American Cars of 1958

[luckydude777]

Awhhh - 1958. My dad owned a 1958 Rambler American in the 60's. Car I used for my first date. Car was an off-green. I always felt embarrassed to pick up a date with it because of its color.

An incident involving "Old Green" I shall never forget. I was just learning how to drive. My mother was chaperoning me. I was trying to turn the car around, and to do so, I drove up a very steep dirt incline to then back down and be on our way. HOWEVER - there was something about that model, Dad said, that if you went from Drive to Park (auto transmission) on a steep incline, it would stay STUCK in Neutral and would refuse to let you put it into Reverse or Drive again.

So there we sat on a steep incline at the base of this mountain, unable to move either forward or backwards.

I got the bright idea that if we jacked up the rear bumper of the car ... lifting the right rear tire off the road ... MAYBE the transmission would work for us in reverse. For some stupid reason that I don't remember now, I had Mom pumping the jack and I was down by the rear tire. Once the rear of the car got high enough, I started twisting the tire to see if it would go into Reverse, and in the process of doing that, the jack came lose and the car came down instantly and I had my thumb stuck underneath the tire!

Pinned to Mudder Earth actually ruined an otherwise good day. Fortunately it was softer dirt I was pinned to that helped cushion the squeeze put on me.

Someone got hold of my dad and about an hour later (NOT LYING) he managed to jack the rear wheel back up again high enough off the ground for me while my mother pulled on the column shifter to free it so I could pull my very bruised and swollen thumb out. And then with much trial and error, he and Mom was able to get the tranny into Reverse.

I shed no tears when Dad upgraded cars to a 1962 Plymouth with a manual 3-speed on the column. It was a pretty blue in color and I got more and better dates with THAT one.

Thumb healed in time so I've lived happily ever after with 10 good fingers.