I was sitting in the office of CMC World Headquarters one afternoon months ago, up above the Ben Franklin on the courthouse square, when there came a knock on the door.
Not the polite tap of someone asking if you had a moment, but the confident rap of someone carrying paperwork that had already decided you did.
When I opened it, there stood the mail carrier holding a stiff cardboard envelope with the words SPECIAL DELIVERY stamped across the front like it had traveled through several layers of federal bureaucracy just to reach Fort Stockton.
Inside was a copy of the August 2025 issue of Collectible Automobile.
What I didn’t know at the time was that this particular issue was about to send me wandering through several chapters of my own life.
A regular reader of the blog sent it to me with a note saying he thought I might enjoy it.
I won’t embarrass the sender by publicly identifying him in front of God and everyone. But he knew exactly what he was doing.
Right there in the middle of the issue was a several-page spread on what may very well be the finest 1960 Ford Fairlane 500 Town Sedan in existence. A dead-on restoration. Correct paint. Correct trim. Correct interior materials down to the stitching that Ford used back when Dwight Eisenhower was still in office and gas stations still gave you glassware for buying fuel.
The photography alone was enough to make a grown man consider bad financial decisions.
Given unlimited funds and enough time, I would love to make my own ’60 Fairlane 500 look that good. But like most things involving unlimited funds and enough time, that sort of project usually happens to other people.
Still, I appreciated the thoughtfulness of the friend who sent it to me. A man doesn’t send a car magazine unless he knows the recipient will treat it like contraband whiskey.
Leafing through the pages sent me back to my original Fairlane 500. The one that I got in high school, kept through college, and was the chariot in which I courted Buttercup, got married, got a degree, and drove from foolishness into adulthood with only minor detours.
The magazine landed on my desk.
Which is where things go in my office when they are too good to throw away and too important to actually file somewhere responsible.
My desk, over the years, has evolved into something between a workspace and an archaeological dig. There are stacks of notes, photographs, parts receipts, coffee cups that should have been washed during the Clinton administration, and at least one carburetor gasket whose purpose has been forgotten by modern science.
The magazine joined the pile.
And there it stayed.
For months.
Every once in a while something works its way back to the top of the stack the same way a fossil eventually surfaces in the desert after enough wind blows across it.
That magazine did exactly that.
The other day I noticed the cover again and picked it up for a second look.
What I hadn’t realized the first time was that the Fairlane feature wasn’t the only thing in that issue that had a history with me.
As I started flipping through the pages, it dawned on me that the entire issue was basically a set of chapters from my own life.
Not intentionally.
But unmistakably.
The first surprise came in the form of a photo feature on the 1977 Chevrolet Caprice Classic.
That was the year General Motors performed one of the most important engineering feats in Detroit history and managed to do something no one believed possible at the time.
They made full-size cars smaller.
For decades, American cars had grown like cattle on irrigated West Texas pasture. Every year they got longer, wider, heavier, and more powerful. Then the oil shocks of the 1970s arrived and suddenly people wanted something that didn’t require its own zip code to park.
GM’s solution was brilliant.
The 1977 Caprice and its B-body siblings were nearly ten inches shorter and hundreds of pounds lighter than the cars they replaced, yet somehow managed to offer more interior room. Engineers reworked the chassis, tightened the packaging, and delivered a car that drove better, used less fuel, and still looked like the kind of sedan that could pull up to a country club without apology.
Motor Trend named it Car of the Year.
And not long after that, one showed up in my life.
It was the first company car I was ever given after graduating college and stepping into the world of sales.
To a young man just starting out, a company car feels like someone handing you the keys to adulthood.
Mine was a Caprice Classic handed down from someone who’d been promoted that suggested dependability and middle management. It had a big bench seat, a steering wheel you could navigate a barge with, and air conditioning that could freeze a brisket.
I drove that car across half the state.
Sales calls. Customer visits. Road trips that started before sunrise and ended with motel coffee that tasted like a bad decision.
That Caprice also served as my graduate school in the realities of the sales profession.
You learn things quickly when your income depends on it. You learn that honesty is always the best policy. But not always the one customers want to hear. You learn that commission sales makes a man hungrier than a salaried job ever could. And that hunger has a way of stretching your workday into the evenings.
You also learn something about cars.
Specifically that a family sedan is much more appealing when you actually have a family to put in it. Before then it’s just transportation with aspirations.
The next chapter in the magazine involved a pair of cars that once saved an entire American corporation.
The 1981–1984 Dodge Aries K and Plymouth Reliant K.
If you were alive during the early 1980s and paying attention, you remember those cars. They weren’t glamorous. They weren’t fast. But they were absolutely critical.
Chrysler was on the verge of collapse when Lee Iacocca bet the company’s future on a new front-wheel-drive platform called the K-Car. Compact, efficient, practical, and affordable, it represented a completely different direction from the big rear-wheel-drive sedans Americans had grown up with.
The gamble worked.
Millions of them sold.
And one of them found its way into my driveway.
By that time it was no longer just Buttercup and me. Two small children had come along who seemed to have more places to be than Buttercup and I did.
Sexy had taken a back seat to practical. Which is ironic, because it was sexiness that had created the whole need for practicality in the first place.
I went down to the Dodge dealership one afternoon and picked out a brand-new four-door Dodge Aries for Buttercup. Four doors. Automatic transmission. Air conditioning. A trunk big enough to hold a stroller and several bags of groceries from Piggly Wiggly.
I handled the deal myself. Picked the color. Discussed the financing. Shook hands with the salesman. The only thing left to do was sign the paperwork. That evening I brought Buttercup and the two kids back to the dealership to make things official.
We sat down at the desk.
The salesman slid the documents across the table.
And that’s when I noticed something interesting.
The financing terms had changed.
The loan that had originally been discussed as 60 months had silently grown into 66 months. A small adjustment on paper. A large difference over time.
That evening I learned another lesson about the sales profession. The policy of honesty at all costs is not universally practiced.
Voices were raised, heels dug in. Keys were thrown. Buttercup vowed to never go with me to pick out a new car again. Our search for a family sedan began all over again the next weekend and didn’t involve anything that was associated with Lee Iacocca.
The magazine continued.
And the next chapter involved the vehicle that quietly helped create a new American lifestyle.
The Jeep Cherokee XJ.
Produced from 1984 through 2001, the Cherokee was one of the first vehicles that truly defined what we now call the sport utility vehicle.
It was smaller than the truck-based SUVs that came before it, lighter, easier to drive, and comfortable enough to serve as a daily commuter while still offering real off-road capability.
It also happened to arrive just as a new demographic group appeared in America.
The Yuppies.
Young Urban Professionals.
People who wore suits during the week and hiking boots on the weekend.
Whether they actually hiked or not.
By the time I bought mine, the Cherokee had already become something of a cultural symbol.
Mine was a 1994 Jeep Cherokee Country, and I bought it as a gift to myself after being promoted to General Manager of the company I had spent years selling for.
It wasn’t a planned purchase.
More of a whim.
One test drive was all it took.
The thing drove like a car but had the attitude of a truck. It felt like it could climb a mountain even if its primary duty ended up being grocery runs and family vacations.
That Jeep became one of my favorite new cars.
We took trips in it. Went out to dinners. Loaded kids, luggage, and the occasional dog into the back. The children, at a certain age, tried to negotiate the removal of their seat belts so they could climb around the cargo area like monkeys in a tree.
Parenting instincts responded quickly.
“No.”
Which is the full extent of the debate.
Looking back, that Cherokee represented a stage of life I didn’t even realize I had entered at the time.
Responsibility.
Stability.
A house full of activity and noise. The kind of years that pass quickly but leave a lot of good stories behind.
Eventually I flipped back to the Fairlane feature that had started the whole thing.
The 1960 Ford Fairlane 500.
That car covered more chapters in my life than any other vehicle ever could.
It was my first car.
The car Buttercup and I dated in.
The car I drove when we were first married and I was trying to survive college.
It was transportation, freedom, romance, and financial desperation all rolled into one steel body with tailfins.
At the time I couldn’t wait to get rid of it.
When I graduated and finally landed a job that paid real money, the Fairlane represented everything I wanted to move beyond.
Old.
Worn.
No air conditioning.
I traded it off without much sentimentality.
Life moved on.
Then something funny happened.
About fifty years later, I found another one through a friend from the blog. “Guess what I found on Craig’s List! Want me to go take a look at it for you?” It was a long way away, but in my driveway three weeks later.
Almost the exact same car.
And I bought it.
Not because I needed it.
Because I wanted it.
A hobby.
A toy.
A way to keep a little piece of the past parked in my garage.
When you sit inside that Fairlane today you can still smell the distinct scent of an old Ford interior.
Vinyl.
Dust.
A hint of gasoline that has soaked into the floorboards since the Kennedy administration.
It’s like opening an old photo album.
Except this one starts when you turn the key.
When I finally closed that issue of Collectible Automobile, it occurred to me that I had just spent several hours traveling through my own life without ever leaving my desk.
All because of a car magazine.
Every vehicle in that issue had been a chapter.
The Caprice.
The Aries.
The Cherokee.
The Fairlane.
And each one came with memories attached.
That’s the funny thing about cars.
They’re never just machines.
They’re timelines.
“Oh yeah, that’s just like the car we brought our first kid home from the hospital in.”
“Do you remember when we had one like that and drove to the mountains?”
“Didn’t we finally have that station wagon towed away when it refused to start for the fifteenth time?”
Cars keep track of the stories we forget.
The places we lived.
The people we loved.
The mistakes we made.
And occasionally the lessons we learned the hard way at a Dodge dealership.
All of it sitting quietly in the driveway.
Waiting for someone to remember.
I hadn’t expected to get so thoroughly entertained by one old car magazine when I opened that envelope.
But life has a funny way of sneaking chapters into places you weren’t planning to look.
Sometimes all it takes is turning a page.
6 responses to “CHAPTERS”
I was reflecting, as I was reading this, some days these days they can feel a bit of a grind…just signed up for Medicare! Wow I got to get right with the lord!
But, first cars, friends cars, girl friends cars, wife’s cars, my cars, my dads cars brothers cars, kids cars etc
Are all right there in my Swiss cheese brain
My only regret is I don’t have a picture of those cars and all with those special people and their cars…
I think I would tear up as I perused that collection of cars and reflect on a life well lived, skinned knees and all
Well, that story really hit home. I can remember every car and motorcycle I ever owned. I can also remember very unique memories and stories including sounds and smells of each. I can’t remember every girlfriend I ever had though. I’m not sure what that says about me, but I’m OK with it.
So is Mrs. Motcat.
You really did strike a nerve with me today Cap. I almost always can reference a time in my 70 YO life by recalling what car/truck we were driving at that time. Especially if it is a fond vacation memory……then I don’t just have the car/truck to help recall but the RV we had also. Thanks!
I love this story too!
The story of our lives, a little anecdote at a time – nothing really noteworthy, but…as Hemingway said, “Truth!”
Truth be told, we never had any of them, but they echo how life was. We were able to shift at a young age to my wife always chose Cadillacs, and I pickups, and added Suburbans along the way.
Now, my wife has passed away, and I mostly drive her Lexus (is it an SUV), with 120,000 miles on it. Most trips are to doctors and HEB in Cypress, TX. (My fun cars get a 13 mile trip once a week – kinda like me.)
Geez, I love this story!