I'M JUST COOKIN' WITH GAS

Almost everyone recalls their first car, some with pleasure, some with pain. My story falls into the latter cateory.

I’M JUST COOKING WITH GAS

After completing my junior year in 1949, a fraternity brother helped me land a job at a roadside inn in Green Pond, New Jersey. He worked there as the night time bartender. I worked as a daytime short order cook, gas attendant, and general helper, ten hours a day, every weekday. The benefits included free room and board. My abode consisted of a one-room cabin (no toilet, no running water), and was not to my liking. However, the owner’s wife served me great meals. Best of all, the job paid a buck an hour or $50 a week.

   Because of its remoteness, I decided it would be necessary for me to buy a car. My friend’s dad was in the used car business, and offered to sell me a well-maintained but dowdy old Nash for about a grand. Knowing absolutely nothing about cars, I rejected this deal of a lifetime and bought a used wreck from a Hoboken man for six hundred dollars, a 1939 Plymouth two-door coupe. It was a terrible decision.

I had few opportunities to socialize with anyone at Green Pond. The residents who lived there during the summer excluded outsiders such as me from their activities. On weekends, I drove to the Jersey Shore and hung out with the beach crowd.  I piled up lots of miles on this old heap of a car, and it began to break down with regularity. By the time summer ended, my entire earnings had been used to pay for the car’s repair bills. I could pump gas and fry burgers, but had no ability to fix any of the car’s parts that had broken. Studying to become a mechanical engineer was probably not a good idea.

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