84 Ford Escort

Check out this beauty:

The car isn’t half bad, either!

That’s right: that’s my first car ever. I was the proud owner at age 17.

On the day I turned 15, I passed the test to get my learner’s permit. This meant that I could now operate a motor vehicle under adult supervision, so I could drive my folks around the neighborhood and take them to run errands, and maybe induce a few micro-heart attacks here and there.

About 3 months later, I passed the only actual driving test I’ve ever had to take. This involved me demonstrating the ability to parallel park and a three point turn, among other things—I remember those two because they were among the most dreaded tasks we had to demonstrate, and everyone had to do both of them in order to pass.

Imagining a fifteen year old kid driving on the same roads I use today seems like madness. The phrase hell on wheels does justice to what my mind is doing with this memory right now.

At age fifteen, my driver’s license was restricted, meaning I couldn’t drive without adult supervision at night. However, I could drive to the comic book shop (just as one example) all by myself, or (more likely) with several rambunctious friends in the car with me.

When I turned sixteen, my license was no longer restricted, and I could drive anywhere, any time. I could leave the state, too, and drive legally anywhere in the US, any time of day or night.

Sixteen.

Anyway, as I approached age 17, I needed wheels of my own. I would usually borrow my dad’s car if I needed to go anywhere, but as my senior year of high school was beginning to draw to a close, I would need my own car to drive myself to work and to college—I would live at home for the first semester to save money, so this ability to commute the 25 minutes from where my parents lived to the University of South Carolina became paramount.

I don’t remember much about this weekend, but I do remember that I was deathly ill. I wasn’t about to let that stop me from doing something so utterly life-changing, though, but I honestly can’t remember if I went with my dad to buy the car or not. Knowing how stubborn I tend to be about my own health, I probably did end up going along.

The car my dad had helped me pick out was a steal. It was a 1984 Ford Escort, only driven to church on Sundays by a little old lady, or so this particular tale went. The car had low mileage, to be sure—something like 40,000 miles total, and while 1984 is an eternity ago today, back then this car was well under a decade old. It cost me $1500 total.

Incidentally, that’s roughly what one semester of college cost back then. Yes, really. That’s how much I paid for my first two years, and then it went up a bit when I moved to Richmond, but only to like $2200 per semester. Sometimes people are shocked when I tell them I paid my way through school, but then they’re usually a lot less impressed when I mention those numbers.

Back over to that maroon Escort now: this $1500 investment was my key to freedom, at least as I saw it. At $4.25 per hour, my hourly wage at the pizza shop where I worked, that worked out to about 353 hours of work.

Totally worth it.

She and I went on a lot of adventures together, culminating in that move up to Richmond. This 84 Ford Escort ultimately met its black, smoky grave on the side of one of Richmond’s streets, for delivering pizzas was far, far too much to ask of this trusted steed, especially since I was probably wretchedly bad at doing any sort of routine maintenance.

While it hurt to lose my first car like this, suffice it to say that I was not grief-stricken the way Alexander was when Bucephalus died. Instead, I was ready to move on to the next adventure.

You can’t really forget your first car, though. Whenever I see a relic that resembles the shape and color of this old gem, nowadays far more likely in pics online than out on the street, I get an instant pang of nostalgia every time.

This wasn’t a car as much as it was independence and adventure.

What was your first car? If you live in a big city and you’ve never owned a car, what was it like to first start venturing out on your own? Let’s remember some of these things together today.