Written by Lisa Rodriquez

I just had to tell you about my car. It is a 1973 Dodge Dart Custom with a 318 engine. Yellow in color with an excellent white vinyl top. When I bought the car, my first car, it had only 83,000 original miles on it. I bought it in 1994 from a police officer who had bought it from a estate sale, so the car had been in a garage most of its life. My uncle inspected it for me and the only problem he could find was a rusting tail pipe. So, on September 27, 1994, I got my first car, and boy was it a beauty. The interior was perfect, the body was shining and the engine was quiet. So quiet in fact that occasionally at a stoplight I would have to turn down the radio to see if the car was still running. A week after I bought the car, I took it out on Interstate 35 near Salina, Kansas. It was a nice October day and I had just finished shopping, and, as you well know, the speedometer on a 1973 Dart says 120 mph. Well, seeing as how it was my first car, I wanted to see if it could actually do it. So here I am, thinking I am the QUEEN of the road, passing all these old folks, and watching the speedometer climb. It's now at 85 mph, then I finally reach 100 mph and climbing, when whom do I see behind me? Highway Patrol! He said he had clocked me at over 100 mph but would only ticket me for 93 mph (thank you, LORD!).

Now let me tell you about some problems I've had; please keep in mind I've only had the car a little over two years. First, the radiator went bad. It wasn't a normal hole either; it cracked at the neck. Next was my muffler. Then I went a few months with no problems until February 1996, when I thought my water pump was bad; a friend changed that, but it kept leaking water. I called my local Dodge dealer here in CA, and he said it sounded like a freeze plug, so I brought it to them. It turns out that my timing chain, timing chain cover and my master cyliander were bad. Then when I asked how much it would cost, they told me they didn't even want to work on it because with a car that old they didn't know what would happen when they started working on it--that a lot more would be wrong. I got the call at work and lets just say I literally bawled like a baby. I could not fathom giving up my car. Luckily, I found a mechanic that my parents went to and he said yes, they would work on my car AND I could make payments. In a little over four weeks I had paid over a thousand dollars; in essence I had bought my car all over again. Oh, but my troubles didn't end there; the once-almighty, ever-starting Dart now wanted to flood on an almost-daily basis. Finally I took it in to find it was my carburetor; then while trying to start my car every day I tore up my starter. Well, finally they are both fixed. Now I am waiting for the alternator to go out on me, the exhaust manifold leaks, and I need a tune-up, but other than all of that I love my car and don't ever want to give it up.

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