My 2nd best Christmas Present - my first car.

An Old Coot remembers a Christmas past.

By Merlin Lessler

It wasn’t best ever Christmas present! But it was a close second. The first, was a 3 speed English bike with hand brakes that was under the tree in 1954. This one, I gave to myself. A 1953 Ford convertible. The year was 1961. I’d just come off a 3 month co-op stint at NYSEG in Auburn, New York, a hiatus from my Electrical Technology Classes at Broome Tech, as it was called back then, having risen from the ashes as State Tech in Downtown Binghamton, moved to upper Front, renamed, renamed again, and now is SUNY Broome. I was flush with cash from my two-dollar and eight cents-an-hour engineering assistant job. Perfect timing to hear classmate, Jack Tyler, announce in the school cafeteria that he was auctioning off his car. There was a hitch. The car died in the Cloverdale Milk Company parking lot on Conklin Ave. (little to the west of what is now the Relief Pitcher). Died in a snowstorm and then was plowed under. It resided in a frozen snow bank. No one but Jack and the snowplow guy knew it was there.

I was familiar with the car. Jack drove it to school most days of our first year at Broome. The days it started, that is. He’d paid $350 for it the previous summer and hoped to break even. Ha! Not with a dead car buried in an ice cave. The bidding started at $10, made it to $35 and screeched to a halt. I checked my wallet and bid $60, hoping to scare off the other bidders. I got the shut out I was looking for. The guys around the table thought I was nuts. But, I had a secret weapon, Jimmy Wilson, a south-sider like me. I lived on Chadwick; he lived on Hotchkiss. Jimmy could fix cars, any car, any problem. And, his father delivered milk for Cloverdale; it would serve him well to be the one who managed to remove that big lump from the parking lot. 

We went at it early one Saturday morning. It had warmed up the night before and digging the car out was a lot easier that we thought it would be. The battery was dead. Jimmy ran some jumper cables from his car, a much-abused 1955 Chevy with rollover dents and scratches on the roof. It cranked but wouldn’t catch. We thought we might have incorrectly hot-wired it. There were no keys, a fact Jack didn’t mention until I’d handed over the sixty bucks and asked for them. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I can’t find the keys.” We checked our hot wiring job, hoping a cop car didn’t wander by; the wires were correct. Jimmy had three cans of dry gas in his trunk, a necessity for him since he was a student in northern New England, majoring in downhill skiing and minoring in Business, though his folks thought it was the other way around. We pored a can into the tank and tried again. Bingo! It started, ran for a minute and quit. We added another can of dry gas. Same thing. That’s when Jimmy determined the car was out of gas. The gage was pegged at full, but was a liar. A trip to the gas station solved the problem and I chugged out of the parking lot and headed for home.

I still remember how proud I felt pulling into our driveway with my Christmas present to myself. I remember too, the look on my parent’s faces and the not too subtle suggestion to, “Move that heap out of our driveway and park it out of sight on Aldridge Ave. It sat there for six months, receiving the application of can after can of Bondo, a failed attempt to eliminate the large number of voids in the rusted body. But that wasn’t the only issue. The heater blew cold air. I had to twist wires under the dash to start it. The tires were bald. The trunk was opened by poking at the latch with a screwdriver through a hole. And, there was a bad spot in the starter; it refused to function at the most inopportune moments. But, I did meet a lot of nice people who stopped to give me a push to get it jump-started.

It didn’t matter. I was in heaven. That beast launched me into adulthood. How could it not, with all its little quirks? Now that I’m an old coot, I realize how life changing that $60 bid was. I courted my college sweetheart in that heap. We drove off in a major snowstorm on our honeymoon, bundled up in winter coats, hats, gloves and with a heavy quilt across our laps. The snow was too much for the bald tires. We had to change our plan to drive to Niagara Falls and settle for the Holliday Inn on upper Court Street (it’s long gone now). Did I mention the radio didn’t work either? It didn’t matter; it was the second best Christmas present ever.

What I thought my first car looked like.

What it really looked like.