Ah, the Good Times; Me and You and A Car Named Blue

Something somebody said this week made me feel (slightly) nostalgic about my first car. Maybe it was the little jingle I kept hearing on the radio: “1-877 KARS 4Kids, donate your car today.”

The jingle encourages people to donate their unwanted vehicles to raise money to help educate kids, pair them with mentors and so on. It’s a good cause, but I’ve never donated. If I ever did donate a vehicle, it would have been my first car, a 1951 Plymouth four-door sedan - Old Blue.

My first car looked like this except it didn't have a white top

I bought Old Blue near the end of my junior year in high school. Paid $75 hard-earned dollars for it when my weekly paycheck from my after-school job was only about $20. A friend of my dad’s owned Old Blue and sold it to me. That was in 1964 so the car already was 13 years old. I don’t know who was more thrilled about me buying Old Blue, me or my girlfriend. We had some good times in that car.

Old Blue did have a couple of bothersome quirks. Every time I drove up Drake Hill Road to my girlfriend’s house the carburetor cover fell off and rolled around under the hood. When I arrived at my girlfriend’s I had to put the cover back on the carburetor. I quickly learned to carry rags in Old Blue so I could wipe my hands before my date.

The rags helped on other occasions too. Old Blue had a split windshield, which often gushed water on me and my girlfriend after a rainstorm. Rainwater would collect in the windshield gutter when Old Blue sat in the rain while my girlfriend and I attended a movie or dance, and as soon as we started home, the accumulated water would pour like Niagara Falls all over my poor girlfriend’s legs. We learned how to avoid that happening pretty quickly too though.

We had more difficulty avoiding a couple other mishaps however. Old Blue didn’t have much of a defroster, so when me and the girlfriend parked somewhere and engaged in some heavy making out, I’d have to back very carefully out of our makeout spot to avoid crashing into something or getting stuck in a ditch. I hit a telephone pole one time backing up with fogged windows, but Old Blue’s bumper was pretty near indestructible. Another time I got stuck in a ditch and thought for awhile I would have to call my dad for help. In those days we had no cell phones so I would have had to hike to someone’s house to place a call. The next day my dad said to me as we were sitting in the living room reading the Sunday paper, “James, you should wash the mud off your car’s back fender before your mother figures out what you were up to last night.”

My mother was not in favor of me having a car, but my girlfriend and I did not like mom driving us to places on dates (my dad worked nights). We actually sat through a drive-in movie with mom one night - sheer agony!

Anyway, my mother absolutely refused to let me drive to school during the day because she knew I would pick my girlfriend up enroute. “You just ride the bus,” mom would insist. But, my fertile mind plotted and plotted and one day I dawdled long enough that I missed the bus. “Okay,” my scowling mom said, “But DO NOT pick up your girlfriend!”

I picked up my girlfriend. Unfortunately, a short distance from her house I pulled into an intersection and was broadsided. Luckily, the woman who hit me was speeding, so she and I both were cited. But being hit and having to go to court were not nearly as bad as having to call my parents and my girlfriend’s parents to tell them we had been in a wreck. Thinking back now, it’s a miracle my girlfriend wasn’t badly injured. All these years I’ve had a difficult time forgetting how stupid I was that day.

Anyway, there was no 1-877 KARS 4Kids in those days so I drove Old Blue with a big boosh in its side through the rest of high school. My girlfriend didn’t seem to mind so I didn’t mind either. We could still go to dances and movies and go parking and make out. Those were happy days!