Redefining Cool: Cars I Have Owned

All kidding aside, my kids think that my past has been littered -- I mean blessed -- with cool cars. In reality, I think that my experience with vehicles I've owned has helped me retain a sense of humility, keeping me in my proper place.

If, someday, it turns out that pride is my downfall ... well it surely won't be because of the automobiles I've owned. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Any boy growing up in the Midwest in the 1970's wanted one of four or five cars. At the top of my wish list was a Pontiac Trans Am, black with a T-bar roof and a gold eagle painted on the hood. I had two friends who each had a car fitting this description. Anyway, other cars high up on the wish list included a Chevy Camaro, Ford Mustang, and Chevy Corvette. Any color would have sufficed.

The problem, of course, with a cool car is the price tag. I wasn't willing to pay the price to have a cool car. I'm still not willing to fork over the big bucks to be cool.

I ended up buying my first car in 1980, at the tail end of my freshman year at the University of Nebraska, I bought a partially rusted out 1975 gold Dodge Dart. For you auto fans out there, yes, that had the Slant Six engine and a manual transmission, three on the floor. It didn't look cool, but it was actually a fun car to drive.

My sophomore year during spring break, while my friends went south to Florida (presumably to gather fond memories for future writing material), my dad and I had a lot of fun patching up the holes, removing all the rust spots that hadn't fallen out yet, and painting the car a bright Cornhusker red. Now that was a cool car. It was still a Dodge Dart, but it had become a Red Dodge Dart.

The teeth on the gears of the speedometer cable kept breaking, and I replaced the cables twice with cables I found in junk yards. Thus, the speedometer reading was about 20% off from reality. That made for very excited passengers, who thought we were going much faster than we actually were.

The passenger door (this was a two door vehicle) would occasionally fly open, even when locked, and I almost lost a date once when I turned a sharp corner. That was our last date.

My kids have seen a picture of that car, and this past Christmas my youngest son wanted a model car -- the kind that you assemble with glue and then paint -- of a '75 Dodge Dart. His request melted my heart.

I graduated from the Dart to an '83 Chevy Citation, another cool car if ever there was one. Yeah, it was a car named after a speeding ticket. Fortunately I received no speeding tickets, though I got a warning when my wife and I were driving home to North Carolina after our honeymoon. The female officer took pity on me, I think, when she saw the wedding dress draped across the back seat.

The Citation blew a head gasket -- twice -- and developed a cracked head, mostly because I didn't recognize the warning signs and didn't maintain it properly.

I ended up driving my wife's old white Datsun 310GX, another potentially cool car except for the fact that she had driven it for three years in Schenectady, New York, where it rusted out from all the salt on the winter roads. Still, that was a fun car. The sun roof leaked, so on rainy days I would get soaked driving into work. The window handle on the driver's side broke, so I couldn't roll down the window. The parking brake didn't work. That car also blew a head gasket and it had a propensity for breaking down. I carried a pair of running shoes in the car so that if it broke down I could just run to wherever I was going. One morning I had to run the last five miles into work...wearing dress pants ... in July.

And one evening, driving home from work, the exhaust pipe broke, and the muffler dragged on the ground for the last ten miles home. Sparks were flying every which way, and even in thick rush hour traffic no car would come closer than a hundred yards behind me.

Finally, in '94 that white Datsun was on its last legs, so I bought a '90 Mazda 626, shiny black. As I was signing the deal for the Mazda and trading in the old Datsun, my darling four year old daughter, who was also sitting at the negotiating table, blurted out, "I'm glad Daddy's buying a new car, because that white car just doesn't work at all!"

I loved the Mazda, but on my way home from work one night, after I had owned the car for about a month, I hit a deer. The deer walked away, but the car suffered nearly $2000 worth of damage. Ouch.

Still, that car served me well. I drove it until 2005, when it finally died. I then bought a 2002 Honda Accord, a car that I thoroughly loved driving.

One afternoon at work, about 6 months after buying the car, I got a call from corporate security.

"Hello, is this Joel? Okay ... there's a brush fire in the parking lot and it's next to your car and you may want to come out and move it."

I raced out to the parking lot and, sure enough, a fire truck was there and they were spraying my car. The front end of my Honda looked like a lava lamp bubble, melted down onto the curb.

Amazingly, the car was fixed after two months in the body shop, and I'm still driving it today.

Wanna go for a ride? The car may not be cool, but the conversation will be sublime!