Our first cars are not always a reflection of who we are. More likely, our first car was the car our parents didn’t need anymore or the one we could afford with the babysitting money we saved. But first cars are sentimental, often a reminder of first love, the taste of independence, and the awkward bridge from adolescence to adulthood.
First cars are also, as these profiles of women and their first-car memories show, a testament to the dangers we are willing to assume in exchange for the freedom that only a car can deliver.
Lisa Schmitz
Armed with an Iowa learner’s permit at fifteen, Lisa Schmitz climbed behind the wheel of her grandfather’s hand-me-down 1979 Chevy Impala. The “boat,” as she called it, sailed her around town, to the movies, and to school amidst some sneering from her peers.
“Driving that car will build character,” Lisa, now twenty-four, remembers her dad saying when she complained about a vehicle so monstrous in size it took out the mailbox at her family’s house.
“The mailbox moved… or something like that,” says Lisa, who now works in public relations.
Once after seeing a movie with her boyfriend, Lisa, laughing while retelling her favorite scenes, hopped her into Impala, and tried to start it up. But the key wouldn’t fit in the ignition. And a stranger was asleep in the backseat.
“My Impala was parked one stall over,” Lisa says, incredulous of the thought that her car’s twin would make an appearance at the theater.
Another vivid memory: when she was sixteen and she skidded off of an icy highway into a ditch. An elderly family helped her out of the teetering boat. They observed that the car looked like the Titanic must have looked before it sank.
When she started college, she traded in her training wheels for something smaller and sold the Impala.
“My brother likes to joke that the car is probably pimped out with rims and a ‘Dr. Dre body kit’ so that it bounces down the street,” Lisa laughs. “It was ugly, but it was mine. No other car can have that claim.”
Bonnie Collins
“It was Chevy’s answer to the Volkswagen Beetle,” Bonnie says of the Chevrolet Corvair she inherited from her older brothers and sisters during high school in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
The car, which Bonnie likes to boast won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year years before she started driving it, wasn’t without its problems. When the car stalled, passengers had to push it so she could pop the clutch and keep going. And she had to keep a couple gallons of crude oil in the backseat because of a small oil leak in the engine.
“I probably should’ve died from carbon monoxide poisoning,” she figures, remembering that she knew it was time to add more oil when it seeped into the fan-cooled engine, infiltrating the car. “I remember thinking, ‘It sure smells a lot like oil in here!’”
But the car was hip, with a maroon exterior—she preferred to call it “Cabernet”—and white leather interior. Bonnie, now in her fifties and working in real estate, liked to impress guys with her knowledge of the bucket-seated car that takes its name from the Chevrolet Corvette and Belair.
“Guys would come up to the car and rave about its dual-carbs, and I would say, ‘Dual-carbs, yeah! Those are awesome!’ and suddenly I was a hit!” she laughs.
And when a freak snowstorm hit North Carolina during midterm exams, her dream came true. After taking her only exam, she took back-roads to avoid the icy main passages. But as she approached a steep hill, her car lost control.
“It became like a sled, and here I was, just sliding down the hill,” she says.
The car skidded to a stop just in front of the house of her longtime crush.
“So he invited me in, and we drank hot chocolate, and we just waited for them to clear the roads so my Dad could come get me,” she remembers. “And then, we had to come back to get the car, so it was a second chance to see him.”
Ralph Nader’s release of the book Unsafe at Any Speed, examining the dangers of the Corvair, which killed comedian Ernie Kovac years earlier, might have contributed to her decision to discard the Cabernet beauty.
But she didn’t stray far—she ended up with its close cousin and closer enemy, the Volkswagen Beetle.
