Almost everyone has a story about their first car. Mine isn’t that great: I inherited the family station wagon, a blue 1968 Pontiac Catalina with a pointy nose and rear-facing rear seats.
Krista Hollenberg-Cussen has a much better story about her first car, also a station wagon and a Pontiac. She told it to me, so I’ll tell it to you. This column includes an ad in my collection for an early 1960s Tempest. A cool convertible, not a practical station wagon.
She was living in Boston and dating a man named Arsen Mikaelian, known as Mick. He bought a van to drive across the country to California, where he wanted to get into the restaurant business.
He had to leave behind his late father’s 1964 Pontic Tempest station wagon. Rather than sell the car, he offered it as a gift. “It had 82,000 miles on it and was pretty rusty and beat up, but the V-8 engine was in great shape,” Hollenberg-Cussen said this week. “It was smaller than other station wagons of its time.”
The Tempest’s original owner was Haig Mikaelian, an Armenian immigrant who painted houses to support his family. He had specially ordered the car with heavy-duty springs to support the weight of his painter’s ladders on the station wagon’s roof.
“Unfortunately, his father died in a fall at work,” said Hollenberg-Cussen. Her boyfriend, a mechanic, had kept the vehicle and kept the engine in top shape to honor his father’s memory.
“When I decided to move back to Indiana, he wanted me to get his beloved Pontiac,” she recalls. A thousand miles later, the car was in Bloomington. “I drove it for six years and put 22,000 more miles on it until my parents decided it was time for me to have a more reliable car.”
At that point, the Tempest was already 16 years old. The bodywork was in terrible condition, she said, there were problems with the wiring and electrical system, and the tailgate wouldn’t open.
“I was going to Alaska for work this summer and left the Pontiac with my parents. My mother said the car wouldn’t be there when I returned.”
And it wasn’t. “My mom sold it at a garage sale for $80 to an old man who wanted to use it to transport his fishing gear,” Hollenberg-Cussen said.
She liked the car, enjoyed driving it, and was sad to see it go.
And what happened to the ex-boyfriend? “Mick moved to California after I returned to Indiana. He wanted to own and operate a restaurant. I’m not sure if he realized that dream or not.”
Cars and people come and go in our lives. All too often we don’t know where they end up.
Hollenberg-Crussen’s next car was a 1966 Mercury Commuter, a large station wagon produced from 1957 to 1968. It was a gift from her next boyfriend. Really.
(Incidentally, Hollenburg-Cussen admitted that despite several friends and family members, she didn’t start buying a car until she was 48 and bought a used 1984 Toyota Corolla.)
Although she liked the Mercury Commuter, it was a beast that she described with the word “ugly.” “He got it from an older man who lived down the street and whose kids had forbidden him to drive,” she said. “It was so ugly and the man had ruined the front end a little bit.”
The car was baby blue, she said, with a turquoise doghouse hood. “It was around 1980, I think, and the car had only 21,000 miles on it. It looked really bad, so I had Earl Scheib paint it cheap.”
(For those unfamiliar, Earl Scheib was a man whose company was known nationwide for its low cost of auto painting – from $19.95 in the early days to $99.95 over the years. Most of the locations had closed by 2009.)
Ever since she bought that used Corolla, Hollenberg-Cussen has been fixated on Toyota. She’s owned a few Corollas and Camrys and is now behind the wheel of a Prius.
A Prius that can’t hold a candle to a classic Pontiac Tempest.
Have a story to share about a car or truck? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at [email protected] or 812-318-5967.
