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.”
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