Since I’m not going to be doing any Teaser Tuesdays for a while I thought I’d try something new around here. Every Tuesdays I will post one memory question and hope people will all chime in with their answers.

This week’s memory challenge – your first car.

I turned 16 in 1974 but I didn’t get my driver’s license at 16 like so many other kids did. For one thing, I only lived a couple of blocks from the high school so walking was easy. For another thing I was a girl who dated guys who usually had cars. But the main reason I didn’t get my license right away was because there was no car for me to drive. My mom worked for a car dealership and drove a company car which I wasn’t allowed to drive. Eventually a friend of hers allowed me to borrow his car for the test and I got my license when I turned 17. Which meant, of course, I wanted a car. I was going to be a senior and I had visions of upping my coolness factor for at least my last year of high school.

I had a job at a local burger joint but would have to borrow the money for a car from my grandmother, which, according to her, gave her a vote in the car I bought.

My way cool aunt had a car for sale and boy did I want to buy it – a blue 1965 Mustang that looked something like this:

I refused to admit that I was too short for the car and that I would be looking out through the section of the steering wheel instead of over the top of it. I sat in that car and imagined pulling into the parking lot at Mt. Diablo High School (after driving around a while “to be seen” of course) and suddenly being someone who mattered at school.

Alas my grandmother and my mother consorted to keep my coolness down in the freezer section and insisted, instead, that I buy this, a 1970 Dodge Dart Swinger.

Sigh. Granted, in later years when drag racing at the Fremont raceway was a part of our life, that car might have made me a little more popular. But as a fairly invisible senior in high school, it didn’t help a bit. And when I married my first husband, the only thing insisted was that I sell that car ASAP.

So what was your first car and how did it come into your life?