We Asked, I Answered: My "Eleanors"

Author's note: On February 8, 2010, the regular contributors at Hooniverse and I posed the question "What's Your Eleanor?" to our readership. The term "Eleanor" is of course borrowed from the original Gone in 60 Seconds, where it referred to the one, singular car that taunted and teased the protagonist, for better or worse. As such it has come to represent the one car that an individual gearhead dreams about. As the day went on, we individually posted stories about our own "Eleanors"... and essentially broke the website with traffic. The results were widely varied and often surprising. What follows here is an excerpt of my own article:

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"As this site’s resident rambling idiot, it may come as no surprise that I don’t have an Eleanor… that is, if you take the article “an” to mean “one”. I actually have two three! And all for good reason, as I’ll explain.

"First, a little back story….

"Growing up, I wasn’t the typical car kid. Sure, I wrote a poem about them when I was 6, and drew a whole mess of ‘em, and had tons of Hotwheels and Matchboxes and Yatmings and Zees and Road Champs, but that was the basic extent of my exposure. We were a blue-collar one-car family, as were most of my friends and classmates and relatives all through high school. Nobody had any of the cool cars I saw on TV. Nobody turned their own wrenches; when a car had issues you paid to have it fixed quickly because you needed it back ASAP, and when it finally exploded, you got a new one. So the only work my dad did to our own car was “rust treat” it with whatever color spray paint happened to be within closest reach. I’m not kidding – ever have to ride every-freaking-where in a clapped-out 10-year old 1979 Granada with a peeling vinyl roof and a paint scheme to make the Partridge Family’s look sublime? It’ll warp your perspective on things, and make every other car out there seem cool in its own workaday way. But faced with the inevitable futility of rust and bad drivers in the Chicago jungle, cars were expensive to buy and and equally expensive to own, insure, and maintain. So there too went any thoughts of magazine subscriptions – they were essentially just a cocktease when nobody had the time or the money for anything more than – it shames me to say – an appliance. Even my grampa, who had made his living owning a service station before my time, seemed put out with cars – stories like his are the true shame the Malaise Era wrought upon us..."

Read the rest at Hooniverse...