My First Car

I had finished my undergraduate degree at Michigan State with my sole transportation being the old one-speed bicycle I had bought when I was 12 years old. It was good enough to get me around campus as needed even though the fenders were dented and starting to rust and the handlebars were quite pitted. I never bothered to lock it up since it looked bad enough that no one would want to steal it.

That fall of 1970, I was starting grad school with a half-time assistantship in the Computer Science Department. They had established CPS as a separate department only a year before and I was one of their first graduates (there were 7 of us) – having switched majors from Engineering. Now I was one of the first graduate students.

As an employee of the university, I pedaled over to the MSU Credit Union and opened an account where my paycheck could be deposited. Once I’d been working for a few months and had built up a bit of a bank balance, I felt it was time to upgrade my transportation. So that winter I used that institution to apply for a loan so that I could buy my first car.

After shopping around a bit, I settled on a 1970 Dodge Dart Swinger like the one pictured here. It was red with a black vinyl top. I went with the basic model that had a slant-six engine, rather than the 340. The 340 had options like racing stripes, hood scoops, etc. So rather than the 340 small block eight cylinder that gave 225 hp, mine only had 225 cu. In. and 145 hp. But I was only looking for basic transportation, not performance. Including taxes, tags, and title, it cost me the grand sum of $2626 – not much compared to today’s prices, but certainly not cheap for a graduate student. That price also included getting it undercoated (Ziebart) – at the recommendation of the dealer.

 

Even though I was legally still a resident of CT, I had an address and a bank in MI, so I got the car with MI license plates and registration. Mine was as shown here. In the red/black color, it was pretty impressive – at least to me. However, I was not aware that it also made a statement to the local police department who could spot it gong by. I got two speeding tickets over the next two years – but only one more in the next 50+ years.

Now, when I went home during breaks (600 miles to CT), I could put a card on the ride-board in the student union as offering a ride – instead of having to post on the other side of the board as looking for one.

But it was also handy when the spring quarter began (we were on quarters, not semesters back then). That was because it was that quarter that I met the woman who would eventually become my wife. By the end of the quarter, we were pinned. That summer I would make the 200-mile trip to Petoskey where she was from just about every weekend. We got engaged at the end of the summer. Then at Christmas time, I took her with me to CT to meet all the relatives. And the following summer we married, and my new brothers-in-law tied some tin cans to the back bumper of that car.

Two weeks later I finished grad school and we drove that Dodge Dart from MI to CT where I had found a job. We took a week doing so as that was our honeymoon. I had a U-Haul trailer behind that probably weighted as much as the car did – being that most of what I owned at that point were all my books from five years of school. Our trip included going through the mountains of WV – probably a mistake on my part. Going up the mountains, that little slant-six was working pretty hard and going down, I was using both feet on the brakes to keep the car on the road around any corners. It was smoking by the time we got to the other side. It was Sunday and everything was closed so we got a motel for the evening. The next morning, I found the local Dodge dealer. Everything was ok, but the strain on the engine and drive train had burned up all the transmission fluid. Got it filled back up and drove the rest of the way to CT – but sticking to expressways instead of trying any more mountain roads!

Had that car for all of our four years in CT before moving to PA in 1975, then for another five years here. It was still running well and I had 92K miles on it by then. There was some rust on the body panels, but the undercoating had prevented most of that. But I was to find out that was not enough.

The Dodge Dart had a “unibody” construction. Meaning that there is no separate frame, rather there are bends/folds in the undercarriage that give the car its strength. It also had torsion bars on the front instead of springs – with one end of each bar fastened to the wheel assembly and the other end fastened to one of the U-channels in the unibody. That would prove to be the eventual downfall of that car.

Hitting a small bump one day, the right front corner of the car dipped – then did not come back up. Taking it to my local garage, it appeared that there were a few areas of the undercarriage that had not totally been undercoated. Some rust had developed there, and that small bump had caused the pressure of the torsion bar end to push that end right through the U-channel so it was now free floating and just riding through the hole in each side of the channel. The process to fix it would be to cut out that section of the unibody, fashion a replacement section, then fasten the end of the torsion bar to it. Certainly doable, but the cost would exceed what the car was worth.

Thus, reluctantly, I drove my beloved first car to a local junk yard where the owner gave me the princely sum of $200 for it. Despite still looking well, it was no longer road-worthy with that front corner dipped down. I’m sure that he got far more than that $200 as he dismantled it and parted it out.

We had that car from 1970 until 1980. By then it was my second car as we had added a 1973 VW Dasher station wagon while we were in CT. The Dodge was my back-and-forth to work car as by 1980 we had one child and another on the way and the two doors of the Dodge were not convenient for using car seats for young children.

One always has a love for their first car – as I did for mine. Besides all the memories of where I drove it, it was in the front seat as we parked overlooking Lake Michigan that I turned to the young lady next to me and asked her to marry me. (For the record, her initial response was “I’ll think about it.” By mail a few days later she actually said “yes.”) That was over five decades ago. That shiny red Dodge Dart bit the dust after only 10 years – but our love still carries on!