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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bob Blaylock" data-source="post: 735600" data-attributes="member: 16749">A 1969 Falcon station wagon.  It was a hand-me-down from my parents.  It was the very first car that they bought brand-new, as opposed to used.  At the age of six, I accompanied them on some of the car-shopping excursions in early 1969, including the one in which they finally bought this one.  Nineteen years later, I again accompanied them on various excursions as they were shopping for what would be their second brand-new car.  Eventually, they wound up buying a 1988 Tempo from the same dealership that sold them this Falcon.  The salesman who sold them the Falcon still worked there, now as a manager, and he remembered them, and the six-year-old kid that they had in tow in 1969.  I think this car had about 160,000 to 170,000 miles on it when they gave it to me.  It was well past its prime by then.  It broke down often, but I quickly learned how to repair almost everything that ever went wrong with it.  I Could almost always patch it together enough to get it to an auto parts store under its own power, where it was a very common event for me to arrive at the store, open the hood, take a part out, walk into the store with it, say something to the effect of “I need another one of these.”, walk out with the new part, install it, and be off.  No better way for a young man to learn how cars work, how they fail, and how to fix them.  It passed 200,000 miles on the odometer in 1995 on a trip to Los Angeles to make preparations for my upcoming wedding.  My fiancée (shortly thereafter promoted to wife) and a friend were aboard at the time, eagerly watching for the odometer to flip.  At some point, I had placed a “1” sticker next to the odometer, to represent the 100,000 miles it already had passed (nearly all cars of that vintage had odometers that only read up to 99,999.9 miles, and then flipped back to zero).  When it flipped, I ceremoniously pulled over, peeled off the “1”, and replaced it with a “2” that I had at hand for the occasion.  Alas, it finally died in the late 1990s, of something I was unable to fix.  After several months of trying in vain, we hauled it to the junkyard.  This picture was taken that day, very shortly before we did so.  At the time, it had about 220,000 miles on it, almost enough to reach to the Moon.  My wife, at some point that day, angrily said, “You wouldn't cry that much over me!”  I guess there are some things that women just don't get.[ATTACH]339510[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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