Gas prices changing priorities in car ownership

As a red-blooded American male I have no problem recalling the vehicles I’ve owned in my lifetime.

Most guys have no problem telling you everything about their first car; girls are a little fuzzy on make and model but most can recall the color and maybe the number of doors.

I had no trouble recalling my 1968 Ford Fairlane 500 Fastback. But then, no, that wasn’t the first vehicle I drove. That could have been maybe steering granddad’s 1959 Chevrolet Apache stepside pickup or dad’s green 1963 Ford stepside. I wasn’t licensed at the time but I even drove a 1967 Chevy pickup with both sides of the bed bashed in to school for a month or two before I got my own car.

I had been looking for just the right car for months but it was my dad that located it first. It was dark green and it cost me $800 in 1974. I had saved up enough paper route money to pay cash for it. Being a mid-size two-door, my folks called it a beer can because it was smaller than what they drove. I loved that car.

It had the 302 engine so it wasn’t fast enough to win a race but that didn’t stop me from trying. The only performance equipment that had been added to the car was a glass-pack muffler and white-letter steel belted radial tires. I had dreams of how that car could have been fixed up but somehow I just never got around to doing anything more than polish the paint off the hood. I believe I sold it about four years later for the same $800 I had originally invested.

I think I can probably tell you the year model, color and pretty close to what I paid for every single car or pickup I’ve owned. I like buying used vehicles and I’ve bought and sold close to 20 of them. With three vehicles in front of my house, all with over 100,000 miles and the newest one 12 years old, I have quite the fleet. I tell people if you’re going to own old beater vehicles you need to have three of them. That way at least one will run when you go out in the morning.

I’ve only regretted owning a couple of those old vehicles. A 1982 Chevy Citation was one of those vehicles.

Gasoline prices had been going up and a peppy little front-wheel drive six-cylinder sounded like a great idea. I was buying the car the owner of the Chevy dealership had driven as a demonstrator so I thought how could I go wrong. It was nearly 20 years before I could bring myself to buy another front-wheel drive vehicle.

 Sadly the last 20 years of automotive history have been largely about homogenization. All the cars look alike, most of them have four-cylinder engines and now they’re even making hybrid electric cars.

My generation participated in the debate of which car had the most power and greatest looks. Future generations I guess will brag to their grandchildren that they drove a car that blew everyone else away on gas mileage.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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