Dans Papers - June 8, 2007

This past weekend, 200 people who own classic, 40-year-old cars showed up in a field in Amagansett to show off their old cars. There were Pontiac Firebirds, vintage Mercedes, Beamers, old Cadillacs with tail fins and classic 57 Thunderbirds. Many of those who own these cars bought them over the last few years for investment purposes. They might think that the cars are beautiful, but they stand around waiting to hear numbers -- how much they could sell cars for. Whether the market was right. Whether they ought to wait.

These people are not old car buffs. They are just at these meets fishing to make a sale. Maybe they even think that the people at these shows who had owned their cars forever -- they were in the majority -- were just a big yawn. Who wants to listen to them talk about their cars?

Well, I do. I am among those people who buy something, lives with it for dozens of years and then just keeps it forever. These things hold great memories. And if they are now worth a lot of money? We couldn't care less. We have no interest in ever selling them. And I will tell you why.

Back in late April, during a warm spell, I went out to my garage and opened the door and there was the car I bought when I was 24 years old, hitting the bars looking for girls here in the Hamptons.

I didn't have much money when I was 24 years old. But when I saw this racy, red sports car sitting out in front of a bar in Hampton Bays with a FOR SALE sign on it, I thought, boy that's for me. I bought it. I've owned it ever since. And there, last April, more than 40 years later, there it was. Oh, the stories it could tell.

The car is a 1959 Triumph TR-3. When I bought it, it was six years old -- a used car. The guy who owned it was getting married and his wife wanted him to get rid of it. Those days with his TR-3 were gone forever. Now he'd be driving a station wagon. And so I test drove it and then wrote him a check for the $800 he wanted for it. It had 47,000 miles on it. Today, it has 98,000 miles. So I rarely use it.

Here's what I like about my TR-3:

At the front end, there is a round hole in the center of the grille. In 1959, when they made it, they wanted to have a way to start the car in the event that the battery was dead or the starter motor was broken. So there was this hole and this metal crank you could slide into it, a zigzag thing that you could turn and possibly get the car to fire itself up. Of course it could backfire and kick the cylinders backwards in a jolt, which could reverse the crank and break your arm. But that didn't happen often.

So that was your backup.

I've never tried it.

By the way, I lost the crank about twenty years ago. Last year, however, I bought another one on eBay for $35. I haven't tried that one either.

Triumph was a viable car manufacturing company with a plant northwest of London back in the day. In 1957, they made the first TR-3. It had a five speed standard shift with four forward speeds and one reverse. It was not particularly fast, but it was cool-looking and reliable for its time. The engineers decided NOT to design a new engine for it. Instead, they bought reliable, four-cylinder farm tractor engines from a factory that made them and modified them to fit under the hood. My original one is still there, still working. They made this model of TR-3 until 1961. All together, they made about 20,000 of them.

Air conditioning in the car is provided by a metal lever that pushes open a vent on the hood directly in front of the windshield. With the vent closed, the air whooshed around the sides of the car. With the vent opened, it came down into the cockpit as a brisk wind to cool you off. Of course, no matter what you did you were out in the open air. The car does have a soft leather top that you can push up and down like you'd push a sunbonnet on a baby carriage. It has snaps that you click onto the top of the windshield to keep it up there. But it really isn't effective in keeping the rain out.

Yes, there is heat. It is a metal box on the floor above the foot pedals that has a fan in it. It has two modes, operated by the twist knob on the dashboard. If you turned it ON and it got too hot, you turned it OFF.

I was wrong when I said the car only has a leather top. It has a hard top, shaped like a hard top, that you can set on top of the open cockpit, with the leather top down, and attach with latches. The front latches of the hard top go on the top of the windshield. The back ones go on the rear fenders. If you hit a big bump, which I did in June of 1981 in Southampton while going 20-miles-per-hour instead of 5-miles-an-hour, it flies off and lands in the road, scaring the hell out of you and everybody else, particularly those behind you. This top, today, is resting in the roof rafters in my garage. It has gouges in it from hitting the road. It has been up there since that day in June of 1981.

All the gauges set in the dashboard have white needles behind glass that point to things. The big gauges indicate the car's speed in miles-per-hour and the engine's revolutions per minute. Smaller gauges indicate the engine's temperature, whether the battery is charging or discharging, the water temperature in the radiator and the level of fuel in the gas tank.

There are also two buttons. One is called STARTER. You press it and it causes the car's starter motor to turn over. The other button says CHOKE and it's a pull button. When you pull it out, it increases the amount of gasoline that comes to the spark plugs. You need to choke the gas to get an excessive amount to the spark plugs in order to get it to fire and first start up. After it runs for a while, it warms up and doesn't need all that gas. It starts to run rough with the choke on. So you push in the choke. It smoothes out. It sounds like a single engine airplane.

The other items on the dashboard are twists. One operates the heater, ON and OFF. The other operates the windshield wiper, ON or OFF.

That's about it for the luxury items in this car. There are rearview mirrors on the front fenders that are fully adjustable if somebody gets out of the car and goes up there and twists them until you say THAT'S IT, they're aimed right.

Oh, and it does have one other luxury, which I think they had in the 1959 version for the first time -- blinking turn signals. There was a lever atop the center stalk of the steering wheel, right above the horn, that you could push sideways and the blinking light in back would turn on that side. After you turned, while you were straightening the wheel, something inside the center stalk would pass a certain raised metal point and the turn signal would snap back to its central position, thereby automatically turning the blinking light off ALL BY ITSELF. Wow!

That feature, by the way, stopped working on my car around 1991. You push the turn signal and it does make the turn signal blink, but after the turn you have to remember to push it back.

I should say that another luxury feature on the dashboard is a single blinking light to indicate that the blinking turn taillight is on, to remind you to turn it off. The car has no safety features whatsoever. The rear seat is a wooden plank with a leather and cotton affair attached atop it. Only one person can sit back there and that person has to sit sideways, with his or her shoes on the plank. There is no seatbelt for either of the front seats, no airbags, no antilock brakes, no 2 1/2 m.p.h., springing front and back bumpers, nothing. Hit anything and you're dead.

So you drive slow, for two reasons. One is that something might break if you drive fast. The other is that you might hit something if you drive fast. And you are not, in the 21st century, going to easily find a replacement part for something that was made in 1959.

And this leads me to the first of the many joys of owning this car. One is the insurance rate. I pay $96 a YEAR for insurance on my 1959 TR-3. The actuaries who establish the rates at the insurance companies have discovered that people with these old sports cars almost NEVER get into accidents. So it's $96 a year. The next joy is how you start the car. You open the hood and check its fluids. Brake fluid. Oil. Water. If anything is low, you fill it up. You're ready. You close the hood. Get behind the wheel. Pump the gas ten times to prime the engine, pull out the choke all the way, push in the starter button and say a little prayer. The starter motor might make a click and then a whine, so try it again. Usually, the second time, it turns over and over and over and, after a while, the engine responds by firing up. It makes a big racket. Everybody cheers. Smoke comes out of the exhaust pipe and there is this wonderful smell of oil and gas that fills the garage and reminds you of a time long ago when garages smelled like this. It's working. Life is good. It also reminds some people of what you have to go through to start a small airplane.

And so you depress the clutch, shift into reverse, back out of the garage, go to neutral, then to first and you are off. There is no synchromesh in the transmission, so you cannot slow down and have the gears automatically change at certain speeds. You do it yourself, depressing the clutch and jerking the floor-mounted gearshift this way and that to get it in sync enough to change gears without grinding the transmission. It's an art. And soon, when you get to about 35 miles per hour, you are in your top gear and it just winds out in that gear until it is going as fast as it can go.

I know how fast it can go. One night, about 1981, at one in the morning, I had a fight with my girlfriend. She ran out of the house, slammed the door and drove off toward New York City. I followed in the TR-3. We went through downtown East Hampton, Bridgehampton and Southampton, I was keeping up with her at about 75 miles-per-hour and then we got out on County Road 39 and Sunrise Highway and she opened up. She was driving, at that time, a black, brand-new 6-cylinder Chevy Chevette with a sunroof. Not a big deal of a car. And I kept up with her as she accelerated past the Shinnecock Canal at 85-miles-per-hour. Then, at Hampton Bays, at 95, she just pulled away and disappeared ahead of me into the darkness.

The TR-3 was wide open, roaring away at 88 miles-per-hour. And that was it. It was trying and almost succeeding in breaking the sound barrier, had there been one, at 88 miles-per-hour. There were no police around. But I knew this baby was about to blow. And so I slowed down, then turned around and, sadly, went back through the darkness toward home.

"Way to go girl," I said to the car. "You did the best that you could."

The girlfriend came back in the morning. Later, we married. Then, eight years later, divorced. But that's another story.

No. I would never part with my Triumph TR-3.

Today, in her dotage, she still runs well, at low speeds anyway and I won't test her at anything over 55.

But she does tend to overheat after about ten minutes of driving. Then, for whatever reason, the oil pressure starts to drop, the water temperature starts to rise and, although it does level off at five pounds of pressure and about 385 degrees -- still not in a danger zone -- you begin to hear the clicking noise of the metal valves on the top of the engine not getting enough oil and if you ignore that, a sort of ominous banging noise begins and only God knows where it comes from.

The fair range of the TR-3 is, therefore, from East Hampton, where I live, to Bridgehampton or Water Mill on the west and perhaps LUNCH and Cyril's Bar on the Napeague Stretch to the east. I go to people's homes in it. I take it to where valet parkers are and won't let them drive it, but they say just park it right here so we can look at it and we'll take good care of it, and I take the key and then give them a few bucks at the end of the evening for watching it.

But no, you won't find me in Montauk or anywhere further west than Southampton in the TR-3, unless I stop halfway there for half an hour to let her cool down and then do it again on the way back.

Sell her? Never. I hope to be buried sitting upright behind the wheel in the driver's seat.