It used to be that teenagers all over the U.S. would wait with bated breath for the day they would get their license, the day would be even greater with the addition of their very own car. While it would be a fantasy to get the newest Mercedes or mustang, to many that wouldn’t be necessary, four wheels and a running engine were more than enought to supply what we all wanted… freedom. I say used to because several studies that i’ve recently read said that most teenagers would just as soon walk or ride a bike than drive a car, also that many teenagers aren’t even getting their license’s untill a few years after their sixteenth or eighteenth birthday. This to me is astounding, I couldn’t wait for my license and I enjoyed every second of choufering my mother and father around, they could’ve slapped a funny hat on me and called me Jeeves for all I cared, driving was what I had lusted at for years now.
Specifically the thought of driving one vehicle, an ’83 el Camino with faded blue interior and paint and every teenage boys dream, a V8 engine! We’d bought the truck two years prior to me getting my license from a man named J.B. Woodard. J.B.lived in a town 5 miles away bought the truck brand new from a Rocky Mount dealer in 1983, and drove it until the day he sold it to my father, although he didn’t drive it much as it only had 70k miles on it. Needless to say I set off tinkering right away, although my father would call the tinkering needlessly breaking things, but where I had a mild automotive itch before this truck turned it into a full blood obsession. I still own my truck and have no intentions of selling it, a truly stupid amount of my fathers and my money has been put into my little elco, from a full paint job, a full interior redo, custom gauges, and many other things. Its currently sitting at right around 110k miles on a very tired 305 that in even in its hayday made about as much power as a small motorcycle, but plans are in the works to swap in a late model chevy truck motor to liven things up a little bit!