You can telllout ages from teh dates on first cars. I think it is interesting how many were Mopars, among this group,

My first car:
My first car was an 11 year old 1965 Plymouth Belvedere I bought from my dad’s uncle for $25.00. Its workhorse 318 had over 97,000 miles in it, as the speedometer had not worked for the past few years. The car came with a list. Monday put in oil, Tuesday put in air, Wednesday put in water, Thursday put in gas, drive over the weekend, start again on Monday. Rust holes had been covered over with tape and painted with Sears Weatherbeater white, a close match. The driver’s door handle did not work. You had to get in and out through the passenger side and slide across the bench seat. My great uncle was very frugal, and when the passenger side wiper blade gave out, he did not replace it. The resulting scratch arched across the windshield an eighth of an inch deep.

It was on this car I developed my affection (or affliction) for auto restoration. I used window screen and bondo to fix the rust holes and used my uncle’s air compressor to spray a runny metallic brown paint job. I took the driver’s door apart and found the clip that connects the linkage and the door worked well after I reconnected it. One summer Sunday afternoon, as I was returning to my dorm at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the speedometer sprang to life. A friend had totaled his Cougar, and I took his black leather bucket seats, drilled holes in the floor boards and bolted them in. I applied woodgrain contact paper to the aluminum dash. Another talented friend helped install an FM Converter and wired a single speaker in the rear seat package tray. I painted the meshwork of the grill satin black, leaving only the prominent cross pieces in stainless. How was I to know the 2006 grill on the Magnum and Charger would mimic my creativity 30 years later? One battery post was cracked. I found that if I packed aluminum foil into the crack, the post would wedge enough to make contact inside the battery. I remember well my summer of painting garages for cash, “Steve’s $60.00 scrape and paint special”. At the end of one such long day, my Belvedere would not start, and I had no more of my stash of foil under the seat. I knocked on the door, and asked the housewife (they had those in 1972) if I could borrow some foil to start my car. She in turn offered to just give me some foil if I would show her how I used it. With her watching over my shoulder, I retrieved the blackened, oxidized old foil from the post, rolled up a snake of foil and with my screwdriver, packed it down inside the loose terminal. I turned the key and the 318jumped to life!