by Angeljean Chiaramida

It was in the early evening of a bright blue summer day, a Friday, in 1958. My dad pulled up in front of my grandmother’s house — where I was being baby-sat — with our brand new, specially ordered, 1958 Ford Fairlaine 500 convertible, with a real Continental kit. The car was sheer splendor. It was shiny black, the top was down, the interior was raucous red, and my dad had a smile on his face that was the personification of pure joy.

That was it; I was hooked. Being young, tiny, and female no longer bore significance; I climbed into that car, right beside my daddy, and I wanted to live there, forever. That may have been the moment of total surrender, but there had been inklings even before that when I had known that these moving masses of metal could cast spells over me that were magically mystical.

It started with my grandfather, my Nanno Busty. I remember walking with him hand-in-hand to the sidewalk, then being lifted into his 1938 DeSoto. HUGE and black, it had a front seat like a sofa bed. I would scramble over to sit beside him, watching as he adjusted the choke and started the car. And then — WOW — Nanno would take my teeny hand, place it on the stick shift that was taller than I was, and we’d run through the gears as we drove down the street to spend the day at his farm. I even remember the day my dad had to sell that DeSoto, cause Nanno had grown too old to drive it. It broke our hearts.

The ’58 Ford was the turning point, though. It came after our ‘53 Pontiac Catalina hardtop, a beetle-shaped behemoth my mother adored. Personally, I didn’t think the Pontiac compared to Nanno’s DeSoto, nor to the black, ’49, rather beat-up Oldsmobile we’d owned before it. When I screwed up my face and expressed my preference for our old Olds, my mother insisted that the Pontiac’s color was all the rage. The Pontiac was two-toned, "yellow and celery," and to this day I’ve never seen another color combination quite like it; thanks, I’m sure, to a dispensation from St. Christopher.

You see, even back then, I knew the Pontiac wasn’t as snazzy as my Uncle Sam’s white and black, saddleshoe-like, ’53 Hudson Hornet. With a big, flat-head six and dual carbs, that car wasn’t only spiffy-looking, it was ’faster than a speeding bullet,’ and Uncle Sam used to let me take my afternoon nap tucked up in the package shelf under the rear window, with my dolly cuddled in the crook of my arm. How cool was that?

Don’t get me wrong, I loved that Pontiac just as much as I loved the DeSoto, the Ford, or any of the other cars that became members of my family, but I loved her like I’d love an ugly, though perfectly cut, diamond. Its ugliness notwithstanding, a diamond is still a diamond after all!

The family progressed through the ’58 Ford, to a Black ’60 Buick Electra 225 convertible, which was my brother’s favorite family car, and the one that saved our lives in a horrible car accident. More Buicks, a Mercury, Caddies and Lincolns came and went. The make didn’t matter too much, for by then my love for cars was really being cultivated by my big brother’s uncanny knowledge of all things automotive.

In ’61, he bought a 1940 Ford DeLuxe Woody, with a souped-up, flat-head V8. He’d give me a ride to school, after we jump-started it — I got to pop the clutch, of course — and I was a hero every morning in my grade school parking lot. In ’63, he got a ’55 Chevy Belair, to which, with a little help from me, he changed just about every mechanical part a car has: the engine, the clutch, the transmission, the starter, the generator, and the differential. Have you ever smelled the fluid that pours out of a differential — and all over a little sister — after being cooped up in a car for eight years?

If I was a good girl, my brother let me help wash the cars with him on Saturdays. I was young and low to the ground, so I had the good fortune to scrub the floor mats, the white wall tires, and the hubcaps until they glowed, literally. If I was very, very good, I got to dry the cars with a special chamois cloth he kept soaking in some disgustingly-slimy solution of something-or-other, while he showered and got dressed for his Saturday night dates. I mean, be honest, how could I not grow up to adore the automotive age with a brother like that! I was blessed, really, exceedingly blessed.

It only got better. By the time I was 13 and started counting the years till I got my driver’s license, I could tell the make of a car at 50 paces. My very first date, with my very first boyfriend, came junior year when I learned that Jimmy Richardson, a chemistry classmate, owned a ’65 GTO. He offered to give me a ride home from school when he saw my eyes go glassy as he discussed the car with my chem-lab partner, Dean Romig. For most of junior year, I helped Jimmy raise his chemistry grade from a D to a B, and floated on air being driven around in that marvelous, maroon, piece of modern art. God, isn’t young car-love wonderful?

Then, one day, after washing all those cars on Saturday nights, my big brother gave me my first car. It was 1970, and he gave me a 1962 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham. White and colossal, with rear fins that were a danger in the Callahan Tunnel, it was a wonder of a car. After learning to parallel park that monster, I seriously considered getting a job backing 727s into their hangers at Logan. Even at 27 cents a gallon, with only 6 mpg, it took all the spending money I earned working between classes at my college library to feed the glutton, but who cared? Piling ten friends in that Caddy and going to the beach was an unforgettable adventure.

When I finally bought my first car, it was a ‘73 Cougar Convertible, with 351 cubic inches under the hood. She was baby blue, sweet as sugar, fast as hell, and exhilarating to wash every weekend. She had clean floor mats, bright white walls, shiny hubcaps, and no telltale water spots. Okay, so I dried her with the special chamois cloth, which was still soaking in the disgustingly-slimy solution of something-or-other to prevent it from getting dry and scratchy. I’m a creature of habit.

Yes, I understand the information in Autoweek. True, I love watching Speedvision for long stretches at a whack, and feel rewarded if I can do so once a day. It is factual that I know the difference between torque and horsepower, that I understand what a spoiler really does and why, that I prefer shifting a five-speed transmission to drifting along with an automatic, that I grasp how pistons and cylinders work, and that I adore the sound of my Alfa Romeo, in third gear, when she’s churning at about 4,000 rpm. I admit it offends my sensibilities when I see an unworthy individual mistreating a noble driving machine. And yes, you guessed it, I talk lovingly to my cars, they all have names, and it still breaks my heart to sell one.

Ostracized though I may be by auto-abhorrent, haughty women, who have never experienced the treat of earning the grease under their long, polished fingernails, I wouldn’t change one second of my car-intensive past. Car-knowledgeable men may ignore me, but I know they’re merely threatened by a female trespassing into one of the last bastions of male superiority.