Marking time
There are those who mark time by the seasons, and those who gauge their lives by the women they have known, the jobs they have held.
I’m not the type to speak openly about the women in my life, and the seasons are just seasons.
But cars. Oh, lord, do I remembere the cars. I’ve marked time by cars since I drove.
The first car I ever owned was a 1967 Plymouth Valiant. It looked a little like this. Mine wasn’t in that kind of condition, though. It had an automatic transmission- that was it’s option.
The Valiantrs came stock wiht a slant-six engine. The curse of the Chrysler Motor Corporation. The Slant Six was an engine so indestructible it made people keep cars well beyond their useful life, simply because they still ran. The Valiant was one of those. It had rust spots in the most incomprehensible of places- like the tops of the front quasrters. Chrysler figured they didn’t need inners, so the salt and spray ended up inside the fenders, which rusted at an alarming rate. The Valiant didn’t have a radio, either- it didn’t even have a hole in the dash. So I laid my hands on an AM radio and made a wood box, whcih sat on the floor under the dash.
Yeah, under the dash- imagine that? There was room under the dash of this beast to put an egg create, and still have room for your feet. I often did just that. The seats were woven out of some material that resembled multicolored monofilament fishing line, and the years of some drunk sliding in and out of the front seat had left it frayed and at any moment a stray thread would poke you hard in the nether regions causing you to involuntarily jump, or perhaps veer into oncoming traffic.
Yeah, the previous owner was a drunk. THe seventeen hip flasks of Beam jammed under the seat were mute witness to this, and more than one had to be broken to be extracted from it’s hiding place. I have no idea how he managed to get them in there, but they were jammed good.
Anyway, I kept that car the first year of my full-time employment. It’s single-barrel carburetor gasped and wheezed like a man posessed, and I had to plan when I might be ascending a hill, or accelerating for any reason. Passing was strictly out of the question. The engine was so old, tired, and worn, that there was no saving it. So I got my hands on another engne, rebuilt it, and proceeded to stick it in the Valiant. Pitiably, it didn’t match the transmission, so the Valiant sat in the driveway until a friend of Dad’s bought it for parts.
11 comments Og | Shadetree Mechanic
My first trustworty car was a ’61 Valiant Station wagon I bought in 1964. It had the 170 CID slant six, with three on the floor and a fifth under the seat. Couldn’t outrun a VW, but it had room for camping, fishing, hunting gear, and a sleeping bag in the back and with that underpowered little engine and snow tires, I drove it around stuck jeeps on Cascade Mountain logging roads. It also got almost 40 MPG on 60’s regular gas at .24 a gallon. That engine was so bulletproof that I drove it once with the center electrodes of the spark plugs burned off 1/4 of an inch up into the porcelain. If I had shut it down it would never have started again. I drove it to an auto shop in Union Gap, WA where they tuned it and made it perfect again for, as I remember, $35.00. I finally had to ge rid of it in 1969 when the entire floor pan fell out.
I was going to boatbuilding school in the mid 60’s. We built three little 20′ wood boats as learning exercises and put marinized slant sixes in them. I know of one that is still running its original engine after 43 years of nearly constant use.
My first car was a Ford Fairmont. I once got passed by a Volkswagen Bug going up a hill
I SOOOOO totally know what you mean about marking time by the car you drove.
I will do this FREQUENTLY – like talking to a friend of mine about the great TGIFriday’s bar fight we got in (that’s a blog post all its own, look for it later this week). He insisted it was Labor Day 1998; I knew it had to be 1997, as I was still driving the Caddy. Bought the Ram (second one) in October 1997…
My first wife came with a ’63 Valiant wagon. The 170 cid Six WAS underpowered, and howled like a banshee if pushed to 70 on I-5 going back and forth between Rancho Cordova, CA, where I was stationed at Mather AFB, and our respective homes in Portland, OR. The engine and body WAS bulletproof, and so, when I made First Looie, I bought my first NEW car, a ’68 Valiant, but it had a 273 V8 in it (plus A/C, A/T). I once drove it clear across WY (in the No Speed Limit days) in 3 hrs, 5 min. I ran out at between 95 and 105, stopping once for gas in Little America. It got 16 mpg at the century mark! That was on bias-ply Top Cat tires of some unremarkable brand.
Drove it north for Xmas in 1968, up through the Willamette valley and through a 42″ snowfall in the Eugene area, then climbed it, with VeeBar tire chains, into the west hills of Portland and finally stuck it in 20 inches of unplowed snow 200 feet from my dad’s house at 1,000 feet elevation. With 4-wheel chains on his ’65 Jeep CJ5, we couldn’t pull it out, so left it there and got into the Scotch….best car I ever owned, that ’68.
Wow, Rivr, I havent’ heard anyine refer to VeeBar chains for a hundred years. I still have mine.
I learned to drive in a ’67 Valiant. It had been my grandparents’ car and they gave it to my dad when they bought a ’74 Dart. The Valiant had a 273 like rivrdog’s and also had an automatic plus the luxury of an AM radio. It had been well taken care of and could really move. It got me into and out of trouble on several occasions (how do we survive our youth?) and sometimes I wish I still had that car.
My first car was a ’66 Chevy Biscayne that belonged to my grandmother.
Had the straight six — 250 cubic inches I think? — with the gaspy single-barrel carburetor. Automatic transmission and absolutely nothing else. Although at least the dash had a cutout for a radio.
I think the Biscayne was a poor man’s Bel Air. No chrome anywhere but the bumpers and the door handles.
My first car was a 64 Valiant with 3-on-the-tree. Underpowered, sure, but super reliable and economical tho that didn’t matter much when gas was 29 cents a gal.
2nd car was a 65 Impala w/283 V8 and auto (my Dad’s). A GREAT car. Now more than 30 years later I drive a new car with same basic GM small block pushrod V-8 (only with about 250 more HP).
My first car was a ’69 Sport Satellite, bought in January ’81. I still have it, out in a field, & it’s all there.
They used the Slant Six as a forklift engine, too.
Friend of mine had, in high school (this woulda been around ’90-91), a ’64 Valiant.
Went nice and fast if you told it to, so presumably its slant-6 wasn’t worn out. Pushbutton automatic, too.
(Better than my first car, which was an ’89 Metro.
But it got good mileage, and the 55 horsepower wasn’t so bad considering it weighed nothing, even with the four door LWB.
My current giant Krautmobile 300D only has 76 HP and I think it weighs 1000 pounds more than the Metro did.)
My first car, in 1979, was also a 1967 Valiant 2.8L slant six – my mother’s old vehicle, bought new when we moved to Swaziland. She had downsized to a 2L Colt Galant to so I inherited this beast. Went perfectly, power, comfort, reliability, although no good in the sand. Eventually sold it to a work colleague in Namibia in 1985