Strike One, Strike Two...

I was nineteen and had just bought my first car.

Somehow I had stumbled across a broken-down Italian sportscar, a Fiat Spider. I drove it proudly to my school, Pomona College, and pulled it up in front of the dorm, where my friends gathered around to admire it.

Six weeks later, a school friend and I decided to drive the car to the Monterey Jazz Festival, a distance that, coming and going, totaled seven hundred miles. The odd thing about our decision was that my friend owned a brand new Alpha Romeo. Was it the perfect car for our trip to Monterey? No, but somehow my beat-up Fiat was.

The festival was great. So was the drive… almost. On our way back into town, my friend decided to test the car’s engine. Bang! Thump! We had the car towed in and were told it was gone for good.

Strike one.

I was twenty-one and had bought my second car. 

Inspired by my car enthusiast buddy Jock Ellis, I purchased one of the great early American sedans, a 1953 Chrysler New Yorker Deluxe, which had one of the first automatic gearshift systems and an engine as heavy as a Volkswagen. How much did I pay for it? Ninety-nine dollars, and it ran perfectly.

The color, a brown that easily could have been buffed up, seemed wrong to me, so I had it painted bright blue at that Southern California institution, Earl Scheib automotive. Driving the car around for a few weeks, I quickly realized the mistake Earl Scheib and I had made, so I sold the car… for $300. Looking back on it, I should have kept that beautiful old vehicle in its original color, as God intended it to be.

Strike two.

I was twenty-two and had my third car.

Unlike my first two cars, the third wasn’t exotic at all. In fact, it belonged to my Cousin Minnie, a retired schoolteacher who had offered me her Rambler anytime at a good price. The reason I had turned her down: it was pink.  

This time, on car number three, I decided to reverse things from the second car. I returned to Earl Scheib and had the car painted the same blue as before, a color that didn’t go well on a Chrysler but was just fine on a pink Rambler.

No drama. No pain. A little silly, but no strike three.