoot for about four- or five-dozen contributions of 800 to 1500 words each. We anticipate about four or five pages each including two, maybe three, images. And we’ll encourage contributors to tell the stories in their own voice, be it vernacular or dialectic. For those with good stories but perhaps not adept at writing, we’ll help polish them up a bit.
The book’s format is yet to be determined, but early speculation favors a soft-cover 8X10, full color, medium/high-design book of about 250 pages.
The idea, of course, is to tell the personal stories of owners’ relationships with their cars. The mission is to “tease our garagenous zones,” as one enthusiast put it.
We’ll invite contributions from our friends, acquaintances, celebrities, . . . anyone who has had special relationships with their automobiles. We’ll start with those we know who can write and tell a good story. As a veteran journalist and enthusiast, I know hundreds of such folks likely to contribute. We’ll begin by inviting those whose stories are most likely to be entertaining. I’ll select, edit, and compile those stories.
[Here are my answers to those important questions in just about 1,000 words. You’ll notice I mentioned way more than three cars in my answers. So, we’re treating the questions rather like speed limits – more suggestions of structure than rigid structure. We want the revealing, uncensored stories allowing authors to emphasize whatever car or whatever context means most to them.]
STEVE’S FIRST CAR:
In the late 1960s I was between college experiences, working at menial, low-wage jobs, living in a college flop house at $9/week without much focus in terms of life goals. I was also vulnerable to the draft seeing many of my compatriots becoming cannon fodder in Viet Nam.
My grandfather had just bought a lightly used Rambler Ambassador a few months earlier so he retired his old, high-mileage 54 Chevy Bel Air, a car he’d driven for at least 10 years as he wintered in Florida and visited family in Missouri. It had been gathering dust, and then snow, then dust again at the Purdy farmstead in rural Michigan when he offered it to me for $50. It needed brakes before it could go anywhere but otherwise this lovely, two-tone cream-and-green Bel Air was in decent shape. It even boasted the high-tech option of an automatic headlight dimmer.
Point of Privilege: As editor of this important historic tome I’ll claim the privilege of reporting a second, first car.
Just before my purchase of Grandpa Purdy’s old Chevy, I had the exclusive use of a 1939 Chevy Master Deluxe that served three of us boys as our first car. My brother Wendell bought it for $60 in the fall of 1965 from my high school friend Paul Caywood who had inherited it from his grandmother. Paul had little affection for such an old car.
Wendell was attending Flint Junior College, living with our maternal
grandmother, and commuting most weekends back home to Marshall. When he quit JC, became a barber, and bought a ’65 Stingray roadster he passed “The ’39,” (as she has always been affectionally known) on to younger brother Warren who was still in high school. Warren continued using it when he began studies at General Motors Institute.
By then I was still floating around Lansing as a miscreant getting by somehow without a car when Warren bought a Ford Cortina that he would later go racing with. The ’39 then came to me.
She was a trusty ol’ girl and easy to fix. We all thought she was way cool because none of our pals drove such a special old car.
STEVE’S FAVORITE CAR
I’ve always referred to her as my “mechanical mistress.” I was between marriages, managing an unwieldy caseload of juvenile delinquents, and reconstructing an old stone house while doing a variety of demanding road rally projects. My plate was overfull, to be sure. It was the mid 80s and she was my daily driver for close to 5 years, at least during decent weather. Instead of taking the company car when chasing and placing miscreants, I’d take my old Volvo and have some serious road therapy along the way.
She was, at the time, about 20 years old: a 1965 Volvo P1800S sport coupe. Most saw her as a pure sports car; known in her day as a poor man’s Maserati. She boasted Italian styling, Ferrari-red paint, long hood, short deck, and the low profile of a true sports car. She drove just like she looked, that is, sensual. She provided intimate connections with the road and all the mechanical systems it took to get that modest horsepower (barely more than 100) efficiently to the rear wheels offering the lucky guy behind the wheel – me – a most gratifying tactile and aesthetic experience.
She did for me everything a pretty young women would do except the most obvious of favors. She waited patiently at the curb for me to finish my work, looking pretty and poised like an understatedly classy dame. She was most rewarding on the back roads. Modulating her pedals, manipulating her shifter, engaging and disengaging her overdrive, flowing down a curvy country road was like dancing with a graceful, experienced lady. She never complained, never disappointed, she reflected my soul.
There came a time when she needed some serious underbody attention. Too many years on the roads of Canada and the U.S. had eroded her early-unibody week spots. She still looked great when I put a “FOR SALE” sign in her window, hoping she wouldn’t sell . . . at least not right away. But a young fellow came along, fell in love with her (or was it lust . . . it’s so hard to tell the difference at that age) and offered me twice what she was worth. I needed the money more than I needed her. So, I let her go.
STEVE’S CARGASM
The first time I understood the concept of a “cargasm” came at the 1989 North American International (Detroit) Auto Show. It was a BMW 850i, all silver and black, spot-lit like a pole dancer. Coincidentally, the car at the top of my lust-inducing, money-is-no-object list today is also a BMW. Here are their stories:
I was barely a hanger-on in the automotive journalism trade in the 1980s when I was first granted press credentials to cover the Detroit Auto Show. I had been attending every year as a spectator since my brother and a couple friends made a 4-hour drive (each way) to the 1964 show in Thom Gray’s ’54 Ford convertible we called the “Thunder Chicken.” The hit of the ‘64 show season
was, by the way, the new Mustang introduced at the New York show a few months later.
As I finished my final pass through the 1989 show on the last of three press preview days I suddenly came upon a car I’d somehow missed in previous passes. It was beautifully lit against a dark background, silver with mostly black trim, low in the front, as sleek and graceful as a Greek goddess – the BMW 850i two-door, two-plus-two, V12-powered touring coupe. It was a full step ahead of the sexiest other cars on the floor.
I remember a gasp, a pause, and a slow, savoring approach to the platform upon which that amazing car sat. It was like an orgasm including, I think, even a flush of adrenalin.
But now, so many decades later, the car I’d most like to have ringing my chimes on a daily basis (after all, if it’s to be a ‘cargasm’ we’d like it to be multi-sensual and daily-driven) is the BMW Z8, the retro-styled, V8-powered, two-seat roadster with manual transmission, the best of modern driving dynamics and the ambiance of a work of art. Produced from 1998 to 2003 the Z8 sold new for about $130,000. Today the average price is well over $200,000.
Bummer! I still can’t afford one . . . but I can still lust after it, can I not?
