It’s Concours d’Elegance weekend in Pebble Beach, and I am
stricken with nostalgia.
It’s Concours d’Elegance weekend in Pebble Beach, and I am stricken with nostalgia.
When I graduated from college, my parents gave me $500 to buy a car.
Don’t laugh; it was 1968.
With the help of my brother the car fanatic, I found a 1954 Morris Minor woody with a Sprite engine. Not only did it fit within the $500 budget, but I also had enough left over to buy four new tires.
It had a divided windshield, a mainly non-working radio, a heater, four on the floor and fold-down seats in the back. While it had working turn signal lights, it also bore vestigial flip-out turn signals on the side posts.
The steering wheel and dashboard dials and lights were on the left side as we are used to, but there were a few signs that it had been converted from British-style right-hand drive at some point. One of the subtle but troublesome indications was the tendency of the right-side windshield wiper to work well, while the left-side one worked sporadically, if at all. I can remember driving in a sudden rainstorm and reaching around outside to the windshield, to move the wiper back and forth.
It was a fine car for going to my job, visiting Mom and Dad or even going as far away as San Francisco or Monterey. However, a journey to Portland one winter almost proved beyond its capability. It rained, sleeted and snowed continuously on the way back. While the new tires held up and the noisy heater worked OK, the car itself stopped and would only start again with great difficulty, for no apparent reason.
Eventually we figured out that water was getting into the distributor cap and keeping … well, keeping the distributor from doing what it is supposed to do.
Anybody who has ever owned a British car will probably recognize this defect. In fact, years later I was taken out by a fellow who owned a Jaguar X-KE, that incredibly low, sleek mid-century Jag sports model. Right on the 101 South on-ramp, in San Francisco, in the rain, the Jag stopped dead. And I knew why.
The Morris, or “Maurice” as I called him, escorted me out of a first marriage. Then for some reason he went back to stay with my ex for several years.
During this time I treated myself to another British car, an MG-B. This one was a racy convertible with its own tendency to stop for no obvious reason. One of my many misdiagnoses involved an electrical malfunction, so I went to a parts shop to look for the indicated electrical part. I naively asked the clerk if they carried Lucas electric parts (found on almost all British cars at the time).
He replied, “You mean the prince of darkness?”
Although Maurice has since gone to a better home, I think about him every time a Concours d’Elegance rolls around. Maurice allowed me, at least for a while, to share with Concours entrants the intrigue of owning – and keeping running – a piece of automotive history.
