how did you learn to work on cars?

At the tender age of 9 years old, my parents moved into the first house that they and the mortgage company owned. There was a guy down the street with a 61 BelAir with a 409 in it. I started hanging around, and being a general pain, I guess Galen figured he would use my energy to keep his garage/shop clean and put me to work pushing a broom. From there, he swapped cars around and in '63 bought a Dodge 330 2door with a 413 in it. I learned may thing from him by just hanging around and helping out. In '65 I went to work in a gas station, the full service type station pumping gas and fixing flat tires. From there it progressed to changing oil and filters, to doing tuneups on customers cars. When I turned 15, my folks gave me a '63 Dart and I got to work on my own car. After much trial and error, I got it running for a short period of time and the push button trans went south. My mentor down the street had a '64 Dart GT with a 273 and 4 speed in it. It was crashed in the front end, and I proceeded to bug him until he "gave" me the car just to shut me up. From there, I put my '63 front end on the '64 and began terrorizing the streets.

I'm of the older generation that couldn't afford to pay someone else to fix my stuff, so I either learned how to fix it myself or bartered my labor to get someone to teach me how to fix my stuff. To this day, I think back fondly of the many people I met over the untold amount of years. Sadly a lot of the folks have gone to their reward, but some of them are still around and I have contact with some of them.

This past Thursday 12-13-12, my oldest and best friend past away. We worked side by side over the past 43 years on his cars and mine.

R.I.P Tommy Tomlin