Unlike my best friend who lived across the street from us when I was in high school, I did not receive a brand new car (a Pontiac Firebird, no less) on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday. No, it wasn't until I was 20 and had saved up a reasonable down payment (and secured my parents' cosignatures for the loan) that I was able to finally have my own wheels.
Those wheels came into my life the summer of 1978. It was a used 1976 Chevy LUV (as in "light utility vehicle") truck. Until that time I—like most boys growing up in the 70s—had dreamt of getting either a Camaro, a Firebird, or a Mustang, but one night I had a dream where I found myself driving one of these small trucks and felt so good about it that when the time came to start looking seriously, I headed in that direction instead. We found one from the same dealer we'd gotten most of our family cars, and as I recall, the final price was something like $2800 and the vehicle had about 26,000 miles on it. This was my first major installment loan; payments were $125 for two years. This was also the first time I'd driven a stick shift, so the test drive was…interesting, to say the least. Once I got the hang of it, however, I was hooked and every car I've owned subsequently (with only one exception) has had a manual transmission.
I'm surprised I have no photos of the interior considering how anally I document everything now. But it came with a dark turquoise vinyl bench seat. After about a year or so the springs under the driver's side were gone and I had to shove a couple phone books (remember those?) underneath it to keep me from sinking to the floor. I swapped out the crappy AM-only radio it came with for a nice AM/FM cassette and a couple years later replaced the speakers, realizing after I'd done that how I'd probably been driving around all that time with blown speakers.
My mom surprised me for my birthday a few months before I moved out of the house by having the interior completely redone. The vinyl seat was repaired and recovered with a nice blue, white, and turquoise tweed fabric and carpet was installed. No more riding on phone books!
It was a good, solid vehicle. Everything about it was easy to service, and the only real problems I had were with the aftermarket air conditioning that the previous owner had installed. I had it repaired more than once, and finally gave up because it never stayed fixed. (You haven't lived until you've driven from Tucson to Phoenix for a job interview in the middle of August with no air conditioning.)
I finally got rid of the ol' girl in November 1983, when the siren song of a new car sounded…