First Car was born out of love for the clunkers, lemons, grandparent hand-me-downs and bad-ass cars that we experience as our first cars.
Your first car, like your first love is often the one that you remember most poignantly. It was special because it provided freedom, got you from A to B, and was often the first big ticket item that you were responsible for. It often seems to be the one that was invested with a sense of pride and faith and love that is rarely passed on to your subsequent cars with quite the same fervor.
Let’s face it—reliable is dull. The first car was likely the one that you really needed to run and didn’t, you couldn’t afford to properly maintain and should have, and often plunged you from the power of determining your own destination, to defeat at the side of the road. But it probably got under your skin.
This is a website devoted to those first cars.
About the new website:
The original First Car Magazine website was inspired by my first car, a flesh-tone Chevy Citation. It was handed down to me by my grandmother, and it is still the most favorite car I have ever had. For a while you’d still see them on the road, but now I only occasionally spot one once a year or so. I saw one about a month ago, parked on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. It was a little banged up, but it looked beautiful to me.
The original version of this website was also my first website. I built it with help from my friend Margaret, who turned it over to me to mangle into an un-navigable site – a labyrinthine jungle of stories, archives, and broken links. I have finally devoted the time to take it off its cinder blocks, Bondo it up and give it a spray-can paint job.
If you have a story about your first car that you’d like to share with the world, send it in. You can use the comment form or email me at leslie@www.the-postcard-project.com.
— Leslie Keats