Recently I’ve decided to write a series of posts to share stories about some, if not all, of the many cars, motorcycles, and boats that I have had the experience of owning. To kick things off allow me to talk about “Old Blue”, a 1965 Ford Galaxie 500, and my first car.

My birthday is toward the end of August, and as my sixteenth one approached my anticipation grew. To a farm kid access to a car or truck means freedom, not just from having parents as chauffeurs but from having to ride the bus to school. In addition, what you drove into the student parking lot could have an effect on your social life. In preparation for the big day I’d dropped some subtle hints, like putting pictures of Mustangs on the fridge. Because that’s gonna work.

Finally the big day arrived. After breakfast Dad said it was time for my present and handed me a set of keys – the keys to his old Ford that had been sitting up on blocks behind the barn for a couple years. A quick inspection told the story: the Galaxie needed work, and a lot of it, before school started the next week. Fortunately the big V-8 engine hadn’t seized, but mice and other critters had been nesting under the hood, and a puddle of transmission fluid was slowly killing the grass.

I told Dad thanks, gave him a smile, and together we moved my new baby into the garage. By lunch we had her running, and on the first day of school I cruised like a champ into the student lot. Despite not being very sporty on the outside, Old Blue did help my social life. It’s amazing how many friends you have when you offer to drive for pizza.

Time spent sitting can do a number on a car’s mechanical systems, and Blue was no exception. Over the course of my junior year I began to think you could trace everywhere I’d driven by following the trail of fluids staining the streets and county roads. Around the time of my next birthday, after picking up my bulk oil allotment for the month at the Big Bear, Dad announced that this couldn’t go on. He told me to make arrangements for Blue to be my project car for auto shop class that fall. Rebuild the engine and transmission, put in a new exhaust, fix a myriad of electrical issues – thanks, mice! – and Blue would be like a new car. He’d buy; I’d fly.

Going through our school shop’s part books led to an interesting discovery: the engine in Blue was what Ford called a “high-output” engine, with various bits and parts that added more oomph than your normal family hauler. This was pretty cool, I thought as I turned the page. Then my eyes got real big. Right there on the page was a police interceptor version of my engine, with nearly 50% more horsepower. More horsepower is always better, right? I wrote down the list of part numbers I needed, then wrote down a column of part numbers to make Blue into a police interceptor. I took the lists to our local auto parts store to get price estimates for both, then took the estimates home to Dad. Of course the cop parts were more expensive than stock, plus we’d need to have some custom machine shop work done. All in all we’re talking more than twice as much. Dad just looked at the two sets of figures for a minute, got a twinkle in his eyes, then ordered me not to tell my mother. I smiled like a Pez dispenser and agreed.

For the first month after the rebuild I drove carefully, treating Blue like the convalescent she was, before starting to drive more aggressively. Dad didn’t say too much, past reminding me that the next set of tires were coming out of my pocket. Then one day after school I floored it at a stop light, just to see what she could do. Turns out what she could do was shred her stock transmission into tiny bits then scatter those bits down Main Street as she slowly rolled to a stop. Dad took care of getting a rebuilt heavy duty transmission installed, with a quiet comment that the car needed to last me through college. Perhaps I should learn to work with the car instead of always having to work on her? It took a few minutes to realize what he meant – teenager, remember – but eventually I got there. During the remainder of that year, and throughout my first years of college, I learned to drive with Blue. We took gravel roads together, learning how to steer into slides and through them. I learned from her that being able to move effortlessly from forty to sixty was more important than how quickly you could go from zero to sixty. Most of what I know about how to drive well came from the time I spent behind that steering wheel.

Eventually the time came for Old Blue and me to part ways. As the man says, rust never sleeps, and over the years she’d been developing a serious case of frame rot. One day at a rough railroad crossing in Des Moines the frame just snapped. To repair damage that serious was beyond my means at the time, so I sold her to someone who wanted the police interceptor engine. Over the years I’ve regretted not taking her back to the farm and storing her until I could afford to fix her up or find another car to put her engine in. But what’s done is done, and I’d like to think her heart is still cruising down the highway in some other car.