My Dad’s First Cars

I thought it would be cool to have a photo gallery of people’s first cars. Maybe even accompanied by some short stories. It would be interesting to see if we could guess the ages of the people by the ages of the cars.
I thought I would start with some pictures from my Dad, Scott Newey, from the early 1950’s. He had several cars from the age of 16 to about 20. His first was a 1938 Olds Coupe that he bought for $45 and soon sold for $50 after he discovered the severe smoking problem it had. Next, was a green 1939 Ford that overheated and the engine burned up on the way to Turlock. After that was a 1948 Chevrolet Fleetline that he rolled.  Here is the after picture, notice the roof all beat up. He still drove it for quite a while after the accident.

Later he bought a 1951 Studebaker Champion from his parents. Here it is in front of their house on 16th Street in downtown Sacramento.

It needed a lot of work to keep it running. Here he is sitting on the rear bumper,  just finished installing a new short block with the help of his friend, Jim Drumright. The pilot shaft was too long for the new flywheel, so they just cut it off with a hack saw and soon drove it all the way across Nevada to Utah on old highway 40.

I wished I had more pictures of my cars. It is so much easier now with digital cameras.  I will see if I can find some and post them soon. If any of you have pictures of your first cars or interesting stories and would like to share them, I will post them here and include the photos in our photo gallery. You can email them to me at tnewey@norcalcarculture.com or leave them in the comments section. I will also try and contact local celebrities and race car drivers and see if I can post pictures of their first cars.