March 21, 2019 (Thursday)
Back in the year 2007, during a tenure at First Baptist Church, Rockport, as Interim Pastor, I wrote a blog about all the cars in my life as far back as I could remember. I was amazed at the response. Many were interested and added notes about their own memories of the cars of their experience. If you click HERE, you can see the blog if you like.
Last September I wrote a brief blog about why some of my cars have meant more to me than others, and included a link to the blog mentioned above. If you would like to read that blog, just CLICK HERE.
Recently I sat down with some friends and they told me they had done something similar and had discovered 18 cars in their family through the years. I dug out the old blog above and sent it to them. But in reviewing it, I was reminded that some of the pictures I had included were not the actual cars I had driven, and also almost none were the right color, etc. So I went back to the good old internet to see if I could find better pictures, more like the actual cars I wrote about. I was successful. So I think I will use a different format for naming and describing the cars, and see how that works. These are not the actual cars, but they look a lot like the real ones. Here goes:
The first cars I can remember were probably manufactured in the 1920s, and I thought this car sort of gives a general idea of the shape of things in our family when I was a little kid. Here is a 1930 Chevrolet.
My mother told me that my paternal grandfather, a photographer and a preacher, helped his children financially during the Great Depression (He possibly inherited the money), and that may explain how my father was able to buy this new car in 1938, when he was earning $10 per week:
My stepfather drove a 1938 Plymouth. I learned to drive in his car, with his encouragement and patience.
As he was buying the new Packard,my stepfather was approached about a used one. He bought it. It was beige but needed paint, so I painted it gray. No pic available–the one shown here is green. I loved the coupe; it became semi-mine, off and on.
The first car I ever owned was a 1941 Mercury, a bank repo. The bank president made it available at payments that he let me set. It was an eyesore. Windows were taped together and it had many things wrong with it, including the need for a new motor. But it got me through college and my first pastorate.
I became a student in the seminary at Fort Worth in the fall of 1953. Wanda and I married on October 3. I was working at a secular job and Wanda was teaching school. We received a call from a mission church in Lampasas and we accepted the call. I suspended myself from classes and we moved, but not before we got another car, a 1950 Nash Ambassador.
After a year in Lampasas, a pastor friend, Gene McCombs, and I commuted 2 days per week to the seminary, where we each enrolled for six 2-hour courses in the Spring semester of 1955. On our way back home one evening, the Nash engine lost a piston, and then the car was not towed correctly, so it also lost its transmission and drive train. We needed another car, and we bought a 1952 Chevrolet 4 door sedan, which we drove for the next 4 1/2 years. With no money for help, I learned how to repair the car, sometimes staying up all night.
We moved back to Fort Worth during the summer of 1955 and I worked at secular jobs and pastored the Briar Baptist Church, north of Azle, where Wanda taught school. I attended classes at the seminary and graduated in May, 1959 and soon we moved to Kosse, Texas to pastor the First Baptist Church. There we bought a brand new 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne automobile.
After we moved to the Vickery Baptist Church in Dallas in April, 1961, we continued to drive the car we bought while in Kosse. One day in 1963, the car was hit from the rear and badly damaged. We sold it as scrap and bought a new 1963 Chevrolet Biscayne.
We moved to Rockport November 1, 1964 to pastor the First Baptist Church for 31 years.
Just before moving, I bought a 1949 Ford from a Dallas church member for $100. We drove it and the 1963 Chevy to Rockport.
We now had two cars but after a while the old 1949 car gave up the ghost and I bought a 1966 VW Bug (we still had the 1963 Chevy).
After a couple of years, we bought a 1968 Chevrolet Impala station wagon, sold the bug and made the 1963 Chevy our second car.
Everyone in the family loved the station wagon, but one day when Wanda was driving in Corpus something went wrong and it steered itself, out of her control, into an overpass pillar. Neither she nor Dwight, who was with her, were injured. But the car was scrapped.
and we bought an almost new 1974 Dodge Monaco Hardtop. It was a great car.
As nice as it had been, the Monaco’s engine went bad and we traded it in on a 1968 Chrysler New Yorker, a dream car when new. It was still beautiful land comfortable.
By this time the 1963 Chevrolet was having lots of troubles, so we sold it and bought a 1971 Datsun 510. What a car that was. Totally dependable. Able to go any speed with ease. Comfortable bucket seats. Easy to park. Etc. Etc. A great car.
In the summer of 1979, we needed a dependable car, so I went to the Ford dealer and tried out a Maverick. Uncomfortable. Then a Granada. Same thing. I was about to go home when the salesman talked me into a test drive of a new 1979 LTD Crown Victoria.
I was hooked. Wanda liked maroon and I liked white. It was both. Smaller exterior dimensions and larger inside. Comfort supreme. We loved that car for the next eleven years.
I accidentally damaged the engine of the Crown Victoria, and traded it in for a 1990 Buick LeSabre. We loved that car, too, but in 1994 in Houston it was stolen, vandalized, burglarized, and wrecked, making it a total loss.
Insurance paid $9000 on loss of the Buick, and we put $6000 with it and bought one of the best cars ever made: a 1994 Mercury Grand Marquis. I drove it for 19 years, passed it on to a son, and he has driven it 6 years. That car has given excellent service for 25 years!
Knowing how much I loved the 1994 Mercury, my sister, Brenda Jones, and her husband, James, bought a 2009 model of the Mercury Grand Marquis and gave it to me! It is much like the 1994 model, but a different color. Not very long after the gift, Ford Motor Company stopped all production of all Mercury products. If quality alone was the only prerequisite for purchase, the Mercury Grand Marquis would still be pouring off the end of the assembly line.
In 1998 we bought a 1989 motor home and a 1991 mini van to tow behind it. For several reasons, we did not make many trips in the motor home, and the mini van gradually became our second car.
I heard somewhere that every man needs a pickup truck. So, in the late 1980s, I bought a 1984 Ford 150.
THIS CONCLUDES THE SECTION ABOUT CARS I DROVE. WHEN OUR 5 CHILDREN GREW UP, WE WERE FACED WITH A NEW SITUATION, AND WE NEEDED MORE CARS. SOME OF THOSE ARE DISPLAYED IN THE FOLLOWING PICTURES.
David was the first of our five children to graduate from high school. He was the class Valedictorian. He went to U.T. in 1972 for a year, graduated from Del Mar, then transferred to Baylor. During his year at U.T., he rode a bicycle. He played in the Texas band. And in the Cotton Bowl. His grandparents loaned him the price of a new Ford Pinto and for a while he lived with his grandparents 35 miles from Waco. Later he lived in Waco near the campus. He graduated with honors with a degree in Chemistry. He had an Oldsmobile Cutlass that he dearly loved. He later enrolled in A&M Kingsville to get a Master’s in Electrical Engineering. He sold the Cutlass and bought a used Buick.
Our son, Dan, was an honor student, number 3 in his high school class. Hewent away to the University of Texas in 1974 for a year before coming back home to Corpus Christi to complete his degree at A&M Corpus Christi. During that year, he worked on an ice cream truck up and down Austin streets, and made enough money to take care of his needs and to buy a car. He bought a 1968 Ford Mustang.He graduated with honors.
Our daughter, Debbie, was Salutatorian of her high school class. She drove the 1972 Chevelle more than the rest of us. I couldn’t pass up a bargain when I first saw it. The owner had bought a new car and had taken perfect care of the Chevelle. It had an engine in it that could respond to any emergency with instantaneous speed and power. Debbie liked to drive it and when she went away to college at Baylor she drove the Chevelle. She named it “Minerva.” She graduated with honors. After she married, she drove it. Her husband was in college and she was employed, so they needed two cars. When they eventually got a new Honda Accord, they sold “Minerva” and brought the money to us.
Our daughter, Dianna, was Salutatorian of her high school class. She graduated from Baylor with honors and decided to seek a Master’s Degree. She had not had access to a car but her graduate work would require transportation to local schools and elsewhere. She bought the car of a Rockport friend who had it for sale. It was a 1981 Navy Blue Ford Mustang with red interior. I’m not sure this picture is anything like her car, but it seems to be the best I can do. Her Master’s Degree was with honors.
Our son, Dwight, was Salutatorian of his high school class. He needed a car and when we saw a ’73 Camaro for sale in Key Allegro. We bought it. Dwight drove it to Baylor University. He later graduated with honors. A van hit him one day. The van was badly damaged but the old Camaro, made with sterner stuff, was easier to fix. The problem was the availability of parts, because the Camaro was a collector’s item. After graduation from Baylor, he earned a Master’s Degree in Computer Science at A&M Corpus Christi.
I taught a class in Farwell, Texas sometime in the mid 1970s. The pastor and I were friends and he loved the Mercury Grand Marquis. A member of his church would trade in perfectly good cars for new ones. While I was there, that happened. The pastor talked with the dealer and reserved the trade-in. His daughter drove a great car that her father had bought for her under the same circumstances. He bought the newer car to give to his daughter and he sold her 1973 car to me. I had flown out there so I just drove the car to Rockport. Sadly we barely got used to it when it was wrapped around a creosote post and totaled. That was that. But this picture shows what it looked like.
In 1981 I bought a new Chevy Chevette Hatchback. One day I loaded it with a giant grandfather’s clock in a huge box. The front passenger seat lay down, the rear seats lay down and the hatchback was semi open, tied down. Amazing. That’s good news. But the bad news is that the Chevette had a defect in engine design that caused the engine to stop running instantly, no matter how fast the car was going. It would have to be towed to the dealer. The bill was always high. I kept it, however, and endured the inconvenience. Fortunately no one was ever injured because of the engine fault.
Brother Walter Scales bought a 1976 Volare (new on the market) after thorough research. He loved the car, but his health prevented his keeping the car. I bought it from him. I swapped it with my son, David, for his older Buick, which had developed some problems. I liked the Volare, but David was not impressed. He later traded it off.
I bought a 1963 Ford Galaxy from T.L. Beedy, a revered member of First Baptist Church, Rockport. He had bought it from Neal Griffis, a hard worker in the church. I remember when Neal bought the car brand new. It was beautiful. He got great service from it, and so did Brother Beedy, but during the one month I had it, I had nothing but trouble, so I sold it as soon as I could.
