1963 Mercury Meteor

I don't always have current events or news to report, and since I've been spending lots of time lately organizing my old photographs and documents, I thought I might share an occasional story. When I look at these old pictures, I usually recall things that are not evident in the pictures alone. For example, here is a picture of me with my first car. This was taken in the spring of 1964 in City Park in Iowa City looking east across the river.

Let's get the obvious things out of the way first. Yes, at a mere 20 years old, I was thinner and had more hair. The car is a 1963 Mercury Meteor, a mid-size model. Fins were still popular, but the ones on this car were not quite as outrageous as some. I thought the lines of the car were quite nice, actually. The color was a deep burgundy, and the interior was a medium brown. White wall tires were still around, although these were the thin stripe versions that replaced the full white sidewalls of earlier years. I liked these better and still think they look nice. At the time, license plates in Iowa denoted the county in which the vehicle was licensed followed by a vehicle number. So, this car was licensed in county 16 (Cedar County), which was my official residence while I attended the State University of Iowa (later just the University of Iowa). My parents still operated a farm then near Lowden, Iowa. Other things that I notice about the car are its very tall antenna and its double headlights. One had to actually get out of the vehicle to adjust the height of the antenna in those years. Forgetting to put one all the way down at a drive-through car wash could be disastrous to the life of the antenna. Double headlights had been around for a few years on many cars, but that was a relatively recent approach for handling high and low beams. I don't recall anything about the mileage the car got, but gas only cost about $0.35 per gallon in 1984, and so I suppose good mileage wasn't much on my mind or anyone else's, for that matter, much to our eventual distress as a nation.

Now, regarding the non-obvious aspects of the picture. I think the picture was taken by Jim Inghram, who was my college roommate in an apartment we rented a couple blocks west of City Park. I came to own the car through some good fortune. Sometime during my early high school years, I had become interested in the stock market. My Great Uncle Mark dabbled in the market and nurtured my interest by explaining the market to me and discussing stocks and companies and the like. He was a very generous man, and at some point (a birthday, I think) bought 20 shares of Burlington Industries for me as a gift. I recall that the price per share was then about $17. When my father and I began to discuss my having a car of my own, we decided to sell the stock, which had risen in value to about $70 per share. This yielded enough to purchase this low-mileage used car from someone dad knew, also from Lowden. I remember dad being considerate about asking Great Uncle Mark if he minded our using the stock in this way. He didn't mind, and I recall his commenting that he should have bought a number of shares for himself when he bought mine.

This car served me well for several years until I eventually bought a new, gold, 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle with a floor-mounted stick shift and bucket seats. That car was ultimately badly damaged in a hail storm the size of baseballs. But that is another story.