My 1965 red Mercury Comet Caliente: I should have kept it

This 1965 Mercury Comet Caliente has survived nearly 50 years. It is like the one I purchased as my first car in 1967.

I bought my first car in the fall of 1967. Paying the bank $64 a month, it took me less than a year to pay off the loan earning $1.64 an hour first as a sacker and checker for Charley Boyd’s Thriftway Grocery Store and then as photographer for The Olathe Daily News.

Ford Mustangs had just come out. A Mustang was “the” car to have. Also popular was just about anything Chevrolet: the ’64 Impala (Jim Walton and Galen Custer had one), the ’67 Chevelle (Ronnie Cox owned one), the Chevelle SS (Joe Johnson’s was a running son-of-a-gun),  and the ’64 Nova (Alan Cheever was always tinkering with the engine). Then there were other brands and models, all of them true muscle cars.