Automobiles
My Maverick was red with a white vinyl top. I later called it the AO mobile because I pledged a sorority at Baylor and their colors were red and white.
My grandparents were the first generation to own vehicles. Pappy had to crank his truck to start it. I remember always having a family car, though for many years, Mother and Daddy had only one family vehicle. Probably about the time that we moved to the home on Bismarck, a second car was added for Mother’s convenience of toting kids around. Cars used leaded gas. Price per gallon for gasoline was about .31 cents. In 1996, with passage of The Clean Air Act, we were mandated to purchase unleaded gasoline. The seat belt began showing up in cars in 1968, but no one used them. By 1995, every state had a mandatory seat belt law. I’m not sure that I always used my seat belt until 2000. We had very few interstate highways so we drove mainly on U.S. Highways and some State Highways. I learned to drive on the FM (Farm to Market) back roads around Vernon. These were the roads that we often drove during our Sunday afternoon drives through the country. I was small and was never really interested in learning how to drive. One Sunday afternoon, Daddy came outside with a pillow in his hand and said, “Let’s go!” I was like, huh? It was that afternoon that I learned to drive a car, with many follow up Sunday afternoon drives to get a feel for the road. I took Driver’s Education as a full semester course as a sophomore. We studied from driving manuals in the classroom, viewed tape of the actual driving experience and then we began our training in the vehicle where we would drive through the city with our teacher in the front seat. These vehicles were equipped with a brake on the passenger side, just in case our teacher deemed it necessary to brake to avoid an accident. In the summer before my junior year, I took the Driver’s Test with a patrolman. My first car was a Ford Maverick, red with a white vinyl hood. Gasoline prices had increased to about 50 cents per gallon. On my birthday, Daddy woke me up and said that we were going to Quanah to pick up my birthday gift, a car! He told it was a VW bug. I invited Terri Howard to ride along. When we arrived in Quanah, a red Maverick was on the showroom floor and presented to me as my new car. I was shocked, but I do have to say, I was a bit disappointed that it had no a/c. Daddy, too, quickly realized that was a misjudgment because of the weather in Texas. By my senior year, he had an air conditioner unit installed below the dashboard and it was a good thing because the next year, I drove this Maverick back and forth to college. Of course, I added an 8 track tape player and speakers.
