WCMessenger.com: My First Car

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My First Car

Others

By Staff | Published Sunday, July 5, 2009

Leisa Gage - Manager, Messenger Office Supply, Decatur High School graduate 1976

My first car was an orange, four-speed Volkswagen "Fastback" with white interior. It didn't have air conditioning or an FM radio, but I do remember it cost about $5 to fill it up. Because it was so small, many of the football players (including husband Robert) loved to mess with it. After school I would come outside and they would have moved it out into the pasture between the Decatur Middle School and the intermediate school, or in some other parking lot. The football guys thought it was funny to pick it up and move it during class before I got out.

Summer Harvey - Paradise

"I had a 1976 Chevy pickup. It was baby poo brown. I was the only one in Keller with a vehicle like it. One day, I thought I was being cool, and I bought some cigarettes. I did not really want anyone to see me smoking, so I put on some dark sunglasses and drove around town smoking. Remember, there were no other vehicles like mine. What was I thinking? Everyone saw me. At school, I was asked several times if I smoked. I denied it, of course. That just made me look like a liar!"

Cheryl Robinson - former Wise County resident, pianist at First Baptist Church in Newark

In 1976, my dad bought a 1968 Camaro for $500. It had a little body damage to the back quarter panel. If only I had it now - it had a three-speed on the floor. I drove it for about a year and sold it - stupid! I didn't realize that it was such a great car until I let it go. I was such a wallflower in school, but I had a hot car and didn't know it.

Angie Tyson - Bridgeport Main Street manager, Bridgeport High School graduate 1984

My first car was a maroon and white El Camino. My dad just brought it home one day during my sophomore year and I tried to be grateful, but I was horrified. He didn't know anything about cars, so the fact that it had a 450 engine didn't mean much to him. It was fast! He then put dual exhaust on it, and when you punched the gas pedal, it would shoot flames out the tailpipes. It was like my very own personal Batmobile. In spite of me being just completely mortified, it really turned out to be a cool car.

Rebecca Clark - Boyd High School graduate 1986, currently lives in Aurora

My first car was a 1979 International Brown Scout. I have three brothers, and we all shared it over the years. Before I received my license, my brother was taking my friend and me to her house, and he pulled over to let me drive the back roads. It was the very first time I was ever behind the wheel, and I did not know what to do at the corners. To make a long story short, I ran into a ditch and knocked the tire off of the wheel. As we were about to crash, my brother screamed, "hit the breaks," but of course, I accidentally hit the gas. My brother knew he would get in trouble if my parents found out he let me drive, so he made up a story about him dodging a dog and running into the ditch. We kept the secret until we were both in our 30's and then we told our parents ... luckily, they laughed. That car lasted through four kids; I can't believe it lasted that long!

Callie Manning - Alvord High School graduate 1995

I had my brother Danny's hand-me-down truck, a 1985 Ford F-150. It was nicknamed "Trusty Rusty" because it was a rusty red color, but it was actually a very nice truck while my brother had it. When he passed it down to me, he took the radio out of it and put it in his car. My parents bought me a boom box and thought it would be cool; I had to set it on the floor, and if someone else was in the car with me, they had to hold it in their lap! If the truck was bouncing around, the CD would scratch and skip ... it was hilarious. I also remember it had two fuel tanks, and one day it broke down on the side of the road. I called my dad to come try and fix it, and when he got there, all he did was flip a switch to access the other gas tank. I had just run out of gas.

Jessica Mowery

My dad gave me his old farm tuck, a 1991 Dodge Ram Cummins Turbo diesel. It had a headache rack and huge deer guard. Most of my friends drove new cars. I was embarrassed at first, but I ended up loving it. My parents always knew when I was coming and leaving the house since it was so loud.

One time my friend and I were running late for basketball practice and were about to get caught by a train. Not wanting to run for being late, I decided to go for it. I slammed on it, and we jumped the tracks! It was a total "Dukes of Hazzard" moment.

Susan Ayers - grew up in Boyd, now lives in Fort Worth

I had a 1976 Vega station wagon that was pumpkin orange with a white vinyl top and interior. You could not kill that car - and believe me I tried. It was cool. That thing had an aluminum block. It was one of those cars that as long as you had gas, water and oil in it, you couldn't kill it. That car is still on the road - I passed it about a year back. I turned around, and I'm pretty sure that was my car.

Danielle Scroggins - Decatur High School, 1993

"I had a Daihatsu Rocky. They don't even make them anymore! It was cute, though, before I wrecked it. A better story is that I learned to drive on my dad's column-shift-no-power-steering truck. On a hill - of course. It died 97 times before I finally figured out the clutch to gas ratio."

Sgt. Robert Cox, DPS Trooper

It was a 1971 Ford F-150 pickup with a three-on-the-tree manual shift with manual brakes. It was my father's truck and his first-ever new vehicle purchase. I loved that truck. I wish I still had it today.

DeDe Diaczenko - Decatur High School graduate 1986, lives in Decatur

My first car was a 1972 Chevrolet Caprice Classic, "the green limousine." When it worked we could all fit in it. I had a sunburned left arm all summer because the A/C was broken. My family got it from my grandparents, my mom passed it on to me and I passed it on to my sister. I drove it from 1985 to 1990. I took it to college (UNT) and delivered balloons in it. It would hold 10 people or 50 balloons comfortably.

(Your first car) is your ticket to freedom. You have a little bit more freedom with more responsibility. It's kind of the car you tear up, it seems like. The first car gets the worst beating, but you take better care of the next car. By the time my sister got the car, we had to put oil in it every week and put water in it to make sure it didn't overheat.

Donna Bean - Classified Ads, Wise County Messenger

I was 22 years old and going through a divorce when I first purchased a car of my own. However, that is not the car that I consider my first car. The year was 1972, we lived in Midland, and the family car died. My parents purchased a brand new, brown, four-on-the-floor Pinto station wagon, and her name was Peggy. Boy were we uptown! When I turned 16, I expected to get to drive the car anytime I wanted - not! By this time, we lived up the road in Bowie. My dad was chief of police and a real stickler for abiding the law. All the other kids in driver's ed had been driving for years, but not me. I barely knew where the key went, and I certainly couldn't drive a car with a standard transmission. After finishing driver's ed without killing myself or my instructor, Daddy wouldn't let me get my license until I learned to shift gears so I could take my driving test in Peggy. It took me from Sept. 5 (my birthday) until Dec. 30 (the day the trooper who did the driving tests retired) to convince him to let me use a friend's automatic car to take my test so I could legally practice driving in Peggy and learn to shift gears. By the last few weeks of school my sophomore year (remember, I turned 16 in September), I had finally mastered the clutch and was allowed to drive alone. The next two years I spent a lot of quality time in Peggy driving my mom to work and my sister to school and to her friend's house, running errands for my mom and finally driving myself to school where my friends would greet me and say, "Are we going to lunch in Peggy today?"

My mom was a police dispatcher. When the patrolmen would see me driving around (very carefully, I might add), they loved to play jokes on my mom by calling in a license plate check. She would enter the information on the old teletype machine and patiently wait for a reply from Austin. When the machine would start ticking and spit out the long, skinny paper with the registration on it, only then would she realize it was our family car, Peggy. She would radio the patrolmen and ask frantically, "What is that car doing?" They would calmly reply, "Nothing, we're just checking."

Peggy was eventually sold to a young man who wasn't a stickler for abiding the law like my dad. The new owner hadn't bothered to change the title. It didn't take my dad long to have a chat with the young man, who promptly got the title transferred. I think Peggy's end came shortly after that.

Tara Knarr, Alvord High School, 2001

"When I turned 16, my parents gave me my very own set of car keys to their cars, but several months later, Dad bought me a 1991 Chevrolet Corsica. They pretty much already had the car picked out when they took me to look at it at. I didn't really like the way it looked, but they said, 'This is what you're getting or you get nothing.' So I went along with it. Dad paid cash and then I had to pay him back as I could. I thought it was ugly. It was white with ugly tan interior, but I made it into my car. I went and bought seat covers, a steering wheel cover and of course, some fuzzy dice for the rear view mirror! I loved those fuzzy dice!"