My First Car...EVER

.)
This is a picture of a 1960-1962 (I have no clue which year, exactly.) Plymouth Valiant. I found it today while reading a list of the top 10 ugliest cars ever. There were 11 cars on the list....that cracks me up. I was a bit sad to see my first car on the list. I LOVED my Valiant. I called it "Gitney"...why, I have no clue and can't remember. It had a push button transmission on the left side of the steering wheel..way cool. I am not exactly certain where my car came from....had a bad transmission. My dad was a top mechanic, and when I was in the ninth grade, he said if I would pay for the transmission, the car was mine. I gave him $200 and he did all of the repair work himself. I do know that the car he got the transmission from was a Lancer, and it did not have power steering, so there was no way to hook that back up. My car was like turning a little tank...and she was solid...and I loved her. The transmission went out again about a month or so after I started my first job after graduating from Rick's College (name then, and always will be Ricks to me.) as an RN. Dad called a friend and I went and bought another used car....on a Sunday...as I had to be to work in Pocatello on Monday. His mother loaned me $1,000 toward my second car, which was , tada...a 1974 Mustang. Of all the years you DO NOT want a Mustang, 1974 and 1975 were the years. Those were the worst Mustangs ever. Do you see a trend here? I also had a Chevy Citation that was supposed to be a wonderful car...There used to be hundreds of those on the road.

Back to my Valiant. My dad wrecked my car, and used the front end of another car to replace the broken part of Gitney...who then became Whitney....That car was red, so then I was driving a car down the road that was about half red...and half white. The neighbor guy was bothered by the red and white car, so painted the red part white...with a paint brush....I didn't have any seat belts and remember my battery was tied in there with a wet piece of inner tube after it got stolen....and there was no way that battery was coming out of there after that. My snow tires travelled in my trunk and were stolen while my sister had my car at school.....my gas gauge did not work. I tried in vain to get my mother to let me leave the car filled up and then have my sister fill the car up after she had used it so we could run around with a full tank of gas instead of on empty all of the time, as neither of us wanted to pay a cent for the other's gas. That was when I realized I was never going to win any argument while living with one of the number one high school debaters in the state of Idaho. After my sis had my car, there were quit a few times that I didn't even have enough gas to make it next door to Don Piper's Gas Station. My Valiant was one HEAVY car to push to the pump! I worked up quit a sweat, AND still remember the smiles of the gas station attendants as they LET me push my car to their pump. (Some of it was down hill....wonder I didn't take out one of their pumps.)

Anyway, ugly car or not, I am have happy and not so happy memories of my first car: a 1961 AND 1962 Plymouth Valiant. (Have to count the year of the red car that became a part of my car.)