The Model T was pretty much the beginning of America's long association (some would say obsession) with the automobile. I presume he bought it new. It was a latter-day Model T. That is, it had a "self" starter instead of a crank, but you still put it in reverse by pulling on the emergency brake and using the clutch and the reverse pedal, a neat trick if you did it right.

Somehow I learned to drive in that car. Then I drove my mother's 1933 Ford V-8 and after that a 1937 Ford V-8 she bought used. Neither of them were great cars. The '33 smoked all the time. One had to leave the window partly rolled down to avoid asphyxiation. The 1937 boiled at the slightest hill. That made it necessary always to carry water to replenish what wasn't in the radiator.

The first car ever solely mine, however, was a Model A. I bought it from a friend at the beginning of World War II for $37.50 and sold it to a relative for $50. (Cars were scarce then, even used cars.) It had a rumble seat and all out would go 45 miles an hour. It was the last car I ever tried to fix myself.

After the war ended, I got my first really new car. Like all of its predecessors, it was a Ford, a straight 6. It had neither heater nor radio and its valves tended to stick, but I drove it all over everywhere. Gas was cheap, roads were being built, I was single and driving a car was great recreation. In those days you could actually go for a restful Sunday drive.

The first family car we had was, yep, another Ford, a yellow V-8 station wagon. By then we had three children and we filled it up with playpens and other child equipment and carted children and equipment to see their grandparents in Southern California.

Getting to Southern California was a long trip in those days. I-5 had yet to be built, and it was often an eight- or nine-hour trip in the yellow station wagon one way. We got to know that car very well.

After that cars seemed to pass in a dizzying succession—Toyotas, Hondas, Ford Pintos, Chevrolets of various kinds. One of the latter was an underpowered Chevy Six station wagon with overdrive (remember overdrive?) which we used to cart the children and ourselves to the East Coast and back. For a while, it was a kind of family home, until we found a rental house in which to spend our year away from California.

And then came the time the children had cars of their own. Most of these were, yes, Ford Pintos, but for a while my son made a business of buying and fixing up old cars. The garage wouldn't hold all these vehicles. The street in front of the house looked like a used-car lot.

This was followed by the Volkswagen era. In 1969, we bought a new VW camper bus in the Netherlands and camped our way around the Continent, brought it home and then, when we both retired, drove it 12,000 miles around the United States on a fling.

It was the second of three VW campers we owned.

The last, a Vanagon, the first Vanagon to be water-cooled, took us all over the Western United States and also was a kind of home on wheels. We slept in it, ate in it, pretty much lived in it in many places and only reluctantly sold it after it had gone more than 100,000 miles.

The Volkswagen era was followed by what I guess you'd call a patriotic return to American cars. We got a Saturn and (yes, yet again) a Ford Taurus. We have them still. We keep saying they are the last cars we're ever going to own. Like us, both are getting venerable and it's sort of become a question as to who is going to last longer—the cars or us.

Of course, we hope it's us, but at this late stage in life one never can tell. Meantime, as we did with all the other cars before them, we think of our vehicles as members of the family, not quite as animate and affectionate as horses might have been, but a part of the family nevertheless.

Each of them has been an integral part of our lives from childhood to old age, each with special qualities, each tending to remind us of a certain time of our lives, a cluster of memories that stretch back through the years.

My guess is that the same must be true for you and that if you think back about the cars you've owned, you'll come up with similar memories.

No wonder we have so much trouble getting out of our cars and into some other more efficient, kind of transportation.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Courier.