My Sister's Car

She was nineteen years old back in 1960, and she wanted a car - an old used car, something different, not your run of the mill man car like my brothers had.

She was nineteen and had a job and she needed a car and some male attention to go right along with it.

My uncle, Dad's brother, who was all of eleven months younger than dad and a man crazy about cars, was the one my brothers went to when they wanted yet another old car they could love and pamper until they were ready for the next one.


So she went there too, and because she was a young woman who could charm if the mood struck, she had my uncle scrambling to find her something spectacular.

And that turned out to be a Willys, a 1939 Willys, as black as spades and to me as ugly as the depths of an abandoned coal mine and just about as spooky.

I hated that car.

My sister loved it.

My brothers groaned and moaned, poor things, because that uncle never found them a car anywhere near as exciting as her Willys.

Shame on him.

My brothers would have done justice to that car, fighting over it, cherishing it, polishing it and showing it off.

My sister just drove it to work and around town, smirking at all the male attention she got, and to this day I can't believe she drove that thing in public.

I refused to ride in it, go anywhere near it, say anything nice about it. I was disgusted.

My sister was as hopeless as that car.

When she decided she needed a trip to New York City, all expenses paid for a week, she entered a newspaper contest to be the number one seller of subscriptions. She had a certain number of weeks to do it in and she was determined to do it.

And of course it had to be at night after work when she went calling on people to make her sales pitch, and it was as dark as Hades out because it was the dead of winter in southern Ontario when the contest ran.

So she got scared one night riding the dark country roads in her "hot" car and knocking on strangers' doors and asking to come in, and some men were way too willing to accommodate her, she figured. You bet she got scared, so guess who she turned to for help.

I said there was no way in my lifetime I'd ever get in that ugly black car she was so proud of. She begged and begged and I said I'd give up an hour or two every night, as long as she drove a real car.

She refused that ultimatum, and because I felt sorry for her, I caved, and gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, and stepped into the doom of the interior of that coal mine and went with her.

And because I did, she won the contest and went off to New York City with the runner-up girl, leaving me home and wondering why I'd done it.

What the two of them did on the long train ride and in New York City, I'll never know.

That's another thing I wouldn't have done at her age - gone to the Big Bad City.

But buying an old black 1939 Willys was about the awfullest thing my sister could ever have done as far as I'm concerned, and I never hesitated to tell her that whenever I saw her in the car and headed out to impress the boys just one more time.

She never got a boyfriend from owning the Willys, because what she failed to realize was that the boys never saw her behind the wheel.

They just saw the jaw-dropping, awesome car tooling down the road, where no other Willys had ever set foot.