History: The Family Car

The old and the new: November 1964 - United Airlines maintenance parking lot, San Francisco International Airport

In 1964 I was three years old. My parents purchased a new car. As befitting a very typical middle-class family, the car was a very typical middle-class piece of hardware for the era: a 1964 Country Sedan station wagon in Wimbledon White, carrying a 300-horsepower 390 under the hood, and manual drum brakes under each fender.

For the next fourteen years, the new and eventually not-so-new Country Sedan bore up under thousands of shopping trips, reliably handled numerous vacations, survived my learning to drive it, and generally did about what it was bought to do. A review of garage receipts from these years show, though, that by modern standards cars of the '60s were very maintenance intensive: frequent oil changes, chassis lube jobs, and brake adjustments were the order of the day, and by 80,000 miles the MS Galaxie had needed a valve job and was on its third master cylinder!

Santa Cruz, California, 1965

Wasatch Mountains along I-80, 1969

The fish pond: near Gibbon, Nebraska, 1969

In 1978 the old beast of burden was handed off to my brother, where it served to shuttle his family around for a while. It left California for Illinois in the early 80s where it was, fortunately, kept garaged in winter; returning to California three years later to spend years locked up in a moving-company warehouse, and several more years in a relative's garage. In 1994 this very patient individual rightfully decided she had better things to do with the space; I then trailered the beast back to the Bay Area.

The car's condition now? Not perfect, not awful. The car has never been badly bent, though the left front fender carries the scars of some tremendously bad bodywork (the aftereffects of some teenage stupidity on the part of Your Humble Author).

Not my favorite picture: 1977

Between warehouse and friendly garage: 1988

The paint has seen better days, there's minor surface rust as well as a few small dents (a legacy of having been used as something of a shelf while in storage) in the roof. The front edge of the hood was thumped slightly by the shipping firm that carted the car back West from Illinois. And then there's the interior, which suffered some water damage over the years. One minor triumph: it has never been registered outside California and still has its original yellow-on-black plates.