stories from Steve
My Motown Mopar Story
My name is Steve Legel, I live in metropolitan Detroit, and I am a car guy. If it’s OK with Bad Mirada, I’d like to share my experiences with you.
When you grow up in Detroit, in the 1960's and go to high school in the early 70's, you can’t help but be a car guy. I cruised Telegraph and Woodward in my buddy’s yellow 351 Mach 1. Half my uncles and both grandfathers worked among the Big 3. As an independent business owner, I have felt the fortunes and demise of the domestic auto industry and its intimate relationship with Michigan’s economy.
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
I drove that car through high school (class of ‘74), college and part of Dental School a the University of Detroit. I replaced it in 1978 with a blue over blue 1972 318 Dodge Challenger. Before being hooked on the back of a scrap yard tow, I sold my buddy’s leather bucket seat ($50.00), pulled the starter, wheels and tires, and received $35.00 for the scrap metal I drove on parts of my 65 Belvedere used on my 72 Challenger for years to come.
The 1972 Challenger was a simple car with auto trans on the column and carpet over the trans tunnel, between the bucket seats. Stock hubcaps, and plain gas cap. I did some rust repair on it and had it painted at MAACO. When the power steering and water pump went bad around the same time, I sold it off, and drove a series of reliable, sensible used cars through Dental Schoo