Ode to the Joys of First-Car Ownership
Commuting on a Honda Trail 90 wasn’t gonna get it anymore. Feeling like an adult at nineteen, I needed a car. I was drawn to British roadsters likely because one of my most memorable toys was the red Hubley MGTD Santa left when I was about four. My ninth grade English teacher, Mr. Reed, drove a baby blue Triumph TR3; the county sheriff’s kid, a year or two my senior, had an Austin Healy 3000. But I liked MGs: Midget or B. Either one. British Racing Green if possible.
Life, I was continually discovering, is nothing if not a series of compromises. One day, motoring south on Park Avenue past Arnie’s Kwality Kars on my Honda 90, I spied a yellow Triumph Spitfire parked at the corner of the front row. Pasted on the windshield was the bargain price: $1299. I rode around the block and puttered by again. Working half time at the wholesale house and making about two-and-a-quarter an hour, I somehow amassed most of that, so on day two, I stopped in for a closer look.
The sales guy was as nice as could be although his breath smelled like an ashtray that no measure of Hai Karate cologne could obscure. I wheeled down Park Avenue on a test drive with him. Although it was far from an MGB and yellow certainly wasn’t BRG, I was feeling a bit obligated because the sales professional ~ it may have been Arnie himself ~ told me he could make a good deal if I acted today. My experiential file in this regard contained only blank index cards and in less than an hour, $1200 lighter in savings, the ’67 Triumph Spitfire Mk3 was mine. So pleased was I with my coming-of-age purchase that the little cough or two it gave up leaving the lot would be of no concern.
My plan had been to park the Trail 90 and use it only on weekends up in the national forest, but plans have a way of not going as planned. After the Spitty stalled out multiple times at stop lights and Mr. Cigarette Breath said, “Gee, son, that’s too bad,” I found a foreign car service that would give my baby a good once over. The ensuing tune-up wasn’t too expensive but more than I wanted to pay and the mechanic said he’d had “a hell of a time” trying to sync the carbs, but I nodded and paid and drove away. Two days later, I was back and the kind mechanic said he’d give the carbs another shot “free gratis.”
Ultimately, I figured that a bit of sputtering must be the spit part of owning a Spitfire, so I decided I’d enjoy the ride in this sleek British marvel even if the ride wasn’t always so enjoyable.
A couple of months into ownership, I hooked up with Brother Beebo who was home on leave from the Army. Beebo knew more about cars than I did, which arguably still wasn’t much. “You just need to blow the carbon out,” he said.
“Blow the carbon out?”
“Yeah. Let’s hop in and take it out to Seven Mile Lane and just get ‘er going and blow the carbon out of the system.”
“Ummm… Okay.”
Seven Mile Lane is (or was) a straight stretch of country road bordered by acres and acres of corn. Rural, it proved a mecca for hot rodders on Friday or Saturday nights engaging in “run it for pink slips.” I never quite knew what that meant but it didn’t matter because this was a Thursday or a Wednesday afternoon.
Top down on the little roadster, we turned off Dayton Road on to Seven Mile and Beebo said, “Hit it!”
So I did. Within about 20 seconds we were going a good sixty miles an hour. Then sixty-five. Then seventy! Seventy-five! The little four cylinder topped out at 82. I checked the rearview mirror to, indeed, see a cloud of black smoke gushing from the tailpipe.
Over the roar of the engine, Beebo yelled, “Let’s find out what the brakes will do!” So I crammed on the pedal.
God or someone who’d engineered Seven Mile Lane made sure the shoulders of the road were wide. There must have been a good fifty feet between the pavement and the concrete irrigation ditches that lay parallel on either side. Across that expanse, gravel would give way to dirt then to weeds then to that water.
As it would turn out this day, half of the brakes worked just as commanded. I think they were on the passenger side of the car because as soon as I crushed the pedal, my little Spitfire’s ass end swung around in front of me, off the far side of the road, spit up some gravel and dough-nutted in a cloud of dust that took a good two or three minutes to clear. In those initial moments, I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t flipped the damned thing and, as Mom would often aver about young people who died doing stupid things, “Become a statistic.”
I killed the engine, waited for my pulse to subside and crawled out to tiptoe along the edge of the irrigation ditch and assess what, if any, damage, might have occurred to my Spitty. Beebo, by this time, was at the back of the car, sort of laughing. He had endured this near-death experience from the passenger seat. Although perhaps thinking active duty was somehow safer, he was gracious enough to drive the thing back home for me.
North Valley Volkswagen was at the north end of town. A week after the ‘incident,’ I dropped by. In 1971, VW had just come out with the Super Beetle, a marginally larger version of the car that so many Americans had grown to love. An orange one had just rolled off the transport truck, and after accepting $300 as a trade in, I found myself comfortably tooling around in a vehicle that was much more my style.
A week into ownership, I cruised down Park Avenue, and sitting at the prime corner position at Arnie’s Kwality Kars was a yellow Triumph Spitfire Mk3. Attached to the windshield was the bargain price: $1299.
© 2025
Church of the Open Road Press
