My step dad was of the opinion that you buy new cars. It actually made sense back in the sixties and seventies. He was in a union job, so buying American was a must, and the were, at the time, basically shit. As in, if you got 100k out of a 6-7 year old car, before it was "worn out", the neighbors were impressed. So there we are, me as a bored elementary school brat, for some reason driving to an endless number of car dealerships, only to watch my dad have a quick conversation with a salesman, then walk away as the guy shook his head. One day, dad struck his gold. He found a new two door Oldsmobile with exactly zero options. It was rust colored, inside and out, and couldn't get any more basic. No power windows, locks, steering, or transmission. It had a horrible AM radio, and I think the only reason it did was that GM didn't want to ship the car with a hole in the dash. I later discovered that it was a bitch to drive, and understood why my mom hated the thing with a passion. It had a very small steering wheel, which typically was NBD, since Detroit iron of the day came with grossly over-assisted, vague, squirrely steering. Except this one, DIDN'T come with power steering, would of been tough to drive with a giant tractor trailer wheel, and was nearly impossible for my mom to maneuver, especially while trying to parallel park. I remember my petite mom just about standing on the floor, with two hands, overhand, on top of the wheel, as she fought to get the thing to the curb, in tight downtown spots.
It also had a three speed manual trans. with a column shifter. Now a column shifter is nothing but an irritating PITA when it works, but GM took it to the next level by making ones that only really worked for the first few years, then they had to be handled with excruciating precision and extremely light touch, or they would jamb in neutral, when shifting from first to second. Now dad was not the kind of guy who would actually take the thing into a garage to correct a problem like this. Noooo, if it got jammed, it was obviously the driver's fault, which should be read as either my mom, or myself, since dad didn't shift it "incorrectly". ( to put this in perspective, when I watch the Christmas story movie, when the kid freezes his tongue to the flag pole, the dad in the movie is so much like my pop, it kind of freaks me out) I quickly learned to pop the hood and realign the shift rods to correct the problem, without getting dad involved. Mom had to (on more than one occasion) walk to a pay phone, or find some man with a clue, to get the piece of crap untangled.
Since dad was one heck of a mustachian, he always drove vehicles until they had nothing left to give. At then end, other drivers in the family were always better off avoiding these heaps, since they had a habit of failing, and much like musical chairs, if they broke while you were at wheel, the music stops, and you are it. Dad's first response to a problem was, "what the hell did you do now!". In the end I got blamed for killing this beast. I went to start it and it just wouldn't start. I pushed it down the street to another dad on the block, who was just as cheap and grumpy, but was a mechanic. He popped the hood up, and pulled the air cleaner off. He then sealed the top of the carb. with his hand and told me to crank the starter. In a minute he said, "The engine is too weak to even suck any fuel in, tell your cheap father that it's over". Twelve years and 155K miles of service from a 1971 GM product made it a true outlier, but dad still wasn't pleased to hear the news.
I'll miss my step dad for as long as I live, and alway be awed by somebody who was thrifty his entire life, and didn't give a rat's ass about what the Jones were up to.