A 1971 Chevy Belair.   Fire Engine Red.   That was my first car.  My wife and I married at the end of junior year in college.   We moved my things from my dorm room to the married student housing using the big basket on my bicycle.  My parents told us they would buy us a car as a wedding present, but they insisted that it had to be a full size car, and it had to have air conditioning.   My only requirement was what I considered the ultimate luxury–an FM radio.   Before coming to college, the only place I heard FM radio was in the dentist’s office, playing classical music.  But in college I became a fan of Boston’s WBCN 104.1 FM.

My family had always owned Chevys–I grew up next door to a Chevy dealer in Brooklyn where as a kid I would get a sneak peak at the new models every fall as they were delivered.   The new cars were clad in canvas, but of course they had to remove the canvas to get them off the truck carrier.   The new models would be parked safely inside the garage, but my friends and I could peek in through the mail slot.   That’s where I got my first look at the famous “Teardrop” tail lights on the ’59 models.

1971 was a recession year.   Auto sales were in the tank, and there were plenty of “leftovers” that fall when the ’72 models came out.   My wife and I went to Seymour Chevrolet on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge to see what they had to offer.   There we saw it.   The Fire Engine Red Belair sedan.  It had air conditioning, it had an FM radio, and they took $1000 off the price.   Such a deal!  Living in Massachusetts, we also bought a pair of studded snow tires for the winter.   Don’t see those around anymore.

That car served us well for nearly six years, all through our moves to Arlington and Brookline.   And then, in 1975, we drove cross-country as I did my interviews for Internship after medical school.   The photo is from Los Angeles where we arrived in the middle of the fire season.   From there, we headed east along the southern tier–Las Vegas, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast heading toward Miami.   As we passed Pensacola, the car began to vibrate, but I found if I kept it at a steady 63 mph, the vibration would cease.   We drove a further 500 miles to Miami, where I decided to bring it into a repair shop.   The mechanic put it on the lift, and found that the universal joint on the drive shaft was about to shatter.   While he was removing it, I checked the tire treads.   One of the rear tires was so thin I was able to indent my finger as though it was a balloon.   Imaging dodging not one but two bullets on the same trip.

We wound up moving to New Haven.   There we traded in the “Fire Engine” for something much classier–a 1976 Plymouth Volare with a vinyl top.  We had arrived in the suburbs.

My dad lost his Chrysler dealership, due to bad business deals and the UAW going on strike, leaving him with no inventory, in 1967. My mother’s 1967 Plymouth Valiant was the last car to come from that dealership. I student taught my senior year at Brandeis and needed a car, so I bought it from her in 1973 for $1. Dan, my boyfriend…soon to be fiance, came to Huntington Woods, MI and helped me drive the car back to Waltham, MA for the beginning of the Brandeis school year.

I dubbed it “Tin Lizzy”. It didn’t have much mileage on it, as my mother NEVER drove on a highway. In fact, she barely drove. It was in good condition; bench seats, lap belts only in those days, but I knew nothing about maintaining cars. I was happy to have my own set of wheels and freedom. I student taught in Arlington, many miles from campus, during the gas crisis of 1973 when gas was rationed, and on one foggy morning, couldn’t figure out why traffic was so slow. I finally realized I was in a gas line! I learned to navigate the streets of Boston and Cambridge, which are challenging.

After graduating in 1974, we married and found an apartment in Waltham. After two years we moved to Acton, some 20 miles away. At this point the car was showing wear and tear. Besides automatic steering and shifting, nothing else was automatic and by this point, things were falling apart. The knob controlling the heater had fallen off and been lost, so I went a winter without heat (it never occurred to me that it could be replaced). I didn’t have the car serviced regularly, so the gasket began to go and I leaked oil like crazy. My gas station attendant knew to “check the gas and fill up the oil”. Lizzy met her maker when, in an absent-minded fog, I rear-ended someone on my way home from work in 1977. She wasn’t worth much and was declared a total wreck. I had stitches in my lip, as I flew forward and hit my face on the steering wheel. Dan’s grandfather died two days later, so we bade farewell to two members of the family in the same week.

My parents bought the car in the fall of 1965. It was a 1966 model, and they custom-ordered it with all the features they (and I) wanted. I was 14 years old, a sophomore in high school, and the age to get a driver’s license in New Jersey was 17, so I clearly wasn’t going to be driving it for a while, but it was understood from the beginning that it was MY car. I got to pick the color (bronze), and I chose to have a convertible, although it also had air conditioning because my father wanted to be comfortable in the summer. The salesman thought it was crazy to get air conditioning in a convertible, but my father insisted. He knew what he wanted. He would even run the air conditioner when the top was down.

I didn’t actually take possession of the car until the summer of 1972, after I graduated from college. My parents had taken great care of it for those first seven years though, and it was still in pristine condition. I loved that car! It was beautiful, and also very powerful because we had ordered a V-8 engine instead of the slant 6 it usually came with. I drove it around Cambridge for the next two years while working for the US Department of Transportation. I even took an auto mechanics course for women at the Cambridge Y, where we learned how to work on our own cars. I knew how to gap the sparkplugs and change the oil and do a bunch of other things I have since forgotten. I washed it and waxed it and kept it looking great. I also had my first accident in that car coming back from a ski trip to Vermont, when I skidded on a patch of ice and went off the road. I went into deep snow which slowed me down, and then into a telephone pole. I remember it seemed like it was all happening in slow motion. My sunglasses flew slowly off my head, and then there was the thunk of hitting the pole and stopping. The people whose lawn I ended up on helped us push the car back onto the road. It was still driveable, luckily, and I made it back to Cambridge okay, although I think the radiator was leaking.

In 1974 I drove my beloved Valiant from Cambridge to California for law school, with all my possessions packed into the back seat and the trunk. Alas, I had my second accident on that trip, at a tollbooth in Indiana. I was wearing the clogs which were so popular in the ’70s, with enormous platform soles, and they were making it hard to drive, so I decided to kick them off while I was stopped in line, waiting to pay the toll. Foolishly, I took my foot off the brake and the car started rolling forward. I went to tromp down on the brake and accidentally hit the accelerator instead, so the car lurched forward and rammed into the Cadillac in front of me. A tall black man in fancy clothes and diamond rings jumped out of the Cadillac and came over to me, yelling. The main thing I remember him saying was “Lady, what’d you wanna go and hit a $50,000 car for?” We somehow moved our cars over to the side of the highway and waited for the cops to come. When they did come, they were very nice to me, and didn’t give me a ticket or even a warning. They told me they had had their eye on this guy for a while. I gathered they thought he had drugs or other contraband in the trunk. I don’t know what happened to him. My car got towed to a shop in Gary, Indiana, where I spent the night in a motel and waited for the car to be fixed.

I happily drove that car for the three years of law school. It was a perfect car for California, even though I had no idea when I chose it that I would end up living here. It was especially good during those drought years of the mid-70s, because I could ride with the top down all year round. However, the headlights were sort of pointing in different directions, which made it a little hard to drive at night. The body shop in Indiana hadn’t done the greatest job of straightening out the front end, and I had never bothered to have it fixed.

When I graduated from law school, my parents bought me a new car for a graduation present. I wanted another convertible, and in 1977 almost no car manufacturers were making them. So I ended up getting an Alfa Romeo Spider which only came with a manual transmission. I had never driven a stick shift before, but I learned on the way home from the dealership. I didn’t trade in the Valiant though, because they only offered me $100, which was an insult. I later sold it to a man who loved old cars and promised to take good care of it and restore it to its former glory. He paid me $500 for it. It was hard to say good-bye, but I knew it was going to a good home. And I spent the $500 on a really dynamite sound system for the Alfa.