With media what it?s become some 10 years into the new millennium ? social and reality-based ? there?s been a real concerted effort to uncover and tell stories that we can all relate to. And it?s under what must be some immense pressure that I got a call from a show producer asking about the story of my first car.
A first car ? can?t get much more nostalgic than that. And there are few things that embody the American Experience more than a kid and a first car. Thing is, as freshly minted drivers of the Eighties, most 16-year-olds around me were getting the keys to cast-off faded maroon Civics or 10-year-old four-door Newports. Nothing to really wax nostalgic about. On the other hand, a few of us who were budding gearheads were running Chevelles and Novas and Plymouth B-bodies and shoving Kenwood cassette head units into the dashboards and SkyJacker kits under the rearends.
But not me.
No, I always seemed to suffer the slightly-different-drumbeat march. Growing up with a dad who understood the benefits of diesel in the late Seventies, I spent an inordinate amount of time in truck stops ? the only places that were sure to sell fuel to a guy driving his family to Disney World in a brand-new, gurgling, banana yellow VW Rabbit Diesel. And because of all that time in truck stops, I amassed a fairly impressive collection of cassette tapes that truckers would pick up by the cash register: Buddy Holly, Elvis, The Platters, Johnny Cash, Del Shannon? and I loved them all. So, by the time I got my driver?s license, I was on the hunt for something that made all those old record covers knocked off on little cassette tape cases come to life for me. After scouring the classifieds in the paper for a few months, I found it: a 1960 Dodge Matador. $350.
The old man had finally made his dad stop driving it when he caught the driver?s door on the bumper of a pickup truck and gouged about 12 feet of doorskin ? roughly half the length of that Matador. Made a deal for $250, and the Azure blue four-door was mine. I?d never even seen a TorqueFlite pushbutton transmission before. Dazzled by the clear plastic speedo that stood up off the top of the dash and glowed like some UFO wing that broke off and landed, edge-up, on a metallic medium blue field in the middle of the night. Using the dash-mounted rear-view mirror was like using a ladies? compact to back the Hindenburg into its hangar ? at least those twin tailfins could be used to line up the edges of whatever was unlucky enough to find itself behind them. Hole in the passenger front floorboard guaranteed enough rainwater in the carpet to gently lap against the trans hump like the shores of Lake Huron on a summer afternoon, once she got up on plane. A ?1-Elvis? Tennessee state vanity plate, a turn signal ballast from the J.C. Whitney catalog that played ?Love Me Tender? and a layer of Turtle Wax that I faithfully never allowed less than a half-inch anywhere over that cheap, 20-year-old repaint. The stock 318 moved her pretty well once we hit cruising knots, but those 25-plus year-old drums would just sort of lean over and raise an eyebrow like a coon hound woken from a snooze on the front porch when I hit the brake pedal. Damn, I loved that car.
And all my friends would just shake their heads and tolerate the Matador among the Camaros and the Celicas and the lifted Toyota pickups in the back lot at school. Until, that is, there was an all-nighter at the drive-in or a field party or midnight cliff swim at the quarry ? then, everyone just loved that car for its sheer volume and capacity. But nobody loved it for the reasons I did: I loved the aroma of gasoline mixed with aging carpet glue, the high shine I could get on her grille-of-a-thousand-pieces, the simple majesty of the inset license plate housing in the trunklid, the way those wide-white bias-plies looked when the front wheels were cocked a quarter turn at parade rest, the massive profile and the beauty of the tail lights perched midway up the fins, glowing red at dusk. Just a statement of individuality when we were all trying to fit in, man.
The Matador was only made for one year: a baseline model Dodge that is rarely ever seen and is more commonly mistaken for its sisters who married well and went to better parties ? the Polara and the Dart. I had written a letter asking for more information about my Matador to the long-gone Special Interest Autos magazine just after I bought, it and received letters from all over the world for the next year from folks who apparently loved everything Chrysler built in 1960: a postcard from Saudi Arabia featuring a camel train and a Matador parked against a medina wall, photographs of a family?s Matador-hosted road trip, drawings and even a guy in the Midwest who used graph paper to write his letters in Jeffersonian calligraphy with a quill pen. Nobody ever said the Mopar crowd didn?t march to the beat of a different drum, either.
Looking back at my career, that darling of Chrysler?s Forward Look design era sealed my fate as an automotive journalist, publisher, collector, lover, hater and faller-on-the-sword. My dad sold the Matador while I was away at college, but if I ever find that car again, my wife?s 300C will find itself a new home on the sunny side of the garage door.
Dan Stoner spent a decade in the advertising industry before walking away from a comfortable paycheck to launch GARAGE magazine in 2001 ? the first car culture magazine of its kind. After selling it, he went on to found a new automotive cultural media brand called, strangely enough, AUTOCULT. Dan now spends his time telling the stories of the automotive underground in just about every form of paper, screen and campfire imaginable.
Source: http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2013/03/20/the-forward-look-in-reverse/
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