(our newest Saturday COAL series starts today) I’ve had a lifelong love affair with cars, and spent everyday dreaming of being able to drive. My parents told me that when I was very little, if I was fussy, or if mom needed to set me somewhere safe while she cleaned, the would set me in front of the front door and let me look out the glass storm door at the cars as they passed. Apparently that’s all it took to keep me occupied for hours. I think I was probably around 12 when I first started trying to convince my parents to let me buy some old car I found for sale here and there.
In fact, there was a somewhat strange family that lived down the street from the house I grew up in, that always had a nice assortment of brougham-tastic cars. The husband/father told me he would sell me any one of his 3 cars for only $500. I had the choice of a 1977 Ford Granada sedan that always smelled like gas when you got close to it, a 1976 Mercury Marquis Brougham 2 door, or a 1973 Chevy Impala. I wanted the Mercury. It was in very nice shape and was just so big that it seemed almost comical.
The car looked just like this only the paint was faded and the red vinyl top was very faded and somewhat tattered.
Same color, but this one is in better shape
Only difference is my neighbors car had a white top
I had the money from working after school everyday taking care of a neighbors dog. $2 a day, $10 per week, for probably 3-4 years. They never did let me get one of those prizes I found.
From the time I was around 11-13 a lot of my afternoons were spent out at horse barns because my sister rode horses and had lessons to take and horses to feed and care for. At one of the places where she kept her horse, the guy that owned the house and barn was a bit of a car collector. He was a very nice guy and would let me look at whatever he was driving at the time and tell me all about it. He came home in a triple black 1969 Mercury Cougar convertible with a 351 and 4 speed.
This is pretty much it, right down to the wheels
I fell in love with the car and he actually told me that he would sell it to me for $5000! I have no idea what he actually paid for the car, it looked to be in about perfect condition, but to my young ears, I heard a price and I was going to make it mine! It took me until I was 15, but I saved my money and one day I was just about there, I think I had $4800 or so and I decided that the next time I saw him, I’d let him know that I was about ready to buy it from him. Just in time for my 16th birthday too! Well, the very next time I saw him, I told him, and he told me that he had just sold it the prior weekend and bought an Austin Healey! I was so upset and crushed by this news that I didn’t even want to look at that stupid little Austin. Looking back on it, its probably better it happened this way than for me to have come up to him with my $5000 expecting to get a $25,000 car for it!
Fast forward to the fall of 1994, I was 15 years old and approaching the day I had been waiting for all my life. I would often go with my dad to his office if he had to work on the weekend, and I really enjoyed doing whatever it was I would do there while he worked. But one Saturday was different. He asked me if I would want to go to the office with him and practice driving a manual transmission truck around the parking lot while he worked. Of course I felt like I had hit the jackpot and was so excited I couldn’t hardly wait to get there. Dad got the keys to a little Ford Ranger. A 6 cylinder, 5 speed work truck. The parking lot was rather large and made a complete circle around the buildings and also branched off in a few places. It had a couple hills for practicing taking off from a stop too. My dad took me around a couple times, explained the basics of driving a manual, and then left me to it. I felt the excitement of every Christmas morning and birthday all rolled into one time that day. From then on, I went with him to work every chance I got. While I drove the Ranger the most, I also got to drive a few of the F-150 work trucks they had, and my favorite, a 1988 F-250 Diesel 5 speed.
The Ranger looked just like this. It even had the same bed cover
On one of these weekends, I believe it was in November, my dad took me around back and there sat 7 or 8 of the F-150’s all lined up. He told me that the company had just bought replacements for them all and asked if I would like to buy one as my first vehicle. This was it! My time had finally arrived! I was going to get my very own car! Of course I told him I wanted to, and he told me to pick one out and that I could have it for $900. Pretty awesome price for what I got too. I spent the day driving them all around and settled on “my truck”. Granted, they were all almost identical, but I knew the one I wanted. It was a 1987 2wd regular cab long bed. It had a 302 and a 4 speed manual. I think it had right at 150k miles on it at the time. I suppose it was a custom, but it didn’t even have the custom badges. What it did have was working air conditioning, and a crappy AM/FM radio. It was a faded tan color, has steel wheels, and a tan bench seat.
In the months leading up to my 16th birthday, my parents let me spend some of my money on it. The first thing we did was have it painted black. Door jambs, inside the bed, behind the bed, everywhere was changed to black. This completely transformed the look of the truck and made it look a whole lot better. Then came some new wheels. Just a set of chrome truck wheels with 10 circles in each wheel. It’s hard to say what made a bigger difference in the appearance of the truck, the paint or the wheels. But with those two things done, it really started to look like a pretty nice truck.
My 16th birthday came on a Sunday so naturally the Department of Drivers Services was closed, and they were always closed on Monday’s as well. But on Tuesday March 14th I finally got my drivers license. I was a freshman in high school, and one of the few people in my class that had a drivers license. This made me the driver for everyone and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Sure, only 3-4 could fit in the cab, but I had a full 8′ bed for everyone to pile in! In fact, I once received 9 traffic tickets at one time while leaving school. One ticket per kid in the bed of the truck that was under 18! Over the next 2 years I continued to customize the truck and add thing, take away things, and just change things to make it how I wanted it. I ordered a nice set of black captain chairs with a flip down armrest/3rd seat, I got black carpet, a really nice Kenwood CD player, amplifier, and small subwoofer. I had the windows tinted, added a sliding rear window, and went through countless mufflers/exhaust systems trying to get the perfect sound (which I finally was able to achieve several years later). I pulled high school parade floats with that truck, had my first real kiss in that truck, made several stupid decisions in that truck, and loved all of it.
For the most part it was a very reliable vehicle and carried me and my friends on quite a few out of state trips for spring break and summer vacations. The few things I really remember having trouble with, were pretty easy for me to fix myself. It had a very sensitive fuel cut off switch or inertia switch that fooled me a couple of times. If you set the parking break hard, when your released the brake it would swing up with a lot of force. That caused the switch to trip more than once. The first time it happened, I thought the fuel pump had gone out, but eventually found it was just the switch. Another problem I had was when the original alternator went out, I bought a replacement from NAPA. We didn’t have an Autozone or Advanced Auto Parts with their lifetime warranties near my house so all my stuff came from NAPA. The alternators only had like a 6 month warranty, and I swear I think they had an internal clock in them and would last no longer than 7-8 months. I went through 4 or 5 of those before I finally bought one from the Ford dealership and as far as I know, that one is still on the truck. The first major problem I had with the truck was when the gears in the rear end tore up. But that was really an easy fix. I just bought a whole rear axle from a junk yard truck and swapped it out in a half day in my driveway.
In 1998 I was a senior in high school and I got the car buying fever again. There was no way I was going to part with this truck, but I wanted something else to drive too. I was going to be going to college the next year in south Georgia and I figured maybe I needed some thing more practical to make the 3.5 hour drive from school to home once every two months or so. This was the excuse I was going to use anyway to convince my parents that I needed a second car. I had been working at an oil change place since my freshman year of high school and had some money saved up. I fell in love with a certain type of car, and the hunt was on. I really wish I had some pictures of the truck, but before cellphones came along with cameras in them, I didn’t really take any pictures of anything.
This picture is from 2002-2003 after the truck had been sitting in a barn for a few years. I cant find a single picture of it from its prime!
This is not the end of the story for my F-150, it continues on for a while and will be revisited in some of my future posts. Next week, I’ll share the story of my next COAL, it was a real doozy.
Welcome kmcbride. This is an enjoyable read and one to which I can personally relate. As a young child I too was enthralled by cars and could name make and model of just about every vehicle that passed my home or that I saw out the back side window of my father’s big old Packard. This was in the mid-1950s when cars were really unique, but I know how you felt looking out the front door window of your home.
And it seemed like it took a hundred years for me to reach my 16th birthday. As luck would have it, the New York Department of Motor Vehicles in Garden City Long Island was open on that day and I drove my mother home from that office in her black 1957 Chrysler with my ink-still-wet learner’s permit in my wallet.
I clearly remember that day and it occurred more than 58 years ago.
I look forward to your follow-up COALs.
Nice truck! I like it even in the first photo, tan and stock 😃
I asked my father many times about the company cars from his old workplace. Especially one, a Škoda Octavia Combi with 1.8T gas engine praised for its reliability, interested me. But he would always tell me how many people have driven the car, and it would discourage me. A bit. For some time 😄
Maybe he thought about the saying ‘the fastest off-road? A company car’ 🤔
My dad told me that I had made a good choice with the truck I picked as it had been assigned to an older gentleman that took good care of it and was careful with his stuff. I think he retired shortly after I got his old truck.
Splendid purchase then!
The Škoda I talked about was assigned to nobody exact, so the drivers varied. My dad as an IT support had to move some equipment once, had it at home for few days and that is how I became aware of it.
Today, from time to time I search in Bazoš (Slovak Craigslist) for keywords like ‘my former company car’ or ‘bought off’. As far as I know people who bought their cars off their company, they look after them pretty well.
“Sure, only 3-4 could fit in the cab, but I had a full 8′ bed for everyone to pile in! In fact, I once received 9 traffic tickets at one time while leaving school. One ticket per kid in the bed of the truck that was under 18! Over the next 2 years I continued to customize the truck and add THINGS, take away things, and just change things to make it how I wanted it.” THIS was a crucial reason why I wanted a minivan as my first vehicle (after my brother’s ’01 Ranger in high school), but NOT one that you could immediately call a soccer-mom-mobile. All the extra space in the bed of a pickup (even with a camper shell) can legally only be used for cargo. The same also applies to a cargo van without approved (& SAFE) modifications for passenger seats. Like you, I added several things to my vehicle(s) but not only to make it (them) “stand out” a bit more from what everyone else was driving (lights, reflectors, custom badges & bumper/window stickers), but also for more functionality & convenience in everyday driving (lights, backup camera, backup alarm 🙂 , power inverter, steering wheel cover, keyless entry, extra cupholders). Many of the things I added to my ’96 Aerostar were transferred to my 2011 Ranger before it got hauled to the junkyard. I kept the things that wouldn’t fit in the Ranger & later added them to my ’05 Astro. The one thing I let go of was the keyless entry b/c it had quit working before what’s hopefully my final deer collision–I literally tested EVERYTHING to see what was wrong with it (loose wires, dead key fob batteries, reprogramming) & never got it to work again; it wouldn’t have worked on the Ranger anyway b/c it doesn’t have power locks, & I think I’m better off leaving the Astro’s wiring alone at least until all the essential stuff gets fixed. My Ranger is essentially the modern-day equivalent of the one pictured in the article right down to the camper shell, but with a different color & a 4-cylinder engine. In case it isn’t obvious in previous pictures, the tool box that was on it before the camper shell was transferred to the Nissan Trailer. Still waiting to get good pictures of the Astro.
I forgot to mention in the post that only 2 kids gave me any money to pay the tickets too! I think they were only like $20 each, but to a high schooler that still added up to a lot! I lived very close to the high school, my neighborhood basically connected to the school at one end so I never even had to get on a main road with a bed full of people. Parking was limited to seniors due to not having enough space but I managed to buy a spot from a senior that didn’t have a car so I was able to drive to school from my freshman year. All my friends would park in our driveway and I’d carry them all back and fourth. My parents driveway would have anywhere from 7-9 cars parked in it every school day.
Thanks for this first installment. I look forward to more.
It is funny what a difference 20 years makes. In the mid 70s my father tried to talk me into considering a Jeep with a snowplow for my first car. “You can make money with it every winter.”
But I didn’t care about making money with it. And I didn’t want a stupid truck. I found them kind of fun to drive, but I wanted a real car. Fast forward to the era of your teens and a pickup was on the A-List for a whole lot of kids.
What’s really funny about that is that a Jeep was the #1 car in my high school parking lot! All the guys who’s parents paid for a new car got Jeeps! There was hundreds of them! My high school had some of the wealthiest families in the metro Atlanta area in attendance and as such, there were a lot of kids with brand new cars. Jeeps were #1 followed by the Mitsubishi Eclipse, and then maybe Mustangs and Camaros. One kid got a brand new H1 Hummer for his 16th birthday and his girlfriend got a brand new Mitsubishi 3000GT.
With very few exceptions the cars in my high school’s student parking lot could be classified as beaters. For most of us the big thing was to have a car, any car, with the freedom that having your own set of wheels brings. Sure, we would like to have had a new Mustang or a new Camaro or something similar (this was in the late sixties) but that was out of the question for nearly all of us. One of my classmates who did not drive a beater was the daughter of the town’s Chevrolet dealer, she had a rotating assortment of Chevelles, with a different one every 3-4 months. One huge difference between then and now was that I don’t remember anyone driving a pickup to school on a regular basis; nor do I remember anyone having any type of 4X4. About the only four wheel drive vehicles around then was the occasional Jeep, usually owned by someone who used it to plow parking lots after the (rare) snow storm.
Having a pick up truck as a 16 year olds first car still wasn’t very popular in my area when I turned 16 either. But that has certainly changed a lot since then. It seemed crazy to me at the time and, now even more so, that so many kids at my school would get a brand new or near new car when they turned 16. A lot of those cars ended up being totaled before we graduated in 1998.
Neat story! Though I generally don’t prefer Ford products, I have to admit these ’87-’91 F-Series trucks just kept going and going and going. And there’s nothing quite like the First Car, is there.
One thing:
Don’t feel too regretful; you’d’ve had, at best, the same lousy results buying alternator-shaped trinkets with the lifetime warranty, which on a “remanufactured” part is nothing but a sales gimmick to make you think you’re getting a quality component, when in reality “lifetime warranty” means you spend your lifetime exchanging failed part after failed part after failed part under warranty (until you lose the receipt or the store chain leaves your area or gets bought by another corporation and rebranded or otherwise like that). The latest variant is “100% NEW!” cheap starters, alternators, and other suchlike at consumer-grade auto parts stores: knockoffs from the People’s Republic of Counterfeits, no better than the thrown-together “reman” junk. All this is especially so in parts with elements of questionable-to-marginal, problem-prone design and engineering, like those Ford alternators, with no margin for the overall degradation induced by the “remanufacturing” (or copycatting) process.
So what holds up well? An OE part from the dealer, which it sounds like you got with good success, or a bench rebuild by a competent local auto electrics house—not as easy to find as in years past, but still out there with a little bush-beating.
I couldn’t agree more. It was just that at the time I couldn’t afford an OE part. But of course by the time I paid for 3-4 replacements at Napa, I ended up spending more than I would have if I would have just gotten a good one from Ford to start with. I got real fast at changing the alternator though!
The one you’ll buy at a Ford dealer, for a vehicle that is more than a few years old, will almost always be a reman part too and it won’t be done at a Ford owned facility, it will be done by an outside company that is a FAR (Ford Authorized Remanufacturer).
Napa typically has 2 or 3 options for popular applications. The standard “rebuilt” (100% used), their premium 100% remanufactued unit (All wear parts replaced) and for the fastest movers a 100% new unit, sourced of course from China.
The typical chain parts store on the other hand has 1 rebuilt (100% used) unit and if you want the lifetime warranty they just charge you more. It will fail just as quick as the one w/o the warranty, they just bet that most people won’t take them up on the warranty and that will make up for those that do take advantage of it.
Personally I’ve had good luck with the new from China units, far more long lasting than a rebuilt unit.
Here are the facts about the standard rebuilt units. In the vast majority of cases they are 100% used, though when the pipeline is filling they may have an occasional 100% new unit. However once the pipeline is flowing they sell cleaned up used units obtained from a core consolidator and units that are assembled from the good parts found in those units from the wrecking yard and core returns. When they have too many left over parts they will do a run of the premium units and depending on who they are going to sell them to and for how much they may replace all wear parts or just those required to make a functioning unit.
Personally I often just go used from the wrecking yard. It will be virtually the same thing you will get if you by a standard rebuilt unit and depending on the application and wrecking yard it may be 10% of the cost of the rebuilt unit. Otherwise I often just get the parts to fix the problem and do it myself. If neither of those are an option my next choice is usually the 100% new from China unit. It will usually have the same parts inside as the 100% remanufactured unit, usually won’t have a core charge and in some cases cost less than that reman unit.
Wow! This one brings back some sweet and sad memories. In October 1986 Popular Mechanics tested the new F150 against the Chevy and Dodge trucks. When I read Ford had fuel injected the 300 I had to have one. So on December 28th 1986 with a $200 trade in on a 74 Pinto Wagon and a co-sign from my Dad I drove out in a new 1987 F150 Custom with the 300 and a granny 4-speed. Also Tan (called Light Chestnut) with a Tan vinyl bench seat, AC, two speaker electronically tuned AM radio, cruise/tilt, and dual fuel tanks. The sticker was $9995. 9.9% interest for 60 months with a $265 monthly payment. At the time I was working minimum wage jobs at $3.35 hr and worked three of them, sometimes all in a row (which made my day last from 5 am till after midnight) and after a year and a half it was becoming an untenable situation. And I figured since these trucks were still being sold new ,when my financial situation improved I’d buy another one just like it. So in July 1988 Dad used my truck and his 81 F100 Ranger XLT he had bought new as trade ins on a new 88 Suburban so he could carry members of the local Corvette club they had joined when they went to national car shows with their 62 ‘Vette. And that Suburban turned out to be a POS, but that’s a different story for a different time. I still think fondly and often of my 87 and still have regrets for not being able to hold on to it. Because to date I have not been able to replace it. I still have all its paperwork and a Marti report as well as several photo’s. It was my first new vehicle. Here are a few pics.
Rear
And as a bonus the only pic I have of Dads 81 F100.