Another Valuable (expensive) Lesson

In late 60s, Ms Day and I lived in Dallas, Texas. We were poor, but didn’t know it and we mostly got by surprisingly well considering that we were totally on our own as kids (me, 19 & she, 17) in a big city. We’d financially “graduated” into being car owners in 1968—a nondescript German import brand that no longer exists—that looked a lot like a tiny hearse. .As usual, Ms Day decorated it to look like a vehicle the Munsters or Adams family might own. While I was driving to a meter reading route (I worked for the Dallas Water Department) I was t-boned at an intersection by a lady driving a new model Cadillac. Our car and a lot of my savings were totaled as a result. The German hearse was unrepairable and our friend/mechanic had a great deal for me; a barely used 1959 MGA that an Air Farce guy had been keeping in storage for several years and was looking to unload for $500. What I knew about cars, auto mechanics, and car maintenance could have been extensively documented on a single side of a page with double-spaced, large type print.

The MGA was a very attractive sports car with some of the most ludicrous attempts at engineering in human history. In retrospect, I couldn’t have been saddled with a worse car for that time and place. The picture, at left, is pretty much exactly the POS British crap that I owned, color and all: 4 cylinder, 1489 cc, 108 BHP (79.488 KW) @ 6700 RPM, cast iron block with an aluminum head, dual SU carb, twin Lucas distributor, 4-on-the-floor manual transmission, rear wheel drive, two-seater convertible, wire wheels and all. That summer, Dallas was hitting some record high temperatures and the postage stamp MG radiator wasn’t even close to up to the job; resulting in multiple blown head gaskets. (A good reason why that generic MGA picture is next to a pond.) Couple that with the twin carbs and distributors that needed moment-by-moment adjustment or they’d slip out of tune and set the freakin’ wooden floorboards and air filters on fire, and you have a formula for sudden bankruptcy and lots of stranded moments in weird Dallas neighborhoods (the only kind of Dallas neighborhood).

By the time I gave up on the MGA, my hard-won savings went from more than $3,000 (Almost $28,000 in today’s money.) to the $500 I received from the sucker who bought the car from me. When he drove the MGA off, it was bellowing smoke from yet another blown head gasket and back-firing because it was, again, out of time. I was happy to see the damn thing disappear from my life and amazed that someone who owned a beautiful white 1960’s Ford Falcon convertible would want a British anything.

The inspiration for this essay was an accidental run-in with a 1960 MGA and its owner at the Red Wing River City Days this past weekend. The bleached white beauty at right is the exact car. I was bicycling past the car show when I saw it and I had to take a look for old times’ sake. The owner was nearby, providing some comic relief. I had all sorts of flashbacks looking at that money-sink of a wannabe-vehicle.

Ms. Day’s “favorite” memory was when I foolishly signed us up for a rally that ran some distance in the north Texas countryside past Plano, west to Grapevine, and into Ft. Worth before sending us back to Dallas for the finish line; not that we got anywhere near finishing. Somewhere near Lewisville Lake our MGA started backfiring, setting the floorboards on fire and sending flames into the passenger compartment. We spent the rest of the rally driving slowly towards home, watching the ditches and fields on the way for any sign of water and the typical Texas litter that would include bottles and cans to hold water to use in putting out our flaming vehicle. One of my “favorite” MGA memories was as we were returning home from our wedding ceremony in the MGA, some damn thing happened in the transmission causing enough pressure to pop the rubber transmission fill stopper and shoot hot transmission lube into the vicinity of the glovebox where it dribbled down on Ms. Day’s bare legs and her wedding dress.The only good part of that memory is knowing that she was still this happy to be married to me after all of that.

So, while I looked at the MGA in the car show, I listened to the owner talk about the “joys” of owning this kind of vintage POS. He described the fixes he’d made to the car’s many engineering faults, the money and time invested, and the joys of driving the damn thing. I looked at the odometer and he’d managed to rack up a grand total of 5,200 miles in 64 years (he was the original owner, too), or about 80 miles per year. That isn’t even a decent stat for a pair of boots.

The MGA was a life lesson for me, though. Since that car, I have never once felt a moment of envy toward any sports car owner. If they don’t look like total assholes, sympathy at best, but envy never. Sports cars are uncomfortable, unreliable, impractical, and irrationally expensive. As David McRaney said in the “Spotlight Effect” chapter of You Are Not So Smart, “The spotlight effect leads you to believe everyone notices when you drive around town in a new, expensive car. They don’t. After all, the last time you saw an awesome car, do you remember who was driving it? Do you even remember the last time you saw an awesome car?”