He was sixteen, standing on a used car lot in the summer of 1975 with five hundred dollars rolled up in his back pocket. Money earned cutting lawns, hauling pop bottles, and he was being called “son” by a salesman in a mustard-colored leisure suit who wanted him to believe a beat-up sedan was the Holy Grail. The chrome bumper in front of him was the size of a diving board, and the car he was about to drive home was going to change everything. Buying your first car in 1970s America wasn’t a transaction.

It was a rite of passage. The horsepower was dying, the gas lines were forming, and the bumpers were getting uglier by the model year. But out on that lot, with the smell of hot asphalt and motor oil hanging in the air, none of that mattered. You just wanted the keys.

There was no app. There was no website. There was the Bargain Madness section of the local paper, and you read it like scripture. You sat at the kitchen table with a cup of instant coffee going cold beside you, squinting at print so small it might as well have been written for ants.

A 1971 Plymouth Duster for $1,797. A ’69 Chevy Nova, runs good, needs paint. A Ford Pinto, low miles, one owner. You circled the ones you could afford in red Bic pen and tore the corner off the page.

Then you got on the phone. The actual phone, bolted to the kitchen wall with a cord long enough to reach the back porch. You dialed, you waited, and half the time the car was already gone. The other half, the guy on the other end told you to come on by, and gave you directions that involved a Sunoco station, a left at the Dairy Queen, and a house with a brown station wagon out front.

The lots themselves were a circus. Strings of red, white, and blue plastic flags strung between light poles. A giant inflatable gorilla on the roof. A hand-painted sign screaming, “Easy credit, no money down.

” And out walked the salesman in that leisure suit, a wide tie, sideburns down to his jaw. He shook your hand too hard, called you sport, and pointed at a car like it was the answer to everything. “This one,” he’d say, slapping the hood, “belonged to a little old lady. Only drove it to church on Sundays.

” You knew it was a lie. The ashtray was packed full of Marlboro butts, and the backseat smelled like a wet dog. But it didn’t matter. The price was right, and a quart of oil was $4.

19. You figured whatever was wrong with it, you could fix yourself in the driveway with a socket wrench and a flashlight. Once you signed that pink slip, and yes, it really was pink, a flimsy carbon paper document that proved the car was yours, you weren’t just a driver anymore. You were a backyard mechanic.

You had to be, because nothing in the 1970s ran the way it was supposed to. If you brought home a mid-’70s muscle car thinking you’d gotten yourself a fire-breather, you learned the truth real quick. You’d bought a performance pretender. The stripes were there.

The hood scoop was there. The badges said 350, 400, 454, but the car couldn’t get out of its own way. A 1975 Corvette, the Corvette, America’s sports car, came out of the factory with 165 horsepower. Just four years earlier, the same engine made 270.

The government had come down on Detroit with smog rules, lead bans, and bumper laws, and the engineers were strangling those big V8s with vacuum hoses and a thing called a catalytic converter that you’d never heard of and didn’t trust one bit. And the bumpers. In ’71, they passed a rule that every car had to have a bumper that could take a 5-mph hit without crumpling. So Detroit bolted these enormous chrome battering rams to the front and back of every car they sold.

They stuck out a foot and a half. They looked like diving boards. A 1974 Chevy Impala had a bumper you could land a small aircraft on. So when the car stalled at the red light, and it always stalled, you popped the hood right there.

You learned the rhythm. Tap the carburetor with the butt of a screwdriver. Wiggle the choke. Spray a little starter fluid down the throat of it.

Cuss at it. Try again. Your old man taught you that. Or your uncle.

Or the guy two doors down who always had a Pabst in one hand and a wrench in the other. And that smell. You remember that smell. It wasn’t just exhaust.

It was leaded gas, sweet and heavy, the kind that hung in your clothes, mixed with the hot, rich stink of a carburetor running too fat. Add the burning oil dripping onto a hot manifold, and that was the perfume of every Friday night of your youth. You can still smell it right now if you close your eyes. Owning the car was only half of it.

Feeding it was the other half. And starting in October of 1973, feeding it became a war. OPEC turned off the spigot. Overnight, the price of a barrel of oil jumped from $3 to $12.

Gas prices shot up 40% in a single month. Half the stations just ran out. You’d pull up and there’d be a paper bag taped over the pump nozzle, or a cardboard sign that said, “Sorry, no gas. ” Or sometimes just a plywood board nailed across the driveway entrance.

So the state stepped in with what they called the Oregon plan. If your license plate ended in an odd number, you could only buy gas on odd-numbered days of the month. Even number, even days. You looked for the flag at the station.

Green flag meant they had fuel and you could line up. Yellow meant rationing, three gallons max. Red flag meant turn around and go home. People got so desperate that siphoning became a real problem.

You’d wake up Monday morning, walk out to the driveway, and find your gas tank bone dry because somebody had snuck up with a garden hose and sucked your tank empty in the middle of the night. So everybody, and I mean everybody, went down to the auto parts store and bought a locking gas cap. Three bucks. Best three bucks you ever spent.

And those gas lines. Three hours, sometimes four. You sat there in the heat with the windows down because the AC ate too much fuel, listening to the engine idle, watching the needle on your fuel gauge, praying you wouldn’t run out before you reached the pump. The guy in the Datsun two cars ahead of you, that little orange box of a car nobody respected, he was going to be just fine.

You, in your big block Buick, were sweating bullets. That’s when something shifted in America. You started seeing more Toyotas, more Hondas, more Datsun 240Zs zipping past you on the freeway. Your dad called them rice burners and refused to even look at one.

But your buddy down the block bought a Civic for under three grand and got 30 miles to the gallon, and suddenly his snickering didn’t seem so funny anymore. But brother, when that tank was full, when the sun went down on a Friday night and you had a clean shirt on and $10 in your wallet, there was no better feeling in America. You slid into the driver’s seat, and that vinyl bench seat hit your back like a hot frying pan. In July, it could blister you.

In January, it was hard as a brick and twice as cold. Didn’t matter. You reached over to the dashboard and shoved in the 8-track. Maybe it was Boston.

Maybe it was Pink Floyd. Maybe it was Fleetwood Mac or the Eagles or Lynyrd Skynyrd. And you waited for that sound. You know the one I mean.

Right in the middle of a guitar solo, that big, satisfying clunk as the player switched from program two to program three, chopping the song in half. Sometimes the cartridge wouldn’t track right, and you’d fold up a matchbook and wedge it in there to hold the head steady. That was 1970s engineering. A matchbook from the bowling alley keeping your music alive.

And then you went to the strip. Every town in America had one. Main Street or Broadway or whatever the locals called it. You cruised it slow.

Window down, elbow out, one hand on the wheel. The girls walked the sidewalk. The other guys cruised the other direction. You nodded at the ones you knew.

You honked at the ones you wanted to know. And when you hit a red light next to a buddy, somebody yelled, “Chinese fire drill! ” And four doors flew open, and everybody ran around the cars and switched seats before the light turned green. There were no cell phones.

There was no GPS. There were no parents tracking you on an app. The street lights were your curfew. When they flickered on, you knew you had about an hour before your mother started calling around to your friends’ houses.

And if you weren’t home by 11:00, your old man was waiting on the porch with his arms folded. You ended the night at the drive-in. All the cars parked nose out facing the screen. The speakers hooked over the rolled-down window crackling out the sound of whatever John Wayne or Burt Reynolds picture was playing that summer.

The smell of buttered popcorn drifting from the snack bar. The smell of damp grass under your tires. A six-pack of Pabst on the floorboards that you weren’t supposed to have. The seat fully reclined.

The whole night felt like it would last forever. None of this was easy. Insurance was a nightmare. State Farm slapped a 25% surcharge on any car with more than 300 horsepower, which is exactly why your buddy with the 440 Charger was paying more for insurance than he was for the car itself.

The interest rate on your auto loan was around 11 and a half percent. And your loan term wasn’t 72 months like it is today. It was 30 months. Two and a half years, and the title was yours.

You paid for that car the hard way. You worked at the gas station after school pumping fuel for a buck sixty an hour. You bagged groceries at the A&P. You mowed lawns all summer.

You collected pop bottles out of ditches, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, RC Cola, and hauled them down to the corner store for three cents apiece. Sometimes a nickel. By the end of a Saturday afternoon, you might have a dollar fifty in deposits. And that was a tank of gas in 1972.

And nothing was wasted. You changed your own oil for $4. 19 a quart. You set your own points.

You gapped your own spark plugs. You learned the difference between a Phillips and a flathead before you learned long division. When the radiator hose burst on the side of Route 9, you didn’t call AAA. You walked to the nearest house, asked to use the phone, called your dad, and you fixed it together on the shoulder of the road with a roll of duct tape and a coat hanger.

That car taught you patience. It taught you grit. It taught you that a thing you owned was a thing you took care of. The vinyl seats burned your legs in summer and froze them in winter.

The gas was rationed. The bumpers were ridiculous. The horsepower was a sad joke compared to what your older brother had a few years before. But it was yours.

You earned every bolt of it. And on a warm Friday night in 1976, with the windows down and an 8-track playing and the strip stretched out in front of you, there wasn’t a kid in America who would have traded places with anybody. But while you were out there cruising the strip, something was changing in the American driveway. Something quiet.

Something nobody saw coming. The big block V8 was about to disappear for almost 20 years. The 8-track was about to die in a parking lot somewhere.

And the car your kid would learn to drive on wouldn’t look anything like the one you brought home from that lot in 1975.