Because I was the youngest of four children by six years, I was possibly the most spoiled. Add the fact that I had wonderful parents who thought I walked on water, a dentist father, and my doting maternal grandparents right next door with my mother being an only child, and I may have been hyper-spoiled!
First Car
It may not be so surprising then, to learn that my first car was given to me in 1972 by my widowed grandmother, who lost her husband and arguably my best friend, three years previously. It was a brand-new 1972 Toyota Celica, a beautiful blue with gold and white racing stripes on the sides and on the hood! Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a photo of the actual car; this is the closest I could find.
I had just recently received my driver’s license, and was beginning my senior year of high school. My older siblings had also received cars as high-school graduation gifts, so why was I getting one at the beginning of my final year? My grandmother reasoned that, because I had just been elected as Student Body President of Tooele High School, I “needed” it to attend all of my “responsibilities!”
1973 Graduation Photo
But little did we know that the car was possessed by some evil demon. The first week that I drove it to school and parked in the school parking lot (which was probably a stupid thing to do), someone did a hit-and-run on it and dented the rear fender! Of course, Grandma got it quickly fixed.
I was, of course, a big hit with all my friends, who loved riding with me. In fact, one Friday night, during one of our sleepovers at Mike Seat’s house, we snuck out, got in the car, rolled down the street a ways without starting it so as to not wake the adults, and then drove out to the truck stop at Lakepoint about 10 miles away to get a hot turkey sandwich! (We almost wrecked it when we rolled without starting it, because the steering wheel was locked and we couldn’t steer until we turned the key.)
A few months later, one of my best friends, David Skidmore (nicknamed Skidrow), went with me to Salt Lake City to do some Christmas shopping. (What? A 16-year-old kid with a brand-new sports car driving on the freeway on icy roads?) We took the 21st-South offramp to go to the new Valley Fair Mall. As we went up the hill of the exit and banked to the right, we could see a Highway Patrolman putting out flares on the crest of the hill, about where it started to bank left and go down the hill. Being dumb teenagers, we did not know why, and proceeded.
We suddenly saw a pickup truck and a horse trailer, parked in the middle of the road, unhitched and separated by several feet. I applied the brakes–and it was like the car sped up, it was so icy! I may have tried to pump the brakes, but not sure I had mastered that yet. And Skidrow calmly said, “I don’t think we’re going to fit between them, Wasso.”
Right as rain! The right front of the car hit the horse trailer, swinging us and the left rear of the car into the truck. Fortunately, we were not hurt, but the car was kind of a mess. The right bumper was rubbing on the tire and the radiator was leaking. The left rear was horribly dented but drivable. We did not get a citation, but we had lost all desire to go Christmas shopping–we just wanted to go home to our mommies!
We pried the bumper away from the tire, turned around, and limped home. We had to stop in Erda near the Motor-Vu theater to get some water to put in the radiator, but otherwise we got home OK.
The car was not totaled, but took several months to fix. By then, the snow had melted, spring had arrived, and it was time to start the high school team outdoor tennis workouts. I got in the car, started it up, and began driving to the high school tennis courts. I noticed that the driving feel of the car was not new anymore–it was like I was driving a beat-up junker. But I was thankful.
I got to the only stop light in Tooele at the intersection of Main and Vine. It was red, so I stopped. When it turned green, I started across, excited to go play tennis. Suddenly, I was T-boned by a pickup truck in my driver’s side! A drunk barreling north on Main Street had run his red light and I was still too new of a driver to not trust others and to check before proceeding.
Ann’s Shop & Russell’s Salon
This could have been much worse. I was only shaken up, covered with the tiny little pieces of windshield safety glass. Fortunately, it was right where my mother and grandmother could quickly come to my aid, because the Russell Barber & Beauty Salon and Ann’s Shop, which they owned and worked in, were right near the intersection.
After all of the necessary paperwork was filled out, I was feeling fine and still determined to go play tennis, so I borrowed my grandmother’s Cadillac. But the next day and several days after, my neck was quite sore from whiplash.
Again, miraculously, the car was not totalled, and went to the shop for repair. At this point, my grandmother decided that the car was possessed and we needed to sell it. “I’ll get you another car,” she said. Soon after it was fixed, it was sold to a young man, who later shared the story that one perfectly calm day, a big wind came up and blew the door off!
Grandma let me choose the new car, and I settled on the popular German-made Opel GT. (Funny that, about three years later, I would get called on a church mission to Germany, and then in another three years, learned from an unknown cousin that our ancestors were German!)
“Toad”
It looked like a miniature Corvette Stingray, so at first we called it the “mini-Vette.” And it was quite impractical, having only two bucket seats and no rear seat. But it was cool! The headlights would hide away until the lever was pushed and they popped out of the hood like toad-eyes, so it later was dubbed “Toad.” And it only had a tiny four-cylinder engine, so it looked fast but was very gutless.
This car was one of the tools that helped me land the greatest catch of my life–the beautiful Debbie Jeppsen, songbird of the BYU campus!
