The Best Car I Ever Had - a 1952 M.G. TD

The best car I ever owned was a 1952 M.G. TD. I bought it, when I was in college in the seventies I bought it for $400 off a used car lot in downtown Pomona, which was surrounded by boarded up buildings, graffiti, and a few decorative drunks lying around to add character.

I miss that car and I wish I had hung onto it. Yes, I loved that car very much and wish I had hung onto it because I just looked up what the damn thing was worth. They are selling for $30,000! Hello!

But then again, if you look at the photo - yep - that is a 1952 M.G. TD. And it is worth about $30,000. Of course my TD never quite looked like that. It was half gray paint and half bare metal. It seemed that someone, after a hard night of drinking, thought he should restore the M.G. He started restoring it, but never finished. In that neighborhood, he probably sold it to the car dealer for $100 or a case of whiskey.

Anyway, the M.G. TD had the three main attributes I looked for in a car. It ran, it stopped and it was cheap.

I loved that car, because it had character. It had two little holes in the dashboard for plugging in the teapot when you were driving and making tea.. And you thought driving and texting was bad!

It did not have windows. It had side curtains, which quite frankly, no matter how romantic it sounds, were a pain in the ass. When it started to rain, you had to get the side curtains out of the special compartment and put them on, which involved fitting them into special slots and then watching the rain drip through them. Of course this never matter, because if you hit a big puddle, the water would come up through the hole in the floor boards and soak you anyway.

Of course , I could have put the side curtains up before it started to rain, but I was drinking a lot in those days. And if I did put the curtains up, my date and I couldn't have stood in the pouring rain and bonded. I was always amazed to hear how many cuss words those sorority girls knew.

Gas gauge ? The memories are a bit fuzzy , did I mention I was drinking a lot those days, compared to ... oh never mind. But the gas gauge did not work., so I measured my gas, by poking a stick down the gas tank and pulling it up.

And the TD was missing many of the ammenities you find on modern cars. For,instance it had no turn signals. Put your hand out and point up, you're turning left. Put your arm straight out, you're turning right. Point your hand down, you are stopping. Just take a guess how effective these signals were on a L.A. freeway. In fact, I think you will find a lot of one handed TD drivers, the other hand is laying on the San Diego off-ramp.

Plus, you have to love the Sears Roebuck catalog - had a roof for the M.G.. How cool is that? I ordered one, as the current roof had a few holes in it, and even if the side curtains were up, your chances of getting soaked in the M.G., were about 100 percent.

Anyway the new roof arrived when I was not at the dorm and my friends, because they were bored and had been drinking , decided to put it on the car. I have always been eternally grateful to them, because of their expertise, the roof never quite closed and they added duct tape to close that extra gap.

I could never lock the M.G. and my friends, put it in the dorm lobby, the dining room, on the President's porch, in the sorority's common room, in the library lobby, on the pitching mound at the baseball field, in the end zone at the football field - in short, the car was small, easy to push and an endless source of amusement to my drunken friends..

To all your current M.G. TD owners, you know how that starter gets stuck? Well just rock it back and forth and you will hear a click and the starter will work. There is also a hole just below the radiator, where you can insert a crank and crank start the car. This is a good way to suffer a broken arm and it is much easier to cruise down a hill and pop the clutch. And those dual carburetors ? The only thing I can assume is that car engineers in England drink a lot too. The dual carbs truly make you appreciate fuel injection.

I have the mechanical ability of a goldfish, but even I could work on the M.G. It took a couple of bolts, disconnect two wires and you could replace the alternator in about five seconds. The M.G. was a car where you could look at the engine and see the ground below.

To raise the hood, you had to raise the hoods. There was a hood, one on each side of the engine, you turned, you know , those whatamacallits, and then lift the hood. Yes those whatamackkpeytdcd, thank God I don't drinked like I used to.

Anyway it was one hell of a car

And for you trivia buffs, what does M.G stand for?