Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Life and Times of Jim Kear: Excerpt 2

model AI had very young memories of the different cars we owned. My first memory was of a Model A Ford car. My dad was the kind of guy that only moved forward when somebody pushed him there. We drove that old Ford until it fell apart. The second car I remember was a Plymouth. One of our neighbors was going into the army and had to get rid of his car. My dad decided to buy his car. Boy, were we ever uptown now! I wanted to sleep in the car. It was one of those cars that had a window shade on the rear window.

Somewhere around this time my grandpa Kear got his car, a Hudson. That was a neat car. My dad used to borrow it on occasions.

Our third car was a 1939 Chevy. You talk about having a nice car, we had it. It had a radio! A very special item for a car back then. We bought the Chevy because the Plymouth threw a rod.

During those days we couldn't afford a spare tire for our car. It was war time you know. Anytime we had a flat on the car we just pulled over and patched the tire. We always carried tire patching and a hand pump. Back in those days the road to Clayton was not paved and we would have a lot of flat tires.

2 comments:

Leslee said...

To have those cars today... would be priceless!

Dr. Mike Kear said...

Yep.

One of my regrets was that my uncle Fred, who was the executor of my grandfather's estate, offered to give me grandpa's 1960 blue and white Chevy (the one with the "Batman" fins) when he was settling grandpa's estate after he died in 1985. The car was in pretty bad shape mechanically and I just couldn't figure out how to get it back to Oklahoma from New Mexico. So I had to decline the gift. Now, I really wish that I could have found a way to get that car back to Oklahoma where I might have been able to fix it up and restore it. It would have been way cool.