I was reminiscing the other day about the cars that I used to drive. The one that I had the longest was a 1974 Plymouth Duster. My mother bought it new for me in early ’74, and I finally got rid of it in early 1988. Somehow I survived fourteen years with that car. And I am most grateful for surviving those years. That car would do the craziest things, things that could have cost me my life. Luckily — VERY luckily — the car pulled its tricks in relatively tame circumstances.

Just what did this car do? Well, it stalled a lot. And not just at stop lights. It once stalled on the Garden State Parkway while doing 55 MPH. I was able to pull over safely since it was on a Sunday night. But had that been in heavy traffic on a weekday afternoon — well, I don’t want to think about it. What else? Well, my Duster had something call torsion bars. They were part of the suspension system. I learned about them while driving with some guys out on a back road near the Delaware River around sunset. Boomp! What was that? And why is the car driving so funny now? The answer was that the right torsion bar had cracked and failed. And without it, you couldn’t do more than 10 mph without losing control. It was a long night getting home, and a couple of days getting a new torsion bar installed (with the help of one of the guys).

Then there was a cold January day on a photo road trip to middle New Jersey, where the car was doing just fine. Until it decided not to start at all; no amount of cranking with the pedal floored did any good. A ballast resistor suddenly failed. And my brother had to come to the rescue with a tow chain, which came unhooked in the middle of downtown Newark, NJ on Route 21. I’ll never forget standing in the middle of the road at sunset with a line of blocked cars honking, big office buildings on either side, waiting while my brother and my friend got the chains re-hooked. Somehow we got away before the cops could hassle us.

And then there was the time that the floats in the carburetor went, causing the car to stall during a left turn. Not every left turn, mind you. You just never knew when you’d lose all power during a left turn. Another time, the carburetor came loose while I was tooling along in a 40 mph zone, heading for work. I hit a bump and poof, red lights and a stalled engine. I called up the gas station guy who lived next door to my family, and walked the rest of the way.

I still don’t know how I nursed 14 years and 125,000 miles out of that confounded Chrysler contraption. I do remember spending a lot of time under the hood and sometimes under the frame. It was a lot easier to work on cars back in those days; you can’t get to anything on a modern car. But you were always working on your car back then; there was something to tend to just about every weekend, even if there wasn’t an emergency breakdown. I got to know a lot of auto parts stores back then. Even a radiator place that supposedly didn’t sell to the public (but they gave me a break).

Today I’m driving a Toyota Corolla. Knock on wood, but so far it’s acting like — like a Toyota Corolla. Nothing much goes wrong, so long as it’s taken to a good mechanic every 5000 miles (where I walk out a hundred bills or two lighter). Almost everything under the hood is now a mystery to me. But it starts up and runs, and keeps on running.

The overall intent of both cars is about the same: basic transportation. But so far, the Toyota seems to provide it with much less drama. Sometimes I almost miss getting my hands all greasy and sweaty with a socket wrench, or standing at an auto store counter telling the guy that I need a whatchamagizmo for a ’74 Plymouth one-ninety-eight six cylinder. And it’s worth a laugh remembering those crazy breakdown situations, and what I had to do to get out of them in one piece (and without going bankrupt, given that we didn’t have too much money back then). But here in my old age, a Toyota is the right car for the times. Thankfully, they don’t build ’em like Chrysler-Plymouth used to!