stealth cam image of myself...recent
I made a list of the vehicles I have owned...in more or less the order I owned them...I was never an automobile collector...
first vehicle was a 1969 Kawasaki 500 triple motorcycle...I was 18 or 19 years old and had been working as a contract laborer in oil refineries...I paid 500 bucks for it...it was in really nice shape...jack C. who I went to high school with and who was a motorcyclist from way back worked in a motorcycle shop and recommended it to me...I had never sat on a motorcycle before but I did not tell him that...he drove it and pulled the front wheel off the ground in first gear, second gear, third gear and it think forth gear...it had 5 forward gears...I told him I would buy it...we did the paperwork at this shop and when I was about half a mile away it stalled and I had to call him and tell him I did not know how to start it...he came in a truck and picked me and the motorcycle up and asked me if I had ever ridden a motorcycle before...when he showed me how to start the thing, off I went...I should have told him I had driven lots of big trucks and fork-lifts...then I quit the refinery business and moved to the "heart of Acadiana" to drive a van and deliver beauty supplies to salons and barbershops...my next vehicle was a 1962 ford falcon "Futura" with an automatic transmission...I had hitch-hiked to Colorado with a guy who also drove a delivery van where I did and after I hitch-hiked back to Louisiana a girlfriends dad sold me the car for $25 which I had to rebuild the "top-end"...I had never pulled a spark plug from a car so it was a blessing that the high school shop teacher let me do it at the shop and coached me on how to do it...the man was a saint...so the other teachers loathed him...the car made it back to Colorado but then I left it there and hitched back to Louisiana...I enrolled in the university since my father said he would pay the $160 per semester cost...I did well in the first semester but took to partying in the second and then dropped out...I rented a house for about $160 a month way out in the country and bought a 1961? Belair for $75 which was hand painted purple...this vehicle was rear ended when I was pulling into my driveway one day and I retired the car...then I moved closer to town and I got a job as a roustabout on oil rigs working 14 days on and 7 days off...my pay was about $500 for two weeks work...my three room cypress house with a two barns and a fenced paddock was $25 a month... my neighbor had a 1963 ford falcon with three on the column which I bought for $75 bucks...it lasted a month before it crapped out and a fellow sold me a Vega for less than a hundred bucks...I decided I did not want to keep working offshore so I applied for a job with the zoo...I was hired and rented a house in the country for $150 a month... the state police came to the house and took the Vega since I had failed to get any bill of sale or registration...I had to hitch-hike to work every day ... the road to the zoo ran in front of the mayors house and he complained to the police so I was a suspect, a fellow at the zoo said his father wanted to sell his truck and I went to look at it in Plauchevile and paid $900 bucks for a 1968 Chevrolet fleet side truck which was hand painted tugboat green and had power steering truck...I liked the truck. I sold the truck and bought a Fiat station wagon then got a job at another zoo....then I bought a ford f150 then I moved to Nevada took up cooking as a job and bought a 1967 Toyota corona for 50 bucks...neat car...I had 3 vehicles at this time including an older jeep wagoner which I paid $500 for...I had never had a 4-wheel drive vehicle before...the wheel wells were rusted out so when I drove around in the black-rock desert the vehicle would fill up with dust...I left the Toyota with my landlady when I left the country and gave it to her husband in payment for sending my belongings to me when I turned to Louisiana... I think that mass transit makes more sense than trying to maintain a vehicle in many cases...I was collecting books and records and loved my Chevrolet truck with all my tuff and traveled the country from Florida to California to Oregon to Wyoming then to Alabama . I traded my Chevrolet truck for a Datsun 510 station wagon. in Oregon ..one of the best vehicles I have ever owned...I sold it in California when I went to Australia where I saw that they still made ford falcons...when I returned to the USA...I became a merchant marine and after a year I had saved enough money to by a motorhome for 3000 bucks which I had for 5 years...then I bought a 1994 Toyota pickup truck which had 315,000 miles on it when it was rear ended by a semi-truck...I bought a small school bus with the insurance money but it was a poor off road vehicle so I sole it and bought a 1991 Toyota previa van for...I think 1600 bucks which had 315,000 miles on it when I sold it 5 years ago...the woman who bought it still drives it...I bought a 2004 ford f150 for 6700 bucks when I sold the Toyota van and still drive this truck...
recently I had my storage unit stolen from me by what Kash Patel accurately describes as "government gangsters"...after 25 years of having this storage unit it contained a lot of "collectibles"...
"If you're a collector you're a sick, obsessive, compulsive person, who would sell your grandmother to buy something you really like, even if its something like an Elvis plate." from a YouTube presentation on book collectors
