My mother, the car nut. Here are all the wheelsets I owned and drove.

A keen and cheerfully fast driver was my dear late mother, whose memory I honor this Mother’s Day. Not only did he teach me to be enthusiastic, aware, and quick behind the wheel from an early age, both by example and direct hands-on training, but he had an eye for explosive, hands-on rides, and his choices of vehicles they taught a lot about different types. of cars

She was granted her first driver’s license by the state of Indiana at age 14 and delivered flowers after school for Ed, my florist grandfather, in the 1938 Buick sedan you see here.

I never met the man: three of my grandparents died long before I was born, and I only met the fourth once. But this Buick loomed large in my imagination as a young child obsessed with all things automotive.

After moving to Jackson Heights, Queens, Ma entered a contest and won a Vespa scooter, which she used to travel to work at the Wenner Gren Foundation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and five days back to the week.

“You can park your car on the street right next to Grand Central Station,” he said. “Nobody would bother.” You can also walk through Central Park during the day or night without being disturbed.

When our family of five moved to Yorktown Heights, mine shared this 1960 Hillman Wagon, which they drove until it died and gave it to us kids, who took it apart and put it back to ride several times and finally broke all of them. its windows with rocks, after which it was towed away without comment.

The first car he bought with his own money while working as a copy editor at Reader’s Digest in Pleasantville, NY was a 1974 Duster 340. You might as well have driven the members of Led Zeppelin down our driveway. We kids went absolutely bananas over this strong, fierce and fat beast.

My Pops, who had flown a B17, didn’t really care for cars, and you can’t blame him after 36 missions around Europe, but Beansie was a car nut who needed to do something impulsive, buy something he didn’t really have felt for a middle-aged office worker in a quiet, remote suburb. You drive an orange muscle car to get attention, and she sure did.

But the 340 ended up having some mechanical problems and only got 11mpg when it was in shape, so he sold it back to our neighbor and went in a completely different direction, buying a 1976 AMC Gremlin.

It’s hard to imagine the year 2023, but AMC’s cars back then caused as much of a stir as any new ride that came out today. They were simple, cheap, and fun to drive—I already had my license, so I could legally get behind the wheel in the presence of a licensed adult—and there was plenty of room in the front. It did what you asked, was quiet and pleasant, and got a more reasonable 17 MPG highway.

One of his kids, maybe it was me, crashed that Gremlin and ended up working every weekend washing dishes at an Italian restaurant to pay his deductible.

Soon a little Toyota Tercel appeared in our driveway, which was actually finally the right car for the right person. My mother was only 5 feet tall and weighed 100 pounds, and the Tercel was also compact, to the point, and while it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t fun looking like the Gremlin had been.

Soon after, I moved from home to New York City and Beansie’s cars stopped being remarkable: his last wagon was a Camry. It was time to relax; his career, his wheels and his life.

I became an automotive journalist, and on many weekends I would visit my mother in the suburbs, catch her at her weekend tag sales, and we’d talk about Freud, Buddhism, family, and the state of the world

Our days dwindled to a precious few, as they must eventually. I began setting up tripods and capturing our time together, knowing that one day in the future, after she passed from this life, these photos would return to me, briefly, to my mother.

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