Yep. I Owned a Ford Pinto
The other day, I was having lunch with several friends at the Buckhorn up in North Fork when, for some reason, I mentioned that when I was a young guy, I had owned a Ford Pinto.
All of them started laughing. Immediately.
After a second or two, I started chuckling, as well — and then began defending the car that had gotten such a bad rap just a few years after Ford debuted the Pinto in late 1970. You likely know the story — stuff about Pintos exploding if they were rear-ended.
But after our laughter at the Buckhorn had died down — and when I was driving back to our place in Madera County — I started thinking about all the adventures I’d had in that little car. Memorable adventures, still shining brightly in my mind all these 50 years later.
In fact, it was the most enjoyable car I would ever wind up owning.
I bought one of the early models in the summer of 1971. I was working part-time at Channel 30 in Fresno as a film editor and soon-to-be announcer-director. I was about to be a senior at Fresno State. And I was still driving a hand-me-down from Dad.
So in a bold move, I went to Bank of America — which was approving student loans up to $2,000 with virtually no interest — got my two grand — and headed right up the 99 to Dick Anderson Ford in Madera.
Anderson was an advertiser at 30 and a close friend of Chuck Carson — who, at that point, was our weatherman at 30. I spent almost my entire student loan to buy a “stripper” — a new, baby-blue, hot-off-the-assembly line 1971 Pinto with no “extras” — not even an air conditioner. Two doors. Stick shift. You get the drift.
Yeah. I bought a car with no air conditioning while I was living in the Valley of the long, hot summers.
But, man, I quickly fell in love with that baby, and the affair never ended. At least, not for a decade. (And by the way — I paid off that BOA loan within a year.)
The first thing I did with my “baby” in that summer of ’71 was take it to the place of my dreams — San Francisco. I drove up to The City on a Saturday morning. My first stop: Chinatown. I walked all of it. Then it was on to the magnificent Golden Gate Park, where I toured the world-famous deYoung Museum, walked through the fabulous Steinhart Aquarium and wound up, that evening, at the Morrison Planetarium.
Heady stuff, for this kid from Fresno. But, hey — I had a Pinto.
I stayed the night at a grubby motel called the “Orleans” somewhere along the 101 in San Mateo. I’d found it through my Triple A guidebook. (The best advice Dad had ever given me was — join Triple-A and keep the membership forever. Well, Dad, I did, and I’m in my 55th year of membership. Thanks.)
The next day, Sunday, my Pinto and I headed down the 101, where I stopped for lunch at Morgan Hill — which was then mostly agriculture and is now a suburb so expensive you can’t come close to affording a home. I remember eating in a small mom-and-pop cafe — and then, it was back to the Valley.
The Pinto and I were now a team. I took it everywhere, and the two of us — the car and I — shared some never-to-be-forgotten times.
One Saturday night in the summer of ’72, I drove a buddy of mine — Ken — to Monterey so we could eat and drink at a restaurant on the wharf. Well, we did.
And when it came time to drive the Pinto back to Fresno along Highway 152, I had to stop to relieve myself of some of my liquid intake. It was dark, and I parked alongside the highway and walked into a farmer’s field. Unfortunately, he was flooding his crop, and I fell into the water.
Ken heroically came to my rescue — pulled me out of that water. And more than that, he took the wheel of the Pinto and drove us back over Pacheco Pass to my apartment on Millbrook Avenue in Fresno. There was more. He kindly stayed with me in the apartment that night to make sure I was okay.
Ken and I remain friends to this moment.
Now it’s early in ’73, and the Pinto and I have driven to Susanville, way up in the boondocks of northeastern California, where I’ve been hired at my first full-time job. I’m the news director at a teapot radio station — KSUE — making 500 big ones a month for the privilege of working 60 or 70 hours a week, covering news weekdays and being a DJ on Saturday afternoons.
A few weeks after I started in Susanville, a young woman came down to visit me. She had been a broadcasting student with me at Fresno State.
After graduation, she had moved back home to Oregon. When she learned I’d taken a job in Susanville — several hours south of where she lived — she drove down for the weekend. 
When she arrived late that Saturday morning, I decided to drive her up to our “lookout peak” that overlooked Susanville from the top of Main Street. Well, we got up there and looked. And then we got back into the car, and I tried to start it.
Tried.
It would not turn over. Not even a click from the starter.
So I walked down that hill to the nearest service station on Main Street while my visiting friend waited at the car. The mechanic at the station drove me back up the hill in his tow truck, but he did not need that truck to take my visitor and me back down.
The mechanic simply opened the Pinto’s hood, checked a switch or two, and bingo! The car started.
I was, in a word, mortified.
The car started, yes. But the incident put a damper on the weekend. My visitor and I drove down to Reno, where we spent several hours in a casino, and she went home the next day.
She never saw me or my Pinto again. She married a childhood sweetheart, and they’ve been married — happily so — this past half-century.
One other incident with my Pinto from my time in Susanville: I drove it one Saturday toward Lassen National Park. Never made it. It had been snowing — and even though I was motoring along at about 25 miles an hour, that was too fast. The Pinto started swerving and I — being a Valley boy — had no idea what to do. So we both wound up in a snowbank.
Fortunately, I wasn’t injured — but the Pinto’s front-end was whacked out of alignment. That meant, a few months later, a re-alignment job and four new tires.
I quit KSUE after five months because $500 a month was not enough to keep me afloat — or keep my Pinto tuned up. I drove back to Fresno, enrolled in a graduate program at Fresno State — and, incredibly enough, became the youngest TV reporter in the city’s history (a distinction I might, just might, still hold).
And so it was that on that Valentine’s Day in 1974, I drove the Pinto to work at Channel 30, where Jeff, the assignment editor, sent me and photog Scotty Sherlock to cover the story of a young high school newspaper editor who had printed a story about drug use on her campus.
Today, that story would generate zero waves. Back then, it became a statewide story because the Washington Union High administration stupidly blocked the newspaper from coming out. Apparently, no one there had ever heard of the First Amendment.
Everyone was covering this one. Front-page in the Fresno Bee. Newspapers around California. And, of course, our local TV stations.
And that was the day — after a meeting in which the school board let the paper come out — when I interviewed the editor. Her name was Sharon, and she was not only attractive, she knew her constitutional law, Supreme Court decisions and legal precedents. In other words, she was smart and good-looking.
I went back into the Channel 30 newsroom and said that I thought I’d met the woman I could marry. They all laughed.
This July 5, Sharon and I will have been married 49 years.
But before we got hitched, Sharon and I had to meet again — and we did, a few days after she had graduated from high school in June. She came down to Channel 30 to see the newscast on a Friday night. I was anchoring sports that night. And I thought I looked mighty spiffy, indeed — plaid sport coat and pants, wide tie — that was the way young guys looked on TV back in the mid-70’s.
Anyway, we went out to Denny’s at Blackstone and Abby after the 11 p.m. newscast. We spent hours there and decided to see each other again the following Saturday.
But before I got to Saturday, another Friday night intruded. And on that particular night — a fellow reporter — Roy Isom — and I were messing around in our upstairs Channel 30 hole-in-the-wall newsroom. We were horsing around — rough-housing, that’s all — when I put my hand through the glass in our half-glass newsroom door.
Roy rushed me to the emergency room at a nearby hospital. I was in shock and needed 15 stitches in my left hand. I was bandaged from my hand up to my elbow.
But the next day, I was determined to take Sharon out. I drove over to her home in Easton, and she was quite surprised to see the way my hand and arm looked.
And I was quite surprised to see one of her feet and ankles (neither of us can remember which) completely bandaged. Seems she had put her foot underneath a Trimmer lawn mower’s roller.
What a couple we made! I was able to drive the Pinto up toward the mountains on the 41 — but realized as we approached Coarsegold that I had failed to “gas up” the night before because I had been, uh, busy at a hospital.
So I drove into the Chevron station in Coarsegold and told the attendant to fill the tank. Then I tried to reach my left hand behind me to my pocket, where my wallet was.
Of course, I could not. So I asked Sharon if she could reach behind me and get my wallet out.
Her response: “Is this how you handle your first dates?”
And, yes, my Pinto and I had quite an experience the night Sharon and I announced our engagement at her parents’ home in Easton. It was Christmas Eve 1974. As I was driving back to my apartment on Ashlan Avenue in Fresno — I was in front of Fresno City College on Van Ness Avenue — a drunk driver cut me off.
But he did more. He apparently thought I was to blame for his erratic driving — he was the one swerving between lanes — so he kept pulling in front of me. Yes, I was frightened. I pulled over — hoping he’d go away — but he parked his car about 30 feet in front of the Pinto and got out.
Fortunately for me, he was so sloshed, he had neglected to put the transmission of his own car into “park.” It was, in fact, in reverse. And just when he had gotten behind his car and was staggering his way toward mine, his vehicle began backing up toward him. His female companion started shrieking, and he realized — just in time — that he was about to die.
He drunkenly tried to jump back into his car. I have no idea what happened next, because I took the opportunity to speed off to safety.
Quite a night, indeed, for me and my Pinto.
But the adventures were not over. After Sharon and I were married, we drove that car all over. Her dad had bought her a Chevy Vega — which, as you may recall, had its own set of serious problems. After a couple of years, we decided to buy a Toyota pick-up and put a camper shell on it so we could go to the mountains on weekends.
And when we moved to Iowa in 1979, we caravaned — I drove the PInto, and Sharon drove the pick-up.
In Ames, both the house we rented in our first year — and the one we bought in our second year there — had only a one-car garage. The Toyota — being the one we most wanted to “keep going” — got the garage.
So my Pinto was exposed to all the elements that came from brutal winters and often-stormy summers in Iowa. Snow. Ice. Hail. Downpours. Wind. You name it, the Pinto got it.
Within the first few weeks we there that summer, we took the Pinto down to the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines to see Red Skelton perform. And on the way back up the 35 to Ames — a distance of about 30 miles — a gigantic, end-of-the-world thunderstorm overwhelmed us.
Lightning to the ground, alongside the freeway. Lighting so intense, we tried to remember what would happen if it hit the Pinto. What could we touch on the inside? Rain coming so fast, our windshield wipers could not handle it.
We were moving along at 15 miles an hour on the interstate when we noticed truck drivers had pulled their rigs off the freeway. That was good enough for us. We did the same. Smart move.
Once things cleared up, we drove back to Ames and — still shaken by the evening — wrote a story for the Ames Tribune about how we just-arrived Californians had been scared to death by our first big thunder-boomer in the Midwest.
The Trib published it on the front page the next day.
In our second year in Ames, we had a mighty ice storm. Our first one. It fell on a Sunday night. On Monday morning, I walked out to the Pinto — which we parked on the street in front of our home — and started it.
That part went fine. I gingerly got it moving on the ice-covered street — and approached the intersection with 6th Street. I had a stop sign in front of me. When I hit the brakes, nothing happened. Oh, the brakes were working. But the tires just kept sliding on the street — through the stop sign and into the intersection.
And at that exact moment, a pick-up truck was sliding down the hill toward me, sideways, on 6th Street, to my right. It was coming right at my Pinto and me. I knew were both about to suffer, and seriously. Somehow — that pick-up slid by my car’s front end, missing us by perhaps a foot — as it continued down 6th and slammed into a parked car.
I was, to say the least, unnerved. So I gently maneuvered the Pinto around, drove slowly back home, and called the Journalism Department office — I was teaching at ISU at that point — and told them that, even though it was a sunny day, I could not drive into work.
And we lived only a mile from campus.
Well, those two winters in Iowa took just about everything out of my beloved car. By the end of our second year there — as we were preparing to move back West — it was obvious the Pinto could not make it.
It had no acceleration. It was smoking out the rear. It barely moved.
So it was with a great deal of reluctance that we did the right thing. We donated the Pinto to an Ames High School automotive class. I don’t remember how many miles it had on it.
We drove back West in our Toyota pick-up, and when we got there, Sharon reclaimed the Chevy Vega we had left behind with her parents.
Our Pinto was gone, but it has never been forgotten. It gave me — and us — 10 years of service. It provided some of our most memorable moments. It simply “rocked.”
We’ve owned numerous other vehicles in our half-century together, but that’s all they’ve been — vehicles. Something to take us from one place to another.
But that blue Pinto — that was the car of a lifetime. Ours.