Cars

Other than my Model T and Model A Ford the cars were mostly my mother's. She loved her fifty-three two-tone green Studebaker two front bucket seater with red interior. She got rear-ended by a Corvette and it demolished the front of the Corvette and didn't even dent the Studi. I hit a big elm with it in snow and ice at about fifteen miles and hour and it didn't dent the bumper but made a hole in the tree trunk.

But I hated it, like-it didn't at all. So she bought a fifty-seven Chevy, all white with red interior, a six cylinder very embarrassingly automatic, all show and no go they all said, where eight cylinders and stick shift might have been fast. And naturally I being a teenager in the fifties wanted to customize it as was the custom of the day.

I was at least sixteen with a driver's license maybe seventeen, and it was probably that I was looking at car magazines, and since I was incapable anything very practical, for-me my mother ordered a chrome tube grill of five horizontal chrome tubes for the front from California, and also custom tail lights six in all red plastic I affixed to the rear bullets, and from somewhere obtained fifty-nine Ford front-end parking lights to go in the bullets in the front. A welder put these in. Finally skirts over the rear wheels and three inch rear-end lowering blocks, they installed for me at the UpTown gas station.

My best buddy Jimbo, Jim, James or Christo depending on my mood, his-car mostly his father's was a fifty-seven Ford V8 with stick, and it could lay rubber and smoke. It was black and white with skirts which was all the customizing he did or was allowed.

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