Ted Streuli, The Daily Record Newswire
I wanted two things when I was in high school: a prom date and a car. Well, three things if you count the beer.
The prom date was a stand-in. She was a friendly young woman who traveled in my circles without harboring even an iota of romantic interest in me, nor I in her. We had a pleasant, unmemorable time. After the dance, our friends, who had real dates, disappeared to dark quiet corners while we sat on a well-lighted couch wondering what to do. There was a mutual understanding that it would not require a dark quiet corner.
The car was a stand-in too, a 7-year-old Toyota Corona sedan with oxidized red paint, a junkyard passenger door sporting rust-colored primer, and a radio antenna fashioned from a wire hanger. The Toyota had a manual transmission (my father believed automatics were unreliable and expensive to repair), which offered a crash course in friction points and hand brakes for a teenager learning to drive on hills where cars are parked perpendicular to the sidewalks so they don’t roll into the bay.
The car did not turn heads very often, but when it did the people were usually pointing and laughing. I suspect my prom date was relieved when we agreed to ride in the back seat of a friend’s car. I didn’t blame her; it’s hard to look graceful and elegant when the door groans open and your wrist corsage gets hung up on the antenna hanger.
All the while, I was dreaming about a 1965 Ford Mustang, maybe a convertible, definitely red. Anything from 1965 to 1968 would have been OK; the changes to the body style were minor. In the late 1970s, an early era Mustang wasn’t in the exclusive domain of collectors. They were just aging sports cars that were pretty cool and mostly affordable; brand-new ones had a sticker price of $2,368 in 1964, about $18,000 in today’s dollars.
Eventually, I owned two. Shortly after that prom, the Toyota blew a bolt through the crank shaft case, which spewed oil with the force of a sperm whale’s blowhole. Approximately six seconds later, the engine suffered an abrupt demise, ending an inglorious 43,000-mile life. I replaced the Toyota with a 1968 Mustang, red with a black interior, which I bought for $1,500. It had the small engine, the 6-cylinder, and an automatic transmission. And man, it was cool.
That was the car that took me to see Willie Nelson in Sacramento, Charlie Daniels in Oakland and eventually to a six-month stint in Reno, where a friendly young woman asked to borrow it so she could visit her family in California. It was the last I saw of the Mustang.
I managed to get another one, a 1992 GT in give-me-a-ticket red with gray leather inside. It was a rocket ship with a five-speed manual transmission and a five-liter V8 that rumbled like an Oklahoma thunderstorm at every stop sign. Heads turned, but without the finger pointing and giggling.
“Driving a hot car is a lot like sex to me," Karen Marie Moning wrote in Faefever, “or a lot like I keep thinking sex should be: A total body experience, overwhelming, to all the senses, taking you places you’ve never been, packing a punch that leaves you breathless and touches your soul.”
The Mustang turned 50 last week. I don’t own one anymore, but my 78-year-old father-in-law bought a new Shelby Cobra last year, and he has hinted that he might let me take it for a drive.
