by Roger Kraemer

Created on: July 24, 2008

My first car was almost a 6 cylinder, stick-shift, Jaguar E-type coupe - maroon with wire wheels and knock-off hubs. It was only $2,200. But my dad, being more practical than I was at 17 (I was 17, not my dad!) steered me away from that sexy, beautiful machine, with horror stories about Lucas electrics and expensive repairs.

Which led me, on the same used car lot, to my actual first car, a light green 1969 Oldsmobile 88. Yes, I know that that brand doesn't even exist anymore! For those of you that don't remember seven years back, GM built Olds as a better-than-Pontiac, almost Buick. Even with its storied history - check out Ransom E. Olds place in automotive history, along with the 1903 curved dash Olds - the brand had no reason to exist.

The car was huge, I mean aircraft carrier huge, and had a 455 cubic inch engine. This displacement, I think, was to prove that it was an Olds engine and not a Chevy, which built a 454. At that time, there was a lot of controversy over whether the engine in your upmarket GM car was actually built by the division whose name was on the car. Now of course, GM sells Saturn Redlines with Honda engines. But I digress.

The car was also fast, really fast. Even its massive girth couldn't keep that HUGE engine from propelling it in a straight line with some serious alacrity. Zero to 60 arrived in the low sevens, and all was great fun unless you wanted to go around a curve, or you calculated the behemoth's gas mileage.

The handling was not sterling. The big brute wallowed and floated in the style of its day and understeered its was around corners with body roll that mimicked a banked oval on flat ground. But the ultimate characteristic of this leviathan was its gas mileage - or lack thereof. When it was out of tune, and for some reason it needed points, plugs and timing all the time, it got 4 MPG! Yes 4 MPG! In tune, it got close to 9! Even with 29 cent a gallon gas, I couldn't afford to keep it running on my $1.35 an hour wage.

There was one cool thing about the car though. It had one of the first cockpit style dashboards where the instrument and the center stack were aimed a little toward the driver and the dash was not a flat plane across the vast expanse of the car.

I had my 88 for three months before I decided that it was time for something more economical, and a VW Super Beetle took its place. I don't know if it was my experience with that Olds, or just something in my genes, but I have never liked, nor have I ever owned, a big car since. But for a while, I could style with the best of them, while I wasted fossil fuels with the worst of them.

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