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My first car was a blue, 1950 Mercury coupe.  I bought it in late 1957, or early 1958 with my own money from a fellow student, Bob Nelson, for $250.00.  This was not a small amount of money, as in those days, one could rent a two-bedroom apartment for $50-$75.00 per month.  I had this  money in the bank, because I had a paper route in Dearborn from 1953-1956.  My folks forced me to turn over all my earnings every Friday after collecting from my customers.  They put every penny of it in the bank.  When we moved here 1956, my dad put that money in an account for me at the Bank of America on the corner of San Fernando and Magnolia.  Take a look at a few pictures of 1950 Mercs in the montage below, and note that the picture on the bottom right is actually my car (closest to viewer) in the Burbank High School parking lot around 1959.  This car, as do all cars, has an interesting history. 

    For example, when I was dragging (racing) someone in front of BHS on Third St, going north, the street was under construction and there was a ditch in it perpendicular to the street.  I didn't consider the depth of the ditch, because it was full of water, and when I flew over it  at what seemed to be around 65 MPH, the rear wheels sunk down six inches in that trough.  The end result was that it pulled the whole rear axel away from the driveshaft.  The driveshaft disconnect from the transmission toward the front, imbedded itself in the asphalt, and created a sort of pole vault.  I was told by others that it raised my car's rear end at least a foot off the ground.  A friend of mine, Paul Boles, helped me re-connect the driveshaft, and pull the rear end forward with a chain fastened to the end of his back bumper.  The car would run, but from that day on, when you saw it from behind, it was slanted to one direction. 

 In September of 1960, on my first day of school at San Fernando Valley State College (now known as CSUN) I had an accident. I was coming down Cedar with my friend Bill Burke and as I approached the stop sign on Sixth Street, I did not make a complete stop, and instead looked both ways, say nothing, and proceeded.   I struck the car lightly on his right-rear bumper, but because of his speed (estimated by police to have been around 60 MPH) the jolt was enough for his car (English Minor) to spin out of control, hit a curb, roll over several times, and land upright on the corner house's front porch.

I got a ticket for going through a stop sign. He got arrested for driving under the influence, got his license revoked and went to jail. My dad got his insurance cancelled. I got put on assigned risk and my premiums shot up and remained very high until I was 26. All in all, it turned out quite badly. The good news is that my car was not incapacitated. Once the ambulance left, and we stopped laughing, we went on to our first day of college with something really interesting to discuss.

Many years later, at my thirtieth re-union I ran into the son of the man I had hit who was a fellow student of mine at BHS. He sought me out, and I suspected it was for some sort of delayed vengeance. In fact, he thanked me. He told me that his dad was an alcoholic and that his parents were talking about divorce. The accident and the problems it caused for him and his parents led to the father getting treatment for his problem and the marriage being saved. I remember feeling good about that, and especially since I had felt guilt over it for a number of years.

The moral to the story is don't make complete stops at stop signs as the car you hit, and the lives you touch, may be entirely for the better.  I know it's a bit of a stretch.