About “78 NO-GO”

I bought this car when I was 16 years old in 1999. She had a frozen up inline six, no transmission and was destined to crusher one day. Until I bought her for $300 that I'd worked a summer job for. I then spent more hard earned dough on a 400 cu small block and a transmission. I bought all of the seals, a motor stand and began building a dream. I would often sit in it (on a cinder block) and dream of one day cruising down the highway in it. I quickly ran out of funds and began to realize that I had the rest of my life to build a project and I wanted to save up and get a 72 Nova or a 69 Oldsmobile instead. So I sold it for what I had in it to a buddy in a town 45 miles away. He sold it to another guy in a town about 20 miles away from him, and that man sold it to an old lady there in the same town. I never saw the car again.

As time passed I often missed the Nova. I had grown partial to the x-body, she was, after all, my first car. I would talk to people about the car I used to own and the big plans I had for her.
One day at college I found myself in just such a conversation. I talked about the engine I was building, the paint I wanted, and all the while remembering that the dream had sailed. But I didn't know what the Fates had in store for me.

On my way home (I commuted to college 60 miles one way), I saw in my college town a Nova like my old one for sale. I thought little of it at first, but like a splinter in my mind it began to fester and swell into a crazy idea before I made it home. Sixty miles later I could take no more, I turned around and drove all the way back to investigate the car.

I began looking her over. She had an engine, she had a transmission, she had a similar smell that I had once known. Some bafoon had disrespectfully painted her a darker blue and managed to botch overspray everywhere. I noticed a feature here, a feature there, a dent in the same place behind the fender, a crimp in the wheel, a missing trunk latch that could only be opened with a flathead screwdriver. I opened the passenger side door. I could smell 1978 and the confined vinyl that melted in the summer heat. I opened the glovebox to find O'Reilly's receipts from 1999 with my phone number on them. She was my old car. Upon this realization, the man selling her came out to see me scoping out his car and I said, "Where did you get this car." "Some old lady in Nacogdoches." It was her. I drove her for the first time, she didn't have the 400 small block I'd planned on-heck she didn't even have her passing gear engaged, the engine was a mess; a rat's nest on wheels. But it didn't matter, it was like going on a date with your first love.

I brought her home on her own power this time, not on a trailer like I watched her leave me on. She returned to me, she found a way back.

I've had her back since 2004 and I've been restoring her ever since. She's been an everyday driver too, not a show car. It is only now in 2012 that I have begun to put her in retirement to begin making her into a "show car". Her future will only get brighter, and she won't be hidden in a garage and never enjoyed. She came back to me to live, not slowly rot in the darkness.