DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour      

It seems that everybody has their Top Ten list of something or another; their Top Ten Favorite Foods, Top Ten Girlfriends/Boyfriends, Top Ten Most Hated Things, etc. Since I’m an auto journalist of questionable repute I’m often asked my for my own Top Ten list of vehicles.

Most want me to list the top ten vehicles I’ve driven. But I’m going to list something a little different in this piece; I’m going to list the top ten cars I’ve owned. With few exceptions, nobody is going to have a list like this because I don’t think anybody has had such an eclectic mix in their lifetime. (Full discloser: I’m old enough to have been chased by roving gangs of cavemen on my way to and from school so there have been a lot of cars in my lifetime.)

Everybody remembers their first car and mine was no different. We owned several automobile junkyards when I was a kid and the month before I got my driver’s license (even though I’d been driving alone on the open roads of Indiana since the ripe old age of 14 – and actually took the left seat of a 1954 Dodge pickup when I was 10) my Dad told me to go out in the back and see if there was something I wanted to fix up for my first car.

This was in May 1960. We had a 1955 Ford two-door hardtop with a perfect body but a blown engine; and there was a 1957 Thunderbird with a totaled body but a perfect motor. Long story short, that weekend my Dad, our chief yard worker Big John and I swapped engines, added a pair of 1956 Mercury station wagon taillights, installed a pair of glass-pack mufflers and voila!!!! I had the perfect babe bus (we didn’t know the term “chick magnets” back then — especially in Indiana).

Thus began my foray into automobile ownership, even though at the end of the summer my Dad traded my hot rod Ford for a 1956 Pontiac station wagon that he needed for his new parts store business.

Following is a list of the other nine vehicles of the many I’ve owned in my pathetic lifetime that deserve recognition (even though some of them also deserved to be cut up with an acetylene torch and crushed for scrap value):

2.) 1959 Chevrolet Impala two-door hardtop. It was white with a red striping and had a 283 cubic-inch V8 and stick shift 

3.) 1964 Comet Cyclone two-door hardtop. It was my first new car and had a 289 cubic-inch     V8 with a four-barrel carburetor and a four-speed transmission. I was told it was the first one ordered in the Chicago metropolitan area

4.) 1965 Ford Galaxie two-door hardtop. Just a basic new car but was painted Poppy Red — a Mustang color that cost me $38 extra

5.)  1966 Ford 7-Litre two-door hardtop. My favorite car EVER! It had a 428 cubic-inch, 345-horsepower V8, four-speed gearbox, bucket seats and a pair of factory-installed     deep-throated fiberglass mufflers. The day the dealer called me to tell me the car was in I got so excited I regurgitated my lunch

6.) 1970 Oldsmobile 98 four-door sedan. I was married, had a new baby and decided my life was over so I might as well buy a comfortable old man’s car. It was and I did

7.) 1974 Volvo 164 four-door sedan. For some reason I decided to go with safety for my family. Sometimes I wish I would have bought a Dune Buggy

8.) 1984 Dodge 600 convertible, the first of my two mid-life crisis cars. It was the first year that Chrysler started remaking convertibles in-house and was all black with a black top and had a 2.2-liter Turbo engine. I was recently divorced and thought it might propel me back into the life of a single stud muffin. It propelled me, alright, but from my rented     apartment to the bank to get certified cashier’s checks for my child-support payments

9.) 1985 Ford Mustang GT, the second of my two mid-life crisis vehicles. I had started dating the woman who has been my sainted wife for the past 26 years who worked at     Ford Motor Company so I was able to get a family discount and went nuts. It had a 302 cubic-inch V8 with a five-speed manual transmission. However, it had a sunroof that     didn’t have an inside cover to block it out — just some speckled dots that were supposed to ease blazing sunlight from entering the inside of the vehicle. Once my balding head began to resemble a soccer ball…and the first winter’s day with a raging blizzard when I was crabbing down a six-lane highway like a B-52 making a crosswind landing, I figured it was time to grow up and I sold the car outright

10.) 1999 Lincoln Continental four-door sedan. It was a really nice car and made me feel like I’d really arrived…IN THE OLD-FOLKS HOME

There you have it, folks, as sad as it looks when I reread it for editing. Like most people my age who remember exactly where they were when hearing the news that Fort Sumter had been fired upon I had many other vehicles but most of them were just fill-ins.

I probably don’t have that many new car purchases left in me and trust me when I say that whatever I buy will not having anything described as “sporty” or “high-performance” attached to it.

I’ll never forget the comment by my friend Art as we drove along a desert highway and got stuck behind an elderly couple driving what was then a new Mercury Grand Marquis. Art said, “Well…it’s plain to me that the people in that car ahead of us bought that vehicle on the “Final Purchase Plan.”

Even though they don’t make the Grand Marquis (or even Mercury for that matter) I feel there’s a vehicle out there like the Grand Marquis that has my name on it.

Then, just like the Big Ten Football Conference that includes 14 teams, so, too, will my Top Ten Vehicle List probably include more than 10 cars.