Bonus Edition – A New Project At My Other Blogging Gig

For the last 366 straight weeks I have added some little addition to the total of online published output one time per week, always on a Friday morning. Today I am going to break pattern with an Extra (as they used to describe newspapers in the old movies). This Extra brings breaking news of another writing project I have undertaken.

Before I started writing here, I contributed as author and editor at a website for fans of old cars, Curbside Classic. My fresh output there has dwindled of late (though I am in reruns) but there has been a long-simmering project that has finally gone live.

One of the features of that site is a series we refer to as a COAL, which stands for Cars Of A Lifetime. Quite a few contributors have done their turns, which involves writing a weekly series on the cars they have owned during their lives. I have finally decided to take my turn in the COAL mines.

My series debuted two weeks ago and will run a new episode each Sunday morning. With somewhere around 30 cars under my belt, this series will last into the early part of 2023.

Many readers here are also readers at that site, so this will be old news to them. Some, however, are not, and I thought it might be worth mentioning here. Many may yawn but some may find the series of interest. I have decided that beginning next Friday I will add a link in this site’s weekly edition to the most recent COAL chapter from the previous Sunday. Unfortunately, this idea occurred to me later than it should have, so I have a couple of links to share right now. They are:

Prologue – Variety Is The Spice Of Life (If You Like Oldsmobiles) in which I explore the car choices of my parents which surrounded me during the years I was developing into a hopeless car-nut.

1967 Ford Galaxie 500 Convertible – Chapter 1, In The Beginning is the first of likely my only two-parter, which tells the story of the epic search by a 17 year old kid for the thing he had wanted for his entire life.

These will not be about specifications and details of the cars themselves but about the stories they tell and the parts they played in my life. Think of it as a kind of auto-biography.

Some of you will likely nod politely and say “How nice”, but I hope that others of you will find something fun to read. If you miss a week or three, you can easily catch up on the CC website by clicking on my byline under the title of any episode – that will take you to a page that lists all of my recent stuff there.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming (which will arrive this coming Friday) and which will be about – I’m not sure yet.

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26 thoughts on “Bonus Edition – A New Project At My Other Blogging Gig”

  1. Glad for the additional read, and will certainly use the “jump” for articles on cars of interest to me! I have to say after reading the current missive, that altho growing up in Chicago, we were well aware of Buick being a “doctors car” and some sort of status symbol, my Mother (also) was an Oldsmobile buying consumer, and at one time, had a jet black Olds 98 that seemed to be longer and wider than the same year Cadilliac! Dad, having taken engineering at Purdue (altho he took a general degree to get out early), was a Mopar man, and tried to get Plymouth Fury company cars until his company switched to only GM products. Pror to that, on his own, he had Studebakers, and consdiered them an “engineers car”. The love and loss of his life was a Stude Hawk, that was ttalled by a woman running a red light. He considered it an American sports car and engineering wise, superior to the Corvette.

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    • Thanks Andy! Yes indeed, some of those Oldsmobiles were big! As for the Studebakers, a kid down the street who became my best friend for years was in a family where the dad was a big Stude guy. His last new one was a red 1964 Avanti, the supercharged one with a 4 speed. He kept that car for decades, although he didn’t drive it much in later years. He must have told the extended family to buy those last ones, and probably agreed to serve as their private maintenance tech. My friend’s grandma had a blue Daytona hardtop and his uncle had a brown low end sedan. I am probably one of the few people my age who got significant time around Studebakers as a kid. Funny though, I have never been around a Hawk, but really love them.

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      • Have you ever read a John Grisham novel JP? I know you don’t have much time to read, with two blogs to maintain. Most of them are legal cases, so you could use your law background. He says often his muse is some real life case he’s familiar with or read about and then he changes it about. You write tons better than he does. Some of his books are thin on plot but very readable anyway. I think he has such a following now that people would read anything he wrote. I just finished his last and the back cover said it was his 47th book.

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      • Oh my, thank you for the compliment on my writing! I have actually never read one of his books but am generally familiar with them and have seen a couple of movies based on them.

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    • PS. They were both good reads! I only remember two of my parents cars, my dad’s old orange truck which he used on the farm, (he was so proud of that truck his first), and an aqua colored something probably a Plymouth which I only remember as I got in an accident with it on my very first solo drive to work and it was a write-off. The accident was my fault, as I missed a stop sign on a side street so anxious was I about driving home in the dark when I didn’t have much driving experience period. It was not a good memory, but my dad never said anything, he just went and bought something else, which I think was beige. I don’t think I could buy a car that puke green color though, convertible or not…..

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      • Haha – finally someone agrees with me on the color of that car!! Over at the CC site everyone seems to love it. And I have never had an aqua car, which is too bad because it is one of my favorite colors!

        Those are the worst accidents, when you are all anxious to start with.

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      • Aqua/turquoise was a big color in the sixties. My mother had turquoise formica kitchen counters and a turquoise linoleum floor, and my 1967 house had turquoise print bathroom tiles. There’s no way I had enough driving experience to be driving period – one driving education class and a few spins on country roads does not a good driver make, especially when you had 3 teenagers competing for the car. Luckily I went away to school a few weeks later which helped me get over it as I could avoid it altogether and walk or take the subway. That’s why I can’t remember the car which came after other than it was beige.

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      • My best childhood friend had a mother who loved turquoise. Their house had been built around 1959 and all of the kitchen appliances were turquoise. It was my favorite kitchen ever! Our appliances were all light brown. Bor-ing.

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  4. JP, Now I get to see your long-simmering project that you mentioned to me in a recent comment. I clicked and see you already have a lot of comments on the last post. I knew you were very knowledgeable about cars from prior posts, plus you have been able to identify vehicles I’ve shown in every blog post that has a car in it. You were even able to ID the year of my 2009 Buick LaCrosse, simply by seeing the odometer as it was so similar to your mom’s LaCrosse. (By the way, I am trying valiantly to reach the 9,999-mile mark that you quipped about, but as of today, I’m only at 9,671 miles.) That you have had 30 cars in your lifetime is amazing to me, but maybe it is more amazing for you to know I’ve only had four vehicles since I got my driver’s license in 1973. All but this car were lemons and I’m happy with the LaCrosse, though it has had its electrical quirks, some which required a long stay at the shop back in May. I’ll bet that you and your fellow COAL contributors might enjoy watching the Woodward Dream Cruise which is held annually here along Woodward Avenue, the nation’s first first paved road. It is the granddaddy of all the local car cruises and attracts one million visitors, some who haul their vehicles from all over the country to participate. They do stream the entire cruise and, I was going to pass along the official site to you, but I was surprised to see it says “not secure” which surprised me, but if you want to venture there, simply type “woodwarddreamcruisedotcom” and you are there. They stream the cruise on a local oldies radio station – if you are interested, let me know and I’ll send you the link as we approach the cruise date (Saturday, August 20th). Congrats on your new blogging gig.

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  6. Hmm, how nice. 😉

    I’m actually surprised that after all this time you had never done a COAL series. I used up all my coal years ago.

    Really looking forward to the series, and yes I also like the Galactic green.

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    • I have done kind of a partial stealth COAL, having weaved my own experiences into photos of other cars I have found, but the German in my background says that a proper COAL series must be in order and complete. So here we are. A long COAL series is one of the few rewards for unconventional car-ownership decisions (some of which were actually good calls).

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  7. Pingback: 2022 – Crossing The Finish Line | J. P.'s Blog

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