Tim Baxter
It was all over when I saw the GT6.
I was 15 years old, with a brand-new, freshly minted drivers license tucked snugly in my wallet next to the condom I was also hoping to use soon when I first noticed it.
Parked would be to kind. It sat dusty and forlorn off to the side of a neighbor's carport, right where it had been abandoned several years earlier. I had no idea what it was, but it looked cool and the owner said he only wanted 800 bucks for it. That worked pretty well for my non-existent budget.
Of course it didn't run. For years it had done nothing but provide shelter for a fairly large family of field mice. But it was my first car—a 1967 Triumph GT6.
Somehow, I overcame my complete and total lack of knowledge about cars. Through sheer teenage determination I disinfected and deodorized, buffed out the paint and got it running. Off I went, neither knowing nor caring what extended periods of inactivity do to ancient British braking systems or how a Mk 1 GT6 and teenage drivers don't mix. Swing axles? Snap oversteer? Failing calipers? None of that mattered—it ran.
As it turned out, it didn't run long. After only a couple of months I was rear-ended by a truck, which pretty much folded the little Triumph in half. It was already too late for me, though. From there, I went on to a series of silly little cars in varying states of disrepair: More Triumphs, MG, VWs and old BMWs than anyone could keep track of. If it was cool and cheap, I bought it, and somewhere along the way I actually got reasonably adept at keeping them running.
While I was obsessing over old cars, I also somehow found time to join the Navy for awhile, then take their money (Thank you Uncle Sam) and go to college. In college I learned enough about journalism in between beers to go work at papers for awhile, and enough about the web to get people to pay me to do that, too.
Eventually I convinced Tim Suddard since I knew how to do stuff, he should hire me to do stuff for him. Not sure how I pulled that one off, but I'm glad I did.
And that's about it. These days I'm happily married, have the coolest son you're ever likely to meet, and have sworn off goofy old cars in favor of a Miata, although I'm pretty sure that's temporary.
