Auto tradition comes full-circle

I was in seventh grade and delivering the local paper every day after school. One day as I made my route I happened to glance over and see a tiny glimpse of chrome peeking from under a lean-to. I stopped and tried to get a better glance at what was obviously some car I wasn’t familiar with, but I just couldn’t tell.

I was intrigued.

Granted, I was just a kid, but since I was little my step-dad had collected just about every kind of car on the planet and I could tell year, make and model of just about any rig around. But not this one. Since the house belonged to a customer of mine I pedaled my bike up the driveway, knocked on the door and politely asked. My customer, an older woman, was more than happy to walk me around to look.

It was a 1960 Austin Cambridge A55 Mark II Saloon. I was instantly smitten. They had bought the car new in 1959 for their daughter to drive to college. However, she soon managed to buy herself a “cooler” car and it had sat behind their house ever since, rarely used. I asked if they had ever thought of selling it and she said they had, but just never got around to it. I finished my paper route in record speed and rode home to find my step-dad and mom and began pleading.

The problem was, I already had a car. It was family tradition that each of us got our first car as a 10th birthday present and had the next six years to fix it up. I had received a 1942 Plymouth Deluxe Sedan that was in pretty poor shape, so I had already made a deal to exchange it for a 1966 VW Beetle with a sunroof. I saw the Beetle parked beside the house as I rode my bike up the long driveway. How in the heck would I tell my parents that once again, I wanted something different?

Surprisingly, my step-dad smiled and agreed to go look at the car with me. I guess he was amused at the idea that, like him, I was always on the lookout for a cooler car. (He had 120 cars in several garages on the property when I graduated from high school.)

I showed it to him, saying, “Isn’t it cool?!”

“That is one of the ugliest cars I have ever seen,” he responded.

I didn’t care. I had to have it.

I had always been fond of the big American iron of the 1950s — tailfins, excessive chrome and over-the-top styling. The Austin Cambridge was a tiny British car, but was unlike any British car I knew. When Austin officials decided to get serious about competing in the American car market, they realized they were stymied at designing cars like Americans. At that time, British cars were small, sparse and either very boring or looked more like 1930s sports cars. So they asked the famous Italian automotive design company Pininfarina to design something that “looked American.” The result was a car that looked like somebody had left a 1957 Chevy out in the rain too long and it had shrunk.

The Austin I was admiring was a small four-door with tailfins, chrome running down the full length of the sides, a large chrome grill with chrome bumpers (two on the front) and a large chrome “flying A” on the hood. It had all sorts of odd features. My favorite was the long crank handle in the trunk that could be used to lower the spare-tire tray that sealed up tight underneath the trunk, or to insert through a small hole in the front bumper and used to crank-start the car like an old Model T. In the event you wanted to start the car while working under the hood, there was a button you could push that would crank it over and start it (God help you if you had left the car in gear!).

After making a deal with my newspaper customer that I would cover her bill for a year, and another deal with my step-dad that I would give him my Beetle, I was handed the keys to the Austin. I practically floated home. Actually, I rode my bike back home while my step-dad drove my new car. Luckily, we only lived a couple miles away. The car had been sitting for a long time and needed a lot of work. Tires, battery and such were all toast. But it was the first car that I had ever wanted so badly and it was the first car that I was paying for (more or less) all by myself, so as far as I was concerned it was the coolest car on the planet.

My step-dad always thought the car was ugly and my mother just shook her head saying, “I don’t see the attraction.”

I got most everything on it squared away and was driving it in high school years later. As other kids arrived in their Dusters, Mustangs, Novas and the like, in came Ben driving his weird, small car with tailfins. Like all British cars, it had constant electrical failures. I carried a small wrench in the trunk specifically for tapping the fuel-pump when it would stop working. The brakes usually worked, but there were times when I found myself pumping furiously and praying to God as I approached a stop. My mother unexpectedly borrowed it once and gave me a tongue-lashing after she got home. Fix the brakes or else, she said.

I have kids of my own now and the oldest one, AJ, has not one, but two, cars. The first one is a Dodge Rampage that is his “collector” car. Funny, all I see is a goofy looking thing built in the ’80s that looks like a mini El Camino. Man, it’s ugly. And, after saving his money all summer, AJ bought an old Mitsubishi Montero.

As far as he’s concerned it’s the coolest 4x4 in town. When he went hunting with my dad this week, I made him take my car since he had to drive so far up north, which left me with his Montero as a commuter car. Oh the joy. At anything above 50 mph it shakes so badly I hear Scotty yelling at me from the back seat, “Cap’n! She canna take anymore! She’s gonna break apart!” If I rest my left leg on the door, the automatic window controls shove all the windows down. There’s speaker wire running across the floor.

What a hunk of junk. Ain’t Karma grand?

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column under the tagline “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.