How My First New Car Went to Pot
by David Ferguson
I bought my first new car in 1974. I was torn between the VW Rabbit, a new model that year, and the Plymouth Valiant.
The Rabbit was different, but it was also a new model that year. Consumer Reports liked the car overall, but of course had no information on how well it would hold up.
I figured I wasn’t going to be able to buy another new car anytime soon, and so I didn’t like the idea of helping to try out a new model. So I went with the Valiant instead.
This wasn’t a cool choice. It seemed that most Valiant owners were little old ladies with blue hair. On the other hand, the car did have a long — a very long — history, and while it wasn’t the best car ever built, it was about the best car within my price range.
Not that that range was very crowded.
I kept the Valiant for about ten years, by which time I’d moved from Detroit to the suburbs of Washington DC. My family had gone from one child to three, and the hot summers convinced me I needed something better than the Valiant’s vinyl seats. I even went so far as to buy a car with air conditioning.
Not to say that the Valiant was low-end, but my kids noticed immediately that the new car had carpet on the floor, not some kind of thick rubber.
The Valiant was getting weary from commuting and from long car trips back to Detroit, and had had a series of increasingly expensive repairs. The tipping point was when the guy at the garage said I might need engine work, but he’d have to take a look at the cylinder heads to be sure. That was a multi-hundred-dollar operation, so I decided to simply run an ad:
For sale: 1974 Plymouth Valiant. 113,000 miles. Engine needs work.
I don’t remember if I put a price in, but I thought I’d be lucky to get $200. I certainly didn’t expect that the first phone call about the car would come in at eight in the morning the first day the ad ran. We probably had fifteen calls by the time I got home that evening — to find two men arguing about who had called first.
Neither of them living in the same county as I did. In fact, neither lived in the same state. One had driven about 30 miles from the far side of the District of Columbia, and the other hand come from a similar distance away in Maryland.
The shorter man, with a strong Indian accident, complained that he had called first, though he didn’t know the time. The taller man wasn’t impressed by this at all. The shorter man said, “I spent a lot of gas to get here!”
So the taller man took out his wallet and offered the guy $10. Which he took.
With that, the short guy left, and the tall guy offered me $200 for the car.
I hadn’t had time to get the title out of the safe-deposit box, which annoyed him greatly. I’m sure he thought I was a rank amateur in the world of car sales, which was the correct way for him to think.
Probably, considering how willingly he paid the $200 for the car, I could have gotten more, but I kept telling myself I wasn’t trying to put anything over on anyone.
With the money from selling the car, we bought a new set of pots and pans, a couple of which I still have. So they’ve gotten good mileage.
Characters • Ferguson, David • Stories • Storytellers • told by David Ferguson | Dave Ferguson August 8, 2006
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By Rose Abril, August 14, 2006 @ 6:56 am
Sounds like you got good mileage out of the Valiant and the pots and pans. I can’t beleive people argued over that car! Hahaha.