Birth of the Blue Missile

Ok here's the next bit,

It was now 1973, I was going to the University of Miami and living in the dorm. There was very little car action except my request of my mother to let me buy a 1950s completely restored Jaguar. It was the one that looks like a Rolls Royce. It was snow white and had a red leather interior and the guy was asking $5500 for it. Now on the performance scale it rated negative numbers, however on the party/chick scale it was off the chart.

The reason I was making the request of my mother was that my father had died just after I graduated the academy and there was insurance money she had control over. I was eighteen but the age of majority bill had not yet been signed. You could be drafted, but you couldn’t vote and you couldn’t sign contracts yet. So I was beholding to her for use of the small amount of funds left to my brother and me.

It was after that she actually took me to look at used cars at a ford dealership. I sit here chuckling still remembering the look on her face when I showed her the used car I wanted. It was a DeTomaso Pantera a few years old for about the same price as the Jaguar. She went off on me like a roman candle. “How could I bother wasting her time to look at something like that.” Unless you have a Jewish mother or maybe you are a member of the Musad you have no idea of this level of wrath. This explains why most Arab nations don’t screw with Israel, too many Jewish mothers to deal with!

I have to explain that in Miami at that time public transportation was almost non-existent. So getting a car was a necessity if you didn’t want to be confined to where ever you happened to be at the time. Larry did come to the dorm from time to time and we would take jaunts all over. There are too many stories here that have nothing to do with cars, maybe at a later date I’ll enumerate.

Later that year the age of majority bill was signed, so I went to her and demanded my money now that I was ‘of age’. She gave in, and within days I was at the Broad Causeway Plymouth Dodge dealership.

I walked into the dealership in shorts, tank top shirt and flip-flops. Larry gave me a ride and was actually more excited than I was. He knew exactly why I was there and exactly what I was going to walk out with. I told the salesman I wanted a Plymouth Duster with a 340 in it and what were my options. He told me they had two in stock. One was yellow with black stripes, this wasn’t going to do Jimmy had one of those, and they had a fire engine red one with white stripes. Well red it was. It had air conditioning, disk breaks, a torqueflight and the center console shifter. It had a black and white interior with white bucket seats. It looked like a great place to start.

I was then ushered into the little sales cubicle by the salesman and we sat down to talk about the money part of the buy. They were asking $4200 on the sticker, now keep in mind that you have a guy in a suite looking across the table at an eighteen old kid dressed for the beach. He asked me how I wanted to pay for the car. Well I said “first of all we need to talk about how much I’m going to pay for the car.” He looked at me in shock. I then said “look you are going to make enough money on the financing to let me have it at a much better price. Why don’t you go and see what you can do?” He said “I have to go talk to my manager.” He then left and, I assume, went to go smoke a cigarette. He returned with a sales contract and said “OK we can do it for $3800. Now let’s talk about the financing.”

It was then that I said “Ok it’s financed” and took my checkbook out and wrote a check for the cost of the car plus the tax tag and title! There is no way he was thinking this kid has cash. His mouth was on the floor; he just watched his commission go out the window. I signed the papers and he took the check, and I told him I would be back tomorrow to pick up the car.

Now for my first of many confessions; I didn’t know how to drive yet! Larry and Bob were going to have to drive me there and one of them was going to have to drive it back to the garage apt I was occupying. I picked up the car and signed up for driving lessons the next day. You see at the military academy you were not allowed to have a car nor was there any sort of drivers ed for the cadets. The course took about a week and after that I got my license and was off.

More to follow
Andrew