While I was back home in Rochester and taking classes at Monroe Community College, several major events occurred – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and race riots in Rochester. Both of those events left a lot of people disillusioned and upset. Me included. Why race riots in a northern city? 
Many cars that happened to be in the way of rioters suffered broken windows and other damage. I found one that had only a couple of broken windows, a two-tone brown and crème 1958 Chevy Biscayne four door with side glass broken. I got the car cheap and found replacement glass in a junk yard. I didn’t keep this car long although I liked the styling. Basically I flipped it and made some money.
My parents must have felt sorry for me and my junk cars and bought a used 1959 Plymouth Fury coupe, supposedly for my mother to learn to drive. My father and I were to teach her to drive. That didn’t work out so well because she was deathly afraid of that overpowered beast but I drove it all the time. It had a V-8, push button auto transmission, big fins, a fake continental tire cover on the trunk, and was pretty fast. The white body looked pretty cool after I painted the wheels red, or so I thought. I pushed this car hard because it could move down the road. I took lots of risks back then and was a foolish late teen.
I despised drivers who beat me off the line when a traffic light turned green. One particular incident turned out nearly disastrous – for me. A car pulled away on my right and I decided to get even by speeding past it first chance I had. So I did that and was accelerating on a curve and as I pulled up next to the car long enough for me to give the driver the universal salute, I lost control of the ’59 Fury and before I knew what was happening I was pressed into the seat while the car did a 360 and ended up going backwards facing the car I was trying to pass. My guardian angel must have been with me at that moment and I got my wits back and managed to steer the car off the road, still going backwards, into a field. Heart racing, I sat there for a few minutes while I contemplated my near death experience. As luck would have it, there were no trees, boulders, embankments, or fences where I backed off the road. I learned a lesson from that hands-on experiment and never did that again.
For some reason, probably because I pushed that car so hard, an engine knock developed and my dad traded the ’59 Fury for a new sedate 1962 Plymouth Valiant. I was depressed about that since the Valiant was definitely not cool.
The Valiant became my main means of transportation before I went back to Alfred University. Eventually my mother did learn to drive in that car. One humorous car/girl incident occurred with this car while on a date with Jerri, my new heart throb and classmate at MCC. Jerri and I were fond of parking along Lake Ontario at Durand Eastman Park, which had 5,000 feet of shoreline along the lake. One night we decided to skip the shore where a policeman spooked us on one other date when we were parked along the lake front. We didn’t want him to find us again because he knew Jerri’s father who owned a Ford dealership in the area.
We decided to venture into the park and pull over on the side of the road where we thought we found a secluded spot. We were so preoccupied we did not realize what was about to happen. I sensed something was not right and my intuition was screaming at me. I sat up and when my eyes adjusted to the dark outside, I saw that the Valiant was surrounded by a squad of soldiers complete with rifles, packs, the whole Army thing. I, of course panicked, started the car, pressed hard on the accelerator and the car did not move. Fearing these army guys had tied a rope to the bumper and then to a tree I panicked even more. Finally I came to my senses and discovered one of my shoes was behind the accelerator pedal. Once this was corrected I peeled out of there nearly running over a couple of the soldiers. Those guys must have laughed about that incident for months afterwards.
There were a couple of cars between the 1956 Rambler and this car but they did not play as big a role in my life as my 1949 Chevy convertible. Two of them were cars my parents let me drive – two Plymouths, and one was a 1958 Chevy with broken windows a rescued from the Rochester riots, and one that belonged to the mother of a girl I dated at Monroe Community College – a Thunderbird. I will write about them later since they did enter and exit my life and involved girls in one way or another.
After spending what would have been my sophmore year at MCC in Rochester, I returned to Alfred University to finish my degree work. As an upperclassman I could have a car. I lived off campus in a fraternity house and one of my fraternity brothers was selling a car I coveted. It was a ’49 Chevy convertible. He was from New Jersey as was the car and he had done a lot of body work on it (Bondo) and repainted it what I called “Piper Cub Yellow.” It was not the original pale yellow but bright yellow, if you have ever seen an original paint scheme on a Piper Cub you would know what I mean.
This car was wonderful. It was a standard shift that my frat brother converted to a floor shifter he made himself. It had an electric top, hand choke and hand throttle, and everything worked. The top was black and the car looked pretty cool. My frat brother was very honest about the car’s shortcomings which included low compression and the home made floor shift that hung up in first or reverse due to excessive play without ever a warning. I would be about to shift into one of those gears and the levers under the car would lock up, requiring me to get under the car and manipulate the mechanism until it freed itself. This was rather inconvenient, especially on dates because I never knew when it would happen. I kept a pair of gloves and an old blanket in the trunk so I could crawl under the car whenever the shifter locked up in either first or reverse. It was one of those things that endeared the car to me. I eventually bought a “real” floor shift and installed it, which eliminated the problem – I did not do this immediately and suffered the indignation to having to crawl under the car many times. But it was definitely a cool car and it was a chick magnet because it was a convertible and had “class.” Oh it didn’t have the class of the Porsche owned by one of my wealthier frat brothers but was nevertheless “cool.” I think it was the oldest car in the fraternity house parking lot.
As I mentioned, my ’49 Chevy had low compression. If it failed to start because I couldn’t afford to replace the battery, I could push the car 10 feet and then hop in to pop the clutch and it always started. Alfred was very hilly and I often parked on a hill so I didn’t have to use the battery to start the car. I would just start the car rolling and I would pop the clutch and bingo it was running. The not so good aspect of this low compression was cresting a seriously steep hill on a two lane road on the way to Alfred. This was a hill 18 wheelers had trouble with and if you got stuck behind one of them it meant a slow climb. For my ’49 to make it up this hill at 25 mph, I had to hit the center of the hill going at least 50 mph. When I got near this part of the trip, I always prayed no trucks were crawling up the hill. God forbid a slow truck in front. If that happened, I would have to limp up the hill on the shoulder.
One Christmas holiday break I took a female classmate home who also lived in Rochester. We had a few dates that went nowhere but we shared many classes and the same major, so I saw a lot of her. The route I used to get home took us along the shore of Conesus Lake, one of the Finger Lakes. On this particular trip it began to snow and turned into a blizzard along the lake. I could not see anything in front of us until we got right up to another car or truck and the red tail lights came into view. I guess it was one of those lake effect snows. My Chevy had snow tires and we crawled along hoping not to run off the road. Actually, I looked out my window and my passenger looked out her window to tell me if I was getting too close to the shoulder. Honestly, visibility out the front was zero. Snow was coming straight at the windshield. The road was snow covered so I could not even see the center line. Once we got past the lake, which seemed to take forever, the snow let up and we could move ahead at a decent pace.
Because I was a poor college student, even the cost of a new battery was beyond my meager means. Given the cold western New York winters, my poor Chevy had trouble starting most of the time. So to keep the engine warm when I had to park it, say on a movie date, I covered the engine with an old heavy quilt and lots of newspapers. Despite the fire hazard, this seemed to work well enough. I never came back to a burned out hulk and the car always started when so swaddled. My Chevy served me well the final two years at Alfred.
When I finally graduated on the five year plan, I sold the car to another Alfred student and have no idea what happened to it after that. I truly loved this car and wish I had it today – fully restored and properly painted. The ’49 Chevy convertible is and always will be one of my favorite cars.
After spending a year working as a carpenter’s helper building single family homes, living at home, and saving money, I applied for admission to the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, NY. After a full academic year
there, I ran out of money for the next year’s tuition and other expenses. I decided to go back home and enroll in Monroe Community College in Rochester and take required courses that would transfer to Alfred and
enable me to fulfill those required courses at a much lower cost. So that is what I did. I needed a car to drive and what I ended up with was not exactly the car of my dreams. I bought a cheap 1956 Rambler, uh station wagon. Yup, you read right.
If you know anything about American Motors cars, especially Rambler models, you would wonder why on earth a young man would want such an ugly vehicle. Let alone a station wagon. Well, ugly yes, but it had reclining front seats. Get the picture?
That may have been its only redeeming quality. This was the car with the door post on the hinge side that was rusted so badly at the lower end that the door would not close unless I lifted the door by the handle.
At the end of the Spring Quarter I got a summer job working for the Monroe County Sewer Department. One of the benefits of working at the sewer plant was access to heavy metal street signs that my friends and I cut to size and screwed into the floors to patch the holes caused by rust. With the added support from the new metal and replacement rocker panels, the doors closed more easily.
Once the rusted body metal was repaired, my best friend Jim, who also worked at the sewer department, and I decided to take advantage of the paint sprayer at the sewer plant and one Saturday, after prepping the car, we spray painted it industrial red. It was originally a strange pale watermelon color. We painted the car right out in the open so you can imagine what the finish looked like. Over spray and bugs. But we thought it looked a lot better than the original color. What were we thinking?
My best friend Jim worked at the sewer plant full time. I was there only as a summer employee. He had duties that included testing the water and general maintenance. The plant was interesting and had enough things we could get in trouble with, including this rotating thing that looked like a small merry go round. It was a trickle filter, the last step in treating the water part of the sewage. We would ride on it for kicks.
Jim was an inside guy. I, on the other hand, could leave the plant in a cool Dodge Power Wagon that looked like a WWII Army vehicle. It had a big water tank that we filled from a hydrant via a fire hose. How cool was that? Our job was to go out and raise manhole covers when streets were repaved. We also had to go down the manholes and into the sewers and power wash the flow channels to make sure there were no blockages. That is what the water tank on the Power Wagon was for.
The sewage entered the plant and passed through successive treatment tanks until the heavy sewage settled into this one tank that had an Imhoff cone arrangement at one end. The heavy sludge settled in this area and was then pumped into digestion tanks where the anerobic process broke the sludge down. I digress. One day I was cleaning things around the treatment tanks with a high pressure fire hose.
My buddy Jim was painting the railing on one of the swimming pool size tanks. He had rigged a scaffold of sorts by notching the ends of a board and hanging the contraption by ropes on the inside of the railing so he could paint the water side of the railings. His big mistake was the notched board was just sitting on the rope, not really secured. Interesting right? Well, while I was using the high pressure hose, I heard Jim shouting. The board had slipped off the rope and Jim fell feet first into the tank. I found this terribly funny and fell on the ground laughing with the high pressure hose whipping around. Jim was kicking so much he only fell in up to his thighs and when he scrambled out I washed him down with the fire hose, still laughing. Jim did not think this was too funny and we cut his pant legs off and sent him home. Up to this time I had never seen anyone walk on water. But Jim did that day.
At MCC I met Jeri, an attractive brunette with a last name beginning in “M” also and we became friends and started dating. We had several classes together and I was very attracted to her. One of our favorite dates was to go out to a special parking spot on the shore of Lake Ontario in a thunderstorm and watch the lightning over the lake. The Rambler came in handy for that.
Jeri had a friend she wanted to fix Jim up with and on this particular double date I drove the Rambler. When I was driving the girls back home I heard a strange scraping noise coming from the right front of the car. I got out to look and was astonished to find the right front wheel laying flat in the road. I called Jim out and he said the ball joint broke. We got back in the car and I put it in gear and the wheel picked itself back up to my continued astonishment.
Obviously we could not drive the car back home and I left it parked on Jim’s date’s street until the next day when I called a tow truck. I did not have enough money for the repairs and towing, so the car stayed there for nearly a month. I finally got it home and decided to sell it, reclining seats and all. Some guy actually wanted it and paid me a lot more than I paid for it. Maybe it was the red paint job.
I finally got the chance to own a ’54 Chevy. It was a 210 model, not the top of the line Bel Air and was a less cool 4-door, stick shift (three on the tree) and had almost seen its better days. To give you an idea of how much the car set me
back, I paid the 2013 equivalent of $200 for it. A couple of my first few cars were only months away from becoming parts cars in a junkyard. The most remarkable thing about almost all of my early cars was the amount of rusted panels in the form of holes in the floor, rusted out rocker panels, or door posts. Rochester winters were typically severe and the city and surrounding communities used lots of salt to keep the roads from icing.
One of the cars I’ll tell you about later was rusted so badly that I had to lift up hard on the door handle to have it close properly. The ’54 Chevy was no exception. Its biggest problem was holes in the floor, which was not a good thing since exhaust fumes could leak into the inside of the car – carbon monoxide was not a good thing. Problem solved with pieces of sheet metal, and roofing shingles screwed into the good metal.
My very favorite thing about this car was the windshield wipers. It didn’t have electric wipers. It had vacuum wipers – powered off the same vacuum lines that advanced the distributor. Result: going up hills and or accelerating they slowed down. No, let me correct that, they stopped. So while stopped for a traffic light, accelerating off when the light turned green meant the wipers stopped wherever they were on the windshield because vacuum was diverted to the distributor. That was fun in a heavy rain! One thing about those non-electric wipers was they were very quiet! Imagine this when it snowed –it was magical.
While some young drivers hung fuzzy dice from their rearview mirror, I hung a rabbit skull I had found somewhere. I thought it was cool. The skull was much more interesting and a conversation piece for the girls that rode up front.
Driving with my arm around my female companion was tricky since I needed my right hand for shifting the column lever. Sometimes I let my date do the shifting while my arm remained around her shoulder. As long as the girl stayed away from reverse, the shifting coordination of my foot and her hand was usually OK and we could remain close on that big bench seat. If the girl was a frequent visitor to the car, she knew not to push the lever up too far to shift into second gear. If not the proverbial grinding of the gears would occur and the sound made my teeth hurt.
Another redeeming quality of my ’54 Chevy was that I practically had to refill the car with oil every time I stopped because it would leave a large puddle on the street. Not good for the environment but the engine oil was always fresh!
I was all for customization of cars back then but one day I was forced into a front end customization of the Chevy’s grill. My dad and I left the house at the same time one day. I was going down the driveway first since I was behind him. I reached the end of the drive and stopped because of an oncoming car but my dad didn’t. He backed into the front of my Chevy and took out the grill! Of course he yelled at me because I stopped. Why wouldn’t I? No damage to his car. So the gaping expanse of the front grill minus the chrome was kinda cool looking. It sort of looked like the engine intake of a jet plane.
I was OK with that but angry because the car suffered additional uglification.
Cars and Girls: My First Car
I didn’t realize it in high school but my family had Mafia connections. One of the reasons the immediate family left Brooklyn was to get away from the bad guys. My grandfather’s cousin was Vincent Mangano, a major contributor to Murder Incorporated. Vincent and his brother Phillip were really bad guys. I didn’t know what this had to do with my first car until years later. Being Italian-American, my family was sensitive to stereotyping Italians with the Mafia. They wanted no one to think we were “connected.” My parents, first generation Americans, wanted me and my sisters to be 100% American. We were not even taught to speak Italian at home, although both parents spoke in Italian around my grandparents or when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about. Little did they know, we knew what they were talking about, especially if it had to do with where my mom had hidden the Cucidata cookies she and grandma had worked so hard to make for the holidays. I ate them like peanuts.
With that background in mind, you may understand my father’s reaction to my first car. I only had this car for 24 hours. I bought it with my own money and was so pound of it. I loved it. I love it today. I bought it from a friend for $35.00. Seriously. I really wish I had this car today.
It was a 1939 Hupmobile. It had bullet headlights, and a humped trunk. The black paint was a little crazed but was in really good condition. Inside, the mohair seats were worn but had no tears. Running boards graced the body on either side of the car and a large chrome grill was the main feature in front. A perfect Mafia car. You could imagine gangsters standing on the running boards firing their Tommy guns at the FBI. One of my high school friends had this car on his farm. It ran fine and drove fine as far as I was concerned and after I gave it a test drive, I paid him the $35.00 and drove it home and parked it in the driveway.
When my father got home from work that night he went berserk. “What the hell is that car doing In the driveway?” I said I bought it from a friend at school. “Take it back, I don’t want a damn Mafia car around here. Do you understand? Get it out of here.” “But dad, it’s paid for, I can’t take it back.”
“Did you hear what I said, I don’t want any Mafia cars around here. Get it out of here.”
And that was it. Sadly I drove it back to my friend’s farm, never to see it again. The shortest time I owned a car. (To be continued.)
Every teenage boy equates his status with a driver’s license and a set of wheels. Unfortunately I was one of the last in my high school class to get my driver’s license. My birthday is in October, so I came of age months after many kids. I took drivers ed in my senior year and took the driving test in a friend’ s car. I had to rely on rides from my friends or parents. It was not unusual for my dad or my date’s parents to take us on dates. Hard to make out in the back seat when your father or date’s father could see you in the rear view mirror. This was a severe blow to my ego since the only way I could get anywhere was on my bike – that is bicycle, not motorcycle. I went steady with several girls in high school and was forced to ride my bike to their houses after school or during summers if I wanted to see them.
I was a bike rider, even the summer before entering college. We lived in Henrietta, a suburb of Rochester, NY, and it was nothing to ride into the city and go to the main library, the George Eastman House, or the museum. I had been doing that for years.
The summer before entering Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the industrial chemistry program, I worked on an egg farm, not a chicken farm, but a farm that produced eggs. I was hired to be a handy man. Mr. Fix It. All the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I could eat. That was to offset the paltry hourly rate I got. There were thousands of chickens. One of my jobs was to manage the manure.
The noise was incredible as was the smell of the chicken shit I had to scoop out of the hen houses with a front end loader, which just fit in the aisle between cages. I used the loader to scoop up manure and dump it in a spreader. You could smell that stuff miles away.
The egg farm was some 10 miles from my home and I rode my three-speed Raleigh English bike. I was in very good physical condition and didn’t mind the 20 mile round trip ride, except one day. There was a pretty steep hill on the rural road I took. On the way home I was flying down the hill, no hands, when I reached down to my windbreaker wrapped around the handlebars. As soon as I did this, the front wheel whipped perpendicular to the frame and I went flying over the handle bars landing in the road and went sliding down the road and scraped the skin off my knees, shins, forearms, and hands. I was going at least 20 mph when this happened. Bleeding from a serious case of road rash I limped along pushing my bike, which suffered no damage except some chipped paint. Not so for me. No one was around and it seemed like forever until a car came by. Fortunately it was someone I knew and they took me, my bike, and my bleeding body home. It took forever for the wounds to heal because every time I moved, the sores on my shins and forearms would ooze. My dog loved licking the sores on my knees, biting the scabs off. I still have large scars on my knees to remind me of this incident.
What does this have to do with cars and girls? Well, I think it convinced my parents it was time I had a car. My second car (I’ll explain why not the first). The car my parent’s helped me buy was a 1954 Plymouth. I hated this car and really wanted a cooler 1954 Chevy. But my parents paid for most of it and no reason to complain. It was a four door sedan, also not cool, was automatic, and had a flat head six. It was not a chick magnet. Just the opposite.
My neighbor, who was also a freshman at RIT had a 1954 Chevy and I was very jealous. The Plymouth had a less glamorous profile, more blob-ish. What was worse was the winter of our freshman year, my ’54 Plymouth seldom started on those cold Rochester mornings. I had the embarrassment of having to ask my buddy to push my car around the subdivision with his Chevy to get my car started. It usually sputtered to life half way around the subdivision. How humiliating. His car always started. My car was a piece of junk. Primered body panels and red wheels were in then but not even those custom touches made that Plymouth look cool. But it was my car. It meant I could go on dates without parents involved and could go to drive ins and make out or park and make out. Making out was a primary objective.
mike mangano 