Long ramble (not Rambler!) follows...
I was born in '59. My dad's first "real" car was a '57 Chevy Bel Air 4-door that he bought after he got out of the Army. That was the car that I came home from the hospital in, but I don't remember us in it much because my dad gave it to my grandfather in '61. I remember it being my granddad's car.
My father bought a '61 Buick LeSabre for the family and a Saab (model year unknown) for my mother. We were one of the first familes in the area to own an import car. An area Buick deal was starting to import them, and he sold the two cars together as a package deal to get people interested. The Saab kind of looked like a cross between a Beetle and a Chrysler Airflow (if anyone remembers those). It was a small car by the era's standards, although looking back at old pics of it now, it would probably be considered an "intermediate" today.
The Buick was navy blue inside and out. It had vinyl bench seats, and man did the interior get hot in the summer. We used to keep towels in the car so that legs exposed by shorts wouldn't get burned. The main thing I recall about the interior was a pecularity of the dash design. The top of the dash overhung the instrument panel by a good amount. In between the seats, the air conditioner controls were suspended from the underside of the overhang. Very peculiar placement. The function selector was a big black knob oriented with its face down, and its side towards the seats. It had detent positions for the A/C, heat, and vent functions, and any turn of the knob was accompanied by lots of vacuum hissing as damper doors repositioned themselves. The fan speed and temperature controls were sliders that moved forwards and back along the underside of the overhang. The car was also lavishly equipped with kick vents, lap vents, vent windows, and a rear seat heater that vented warm air out from under the front seats.
The Buick developed a peculiar habit: it ate starter solenoids. Periodically, at random, the solenoid just fried itself. My dad got very proficient at changing them. He kept several in the trunk, with some hand tools, and he could change the solenoid in five minutes almost anywhere he happened to be. This was the sort of thing you had to deal with in cars back then. Other than that, I don't remember the Buick having any particular problems until about '69, when the engine developed a major oil burn. My dad traded it in that year.
The Saab was interesting. I wish I remembered more about it. I do recall that some of the gauges were peculiar by American standards. I think it had a voltmeter rather than an ammeter, which would have been standard on American cars of the day. The engine temp gauge was marked in degrees C, although the oil pressure was marked in PSI. It had a three-on-the-tree transmission. The engine was a wimpy 4-cylinder job; there were hills around town that it wasn't capable of climbing, and my mom had to plan her routes accordingly. It got totalled in '65. My mom was driving through a construction zone, and a flagman waved her around a blind corner. As soon as she rounded the corner, a boom crane backed over the car. It tore the roof off and destroyed the front end. Fortunately, Mom was not hurt. For a while, they shared the Buick; some days my dad car-pooled to work, and on days when he took the car, if Mom needed to go somewhere during the day, she just borrowed a neighbor's car. That kind of thing was common during those days.
(Another thing that was common: cars of the day usually had ignition switches that allowed the key to be removed in the "off", non-locked position. This made it possible to turn the ignition back on and start it without a key. People often did this when their car was parked at home, because "someone might need to move it". In fact, our driveway pad was also a neighborhood basketball hot-spot, and moving cars so that a game of basketball could be played was common. Sometimes my dad would set me in his lap and let me turn the steering wheel when he moved the Buick. The GM "no-feel-no-effort-whatsoever" power steering of the day made it possible for even a 4-year-old to drive!)
In '67 he bought my mom a TOL Buick Riveria with all the bells and whistles. Which would have been great if all the bells and whistles had worked properly every once in a while. But that car was always in the shop for something. The headlight doors sometimes wouldn't open, or would close by themselves in the dark. The wipers blew fuses in heavy rain. The AM/FM switch on the radio, which actuated a rotating legend for the tuning dial for the two bands, got hung in between positions and the radio wouldn't pick up either band. The vacuum-powered door locks never worked right. The power window motors splattered grease all over the glass, and the switches went up in smoke. The "automatic" air conditioning alternated between blowing cold air on the occupants' feet and heating on 90-degree days.
In 1970, Dad traded in both the Buicks for a '69 Firebird SD455 with the Ram Air induction. I recall that it had a rocker switch on the dash that you had to flip to close the airscoop whenever it started raining, lest the carb ingest a bunch of water. That thing was an absolute beast. The speedometer was indexed up to 160 MPH, and the car was undoubtedly capable of it. I was in it one day whem my dad got it up to 130. He didn't have it long, though. My parents separated around that time and Dad traded the Firebird for a '70 Olds Delta 88. The Olds was a good car when it was new; it didn't start having major problems until 1980, when Dad sold it. (Two weeks later, the guy he sold it to had the transmission go out, and he junked it.) We did all the maintenance and repair ourselves. I learned about cars from working on that Olds. We did brake jobs, changed out sticky valve tappets, replaced the distributor, and put new clutch bands in the transmission. In its lifetime we did nearly everything short of actually pulling the engine. I still recall the first time I changed the spark plugs. Dad had decided it needed new plug wires too. So I took all the old ones off... oops, where do the new ones go? The firing order was imprinted on the intake manifold, but which plug was 1 on the distributor? The first time, I got it wrong, and when we tried to start it, flames shot 15 feet in the air out of the carb. Oops, guess that wasn't it. Eventually I got it straight. Dad was very patient with me. He taught me how to use a timing light and a vacuum gauge to set the point gap, dwell, and advance curves. All completely useless skills now.
My mom remarried, and she drove my stepfather's '69 Camaro until he traded it in for a '73 Monte Carlo. To this day, my stepfather is still sick that he did that. The Monte Carlo was the car I learned to drive in. It went fast in a straight line, but it was heavy and it handled like a pig. It had little interior room despite being a pretty large car, because the engine compartment took up half the length of the car. The front seat passengers could only get comfortable by moving their seats all the way back, and that made the rear seat passengers feel like they had they had their feet in a mailbox. And the car had all kinds of electrical problems. The gauges and idiot lights went wacko. The stupid seat belt buzzer would go off randomly for the front passenger seat even when there was no passenger in that seat -- I eventually figured out how to disable it. One time, on a long road trip in the middle of summer, the A/C quit. The problem was a fusible link to the commpressor that had melted. I found a spool of 22-gauge wire, twisted about 10 strands of it together to make a heavier conductor, and bypassed the fusible link with it. Eventually my stepfather bought a '77 Caddy for himself. It had one of the infamous 4-6-8 engines that GM wound up recalling. My stepfather got a nice settlement from the class-action suit on that, and used the money to go buy a Lincoln.
My own first car was that same '57 Chevy that my father had bought new and given to my grandfather. I acquired it in '77. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep it; it just required too much maintenance. If it had been a 2-door it might have been different, but since 4-doors werern't (and still aren't) as valuable to collectors, I sold it. I do recall some things about it. It had the 265 V8 with the Rochester 4-barrel capable of sucking prodigous amounts of gas if you tempted it. The air filter was one of those old oil-soaked jobs that needed cleaning every few weeks. The windshield washer was activated by a foot pedal, which activated a switch to turn the wipers on, but also operated a manual washer fluid pump. Given a good healthy trodding, it would squirt some washer fluid on the windshield, and some on your foot. My dad told me he had been trying to fix that leak since it was new. He called it the "pisser pedal". And the gas tank had a bad problem with water condensation for some reason. I was constantly putting Heet in it.
When the Chevy got to be too much for me to keep up with on my very limited income as a teenager, my dad helped me buy a '78 Pontiac Sunbird. That was an okay car. It always had something wrong with it, but in its defense, it survived three major wrecks. It got hit while parked twice (once by a car doing in excess of 60 MPH), and once I stuffed it in a ditch during a snowstorm. I kept it going until I graduated from college, got a job away from home, and started making some money. At that point, the fact that it had black vinyl interior and a non-functioning A/C, in south Florida, became distinct disadvantages.
I traded the Pontiac for a '84 Dodge Daytona. I wanted a sports car, and by god I got one. What's the old saying about Porsches -- "it'll pass anything except a garage?" Well, that was the Daytona. One problem after another -- seat belt retractors that jammed, seat mounts that broke, fuel injectors that burned up, paint that peeled, pushbutton switches on the dash that fell apart, engine computers that went wacko and flooded the engine. I traded it in after four years with only 37,000 on the odo, and the engine was burning oil badly and the clutch was shot and the paint was almost toally gone.
Traded that for a '88 Nissan Sentra. Nothing fancy, but it was a very good basic-transportation car. Drove it for eight years, put 115,000 miles on it, and had very few problems. Sold that in '96 and bought a Saturn SL2, which I'm still driving today. I'm thinking about trading it now but overall it has been the best car I've ever owned. In fact, I'm still kind of reluctant to let it go, even though it is beginning to show its age.
