My First Car

I started driving a tractor around the farm when I was nine-years-old.  I got to disc and pull a harrow...if I kept it in the furrow!!!  I'd also get to drive my grandpa's 1969 Ford F-150 three-on-the-tree and the truck's name was Whitey because he was white!  Quite original I might add and my parents still have Whitey to this day!  Everybody in my family has a name for their vehicle so when I got my first vehicle I was so excited to name it, but it already had a name.  😒

My first car was a bright fire-engine red, wood-grain sided,  1976 Ford LTD Countrysquire station wagon named Mooney.  Why?  Because some old man named Gerald Mooney was drunk one night and side-swiped my sister.  From then on the car became Mooney.  I hated Mooney.  He was big and a station wagon and E-M-B-A-R-R-A-S-S-I-N-G!  I had hoped I would never have to drive Mooney.  He was my sister's car.  Why did I have to drive her hand-me-downs?  Why didn't I get a car and she keep driving Mooney?  Life is never fair for the youngest child in the family.  I was always getting gypped!  When I started driving Mooney, I felt like the Griswold's in the movie Vacation driving that scag-nasty green station wagon.  No wonder Audrey took to smoking pot!! LOL

I tried everything to keep from having to drive Mooney and I even tried tearing him up by bottoming out in the grocery store parking lot and bottoming out going through Sonic, but my dad would just keep fixing him.  I kind of feel bad about that now, but back then I sure didn't!  I finally gave up trying to tear him up and realized I could fit way more friends in my car than any other.  I got an 8-track stereo and some jammin' speakers and hooked them up all by myself!  I ordered new 8-track tapes through Columbia House so we would have some rad tunes to listen to as we cruised the gut because that is all there was to do in our small town.  We would all pile in old Mooney and could usually get about 12 of us in the car...of course this was back before seatbelt days!  We would even pop up the hidden jump seats in the very back and people would sit in them, they'd sit across the back in the area above the jump seats, they'd sit in the back bench seat and all across the front bench seat.  It was like the first of party buses, but the station wagon from the 70s...Mooney.