My First Car is the One I’ll Always Remember the Most

Your first car is a big deal. You always remember it so well. It may not have been the first car you drove (thanks mom), but it was the first one that was truly yours even if it was old and beat up.

My first car was a hand-me-down from my late grandfather. His old 1976 (maybe '77) Ford F-100 had been parked in the woods at my family's camp on Sebago Lake in Raymond. It had been hit by a tree. You read that right. A tree had fallen on the bed of the truck during a storm so the back end kind of tilted to the right a bit. It still managed to pass inspection for the three years or so that I drove it in the late 80's.

It was unique because it was a manual transmission with shift on the steering column. Not the floor. The column! You know, like where the blinker goes. That took some getting used to, but eventually I was shifting that bad boy like a pro.

It still had a piece of electrical tape on the instrumentation panel. My grandfather hated the bright blue hi-beam indicator. It wasn't as easy to disable like he did for the buzzer that went off when your door was open and the keys were in it, so he just put the tape there to cover the light up. He knew when his beams were on high. He pressed that little button on the floor to change them, so he was no dummy.

It looked very similar to the F-100 higlighted in this video.

What was your first car and what do you remember about it? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook and Twitter.