Cars and Girls: ’58 Chevy,‘59 Plymouth Fury, & ’62 Plymouth Valiant

While I was back home in Rochester and taking classes at Monroe Community College, several major events occurred – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and race riots in Rochester. Both of those events left a lot of people disillusioned and upset. Me included. Why race riots in a northern city? Many cars that happened to be in the way of rioters suffered broken windows and other damage. I found one that had only a couple of broken windows, a two-tone brown and crème 1958 Chevy Biscayne four door with side glass broken. I got the car cheap and found replacement glass in a junk yard. I didn’t keep this car long although I liked the styling. Basically I flipped it and made some money.

My parents must have felt sorry for me and my junk cars and bought a used 1959 Plymouth Fury coupe, supposedly for my mother to learn to drive. My father and I were to teach her to drive. That didn’t work out so well because she was deathly afraid of that overpowered beast but I drove it all the time. It had a V-8, push button auto transmission, big fins, a fake continental tire cover on the trunk, and was pretty fast. The white body looked pretty cool after I painted the wheels red, or so I thought. I pushed this car hard because it could move down the road. I took lots of risks back then and was a foolish late teen.

I despised drivers who beat me off the line when a traffic light turned green. One particular incident turned out nearly disastrous – for me. A car pulled away on my right and I decided to get even by speeding past it first chance I had. So I did that and was accelerating on a curve and as I pulled up next to the car long enough for me to give the driver the universal salute, I lost control of the ’59 Fury and before I knew what was happening I was pressed into the seat while the car did a 360 and ended up going backwards facing the car I was trying to pass. My guardian angel must have been with me at that moment and I got my wits back and managed to steer the car off the road, still going backwards, into a field. Heart racing, I sat there for a few minutes while I contemplated my near death experience. As luck would have it, there were no trees, boulders, embankments, or fences where I backed off the road. I learned a lesson from that hands-on experiment and never did that again.

For some reason, probably because I pushed that car so hard, an engine knock developed and my dad traded the ’59 Fury for a new sedate 1962 Plymouth Valiant. I was depressed about that since the Valiant was definitely not cool.

The Valiant became my main means of transportation before I went back to Alfred University. Eventually my mother did learn to drive in that car. One humorous car/girl incident occurred with this car while on a date with Jerri, my new heart throb and classmate at MCC. Jerri and I were fond of parking along Lake Ontario at Durand Eastman Park, which had 5,000 feet of shoreline along the lake. One night we decided to skip the shore where a policeman spooked us on one other date when we were parked along the lake front. We didn’t want him to find us again because he knew Jerri’s father who owned a Ford dealership in the area.

We decided to venture into the park and pull over on the side of the road where we thought we found a secluded spot. We were so preoccupied we did not realize what was about to happen. I sensed something was not right and my intuition was screaming at me. I sat up and when my eyes adjusted to the dark outside, I saw that the Valiant was surrounded by a squad of soldiers complete with rifles, packs, the whole Army thing. I, of course panicked, started the car, pressed hard on the accelerator and the car did not move. Fearing these army guys had tied a rope to the bumper and then to a tree I panicked even more. Finally I came to my senses and discovered one of my shoes was behind the accelerator pedal. Once this was corrected I peeled out of there nearly running over a couple of the soldiers. Those guys must have laughed about that incident for months afterwards.