If you’ve read any or all our past posts, you know that I spent the summer of 1985 in the panhandle of Texas. Not a lot of good came out of that summer for me save one thing: my very first car.
As I mentioned a couple of issues back, around the start of junior high school guys my age were starting to exchange their BMX bikes for motorcycles. In an effort to keep me off motorcycles, my parents told me on my fourteenth birthday that if I never asked for one, they’d buy my first car for me when I turned sixteen.
DEAL.
Fast forward 15 months and, while we were in Texas that fateful summer, my dad happened upon a car in the newspaper classifieds. It was a 1971 Chevelle Malibu with relatively low mileage that was owned by an older woman whose husband had bought it brand new but had since passed away. My dad paid $1000 for it (roughly the equivalent of buying a 2010 vehicle for $2500 today). I was still only fifteen at the time and didn’t even have a learner’s permit, so it sat in the apartment complex parking lot. My parents trusted me with moving it around the parking lot daily so that it wasn’t just sitting. Not an amazing amount of driving but driving, nonetheless and I would often go out and just sit in it. It was my car. When we did finally move back home a month or so later, my dad towed it behind the U-Haul.
Once we got it back to Oklahoma, the first thing we did was get it painted. It was originally Candy Apple Red, but the paint was faded and had multiple blemishes, so I spent $100 on an Earl Sheib special. The shop owner suggested we go with Matador Red instead of a straight repaint and we did. After seeing it post paint job, I was in love with it. The car came with a stock AM/FM radio and an 8-track tape deck installed under the dash. Neither of those were going to meet my audio listening needs but I was broke as a joke so replacements were going to have to wait a bit. In the interim, I purchased a cassette adapter for the 8-track. Beggars can’t be choosers, huh?
The car came with a set of Crager 5-spoke aluminum wheels, so with those and it’s new paint job it LOOKED tough. It also came with a short block, V8 307 engine that was supposed to have 165hp but was way more pedestrian than that. However, it did have dual exhaust so it had a very throaty sound to it. My father chipped in money and had glass pack mufflers installed for me. After that? The car sounded like a friggin’ animal. I couldn’t sneak up on anyone because it roared anytime I stepped on the gas. It may not have been fast but it looked and sounded the part!
I made two more major upgrades. First, I replaced the front bench seat with two bucket seats. Sounds way easier than that job actually was. These days, I could hop online and check parts and salvage sites for the seats I needed then set up alerts for when those parts became available. In 1986, I can’t remember how many salvage yards I had to cold call (and call and call) to find bucket seats that would work in my car. Not to mention I then had to go pull those seats out of their current car, pull my bench seat out and install the buckets in the Chevelle. I learned a lot, though, through the entire process. Funny story: I kept the bench seat, bolted it to a piece of plywood and used it as a couch in my first dorm room a couple of years later as a college freshman.
The last major upgrade I made was the most important: the sound system. It took me a while to save up enough money to buy what I wanted but I was NOT going to skimp on this part. I installed ALL Pioneer hardware. Tape deck, equalizer, 6.5 inch two-way door speakers, three-way 6×9’s in the back deck and a small amp. Man, it sounded so amazing in there.
My friends and I took to calling her the big red machine because most of my friends drove smaller cars and the Chevelle was a big heavy tank. I drove that car for almost five years. I got my first ticket in that car (the same day I got my license, in fact), experienced my first fender bender in that car, hauled many an amp and drum in that car. I was in that car when I ran from the police one night, and I kissed more than a couple of girls in that car. But those are all stories for a different day…
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