So one day after borrowing my mother’s Century to run around looking at cheap used cars, I told her a friend would be taking me to school today. The owner of the cheapass little car lot pulled up in front of the house in a blue Datsun pickup and took me off to his lot to sign paperwork on a Silver Blue Glow 1975 Ford Gran Torino. $300 down, $50 a week for 27 weeks. The air was cold. The Sparkomatic stereo ate tapes in reverse but not in forward. The right rear window didn’t roll down. But that car was mine (well, it would be after the 27 weeks were up and I would be 18, and it could go into my name). The week after I paid it off, I blew the left front tire at 75mph on my way to Auto Tech school in Laramie and the tire caught fire when I stopped. I could not save the car. My $1650 was gone, my Torino was a $25 piece of scrap metal, and all I saved was the GRAN TORINO badge off the right fender as I scrambled to empty the car of everything I owned before the interior caught fire, too.

It took me 12 years, 2 wives, 3 kids, and thousands of classified ad searches on the internet. Then one day my wife comes to me and says, I bought you a car. She found a white 1976 model on eBay for $355. It was supposed to run. It was supposed to drive. The battery was dead and the carb linkage was messed up, but we had it shipped from Oklahoma to Texas, and now I have my baby again. Silver Blue Glow will come in time. I have the hubcaps. The Sparkomatic cassette deck is on my eBay Watch List. And the feeling of piloting this thing with my pinky finger at 70mph down the back roads of every Farm To Market road I can find is blissful!

There’s a matching wagon to my sedan on Craigslist in New York for $2500. It has the brown interior, not blue, but it has the same 351 engine, hubcaps, and living room sofa on wheels feeling. There’s a copper colored one on CL in Minnesota for $650. And a dark green ’74 somewhere out west for $1000. Go get one. Baby it. And relive the magic of a Bright Idea from Ford!!!

Dru