My first car cost $30.00 and my second car cost even more!!! At $35.00, my 1969 Dodge Rambler wasn't much of an improvement over my Ford Falcon. The Pimple, as I called it, got me through my high school years and then some, but she had finally given up the ghost. A replacement had to be scored and Dad, being forever frugal, decided our budget could be increased. My first five cars combined cost less than $1,500. Dad, of course always had a new car, truck, van and later spent tens of thousands of dollars on RVs and such...but that's another story. I'm always shocked by the large numbers of kids with brand new cars and as a retired banker, I couldn't believe the number of parents coming in to co sign or take out a loan for their kid's brand new car. My parents never cosigned any kind of loan for me. I went with the $35.00 cars!!! Not that it bothered me much at that age. Besides, I was hard on cars.
While in my second semester at ICC, I had turned 19 which meant I could legally drink. I'd met a lot of great people at school and we were all musicians and we enjoyed going out and seeing live music in the area. The problem was.....I wasn't real good at backing up or using my rear view mirror much. There was a night when I was leaving Nashville North in East Peoria and backed my car into a pole. Shit!!!! Oh well, that's how I drove it. Then, on the way to school one morning, a semi truck pulled out in front of me on Washington Street, totally blocking my lane. Being still fairly naive, i didn't know that semi's warn you of that particular turn on the back of their trucks. I crashed right into it. No tickets were issued. Somehow I still piloted the car to school and then explained to my first hour professor that I'd been in a slight accident. I apologized for being late.
That was around the time I struck up a friendship with a guy called Dave Hout from Pekin. He had a nice car and always laughed at my cars. In fact, he wanted to take a picture of me in front of my beat up Dodge which I later called, Ziggy Cardust And The Fenders From Mars. Ziggy Cardust did have one improvement..... I had received an eight track player for Christmas and a pair of Jenson Speakers. Dad or friend must have helped me install the eight track player but the speakers were never installed in the back. I just improvised and put each of the two speakers in it's own shoe box with news paper in them for acoustical treatment!!! I always wondered why everyone else's car stereos sounded kick ass and mine sounded like shit!!!
Even with that slight improvement, Ziggy Cardust, had no heat, no air conditioning, no power steering or any other luxury. It was a "three on the tree" which meant there was no automatic transmission either. I had to learn to shift gears manually which wasn't terrible once you got used to it. There was one incident that happed when I was still in my learning phase.
I found myself at a stop light on Western Hill, just below Jumers heading north, up the hill. I was panicking because I knew that as soon as I let my foot off the brake, I had just one shot at getting my left foot off the brake, over to the clutch and put Ziggy Cardust into low gear to get up the hill. There was a car right behind me and I did NOT want to roll back into it!!!!
Of course I failed and the car stalled!!!! The person behind me could sense that I was inexperienced and backed up a bit giving me another opportunity to roll back just enough to pop it into low gear and proceed up the hill. I finally learned how to smoothly do this in the future which helped me when I drove a delivery truck that Summer with manual transmission.
Just another mile down the highway leading to THE ORANGE ROOM......When Days Were Psychedelic!!!!
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