Quotes of the Day

When my grandparents died after 50 years of smoking two packs a day in 1975, they bequeathed to us their car.

At the time, I was 17 and vaguely aware they owned a car: some big, yellow, hulking dignified thing that we never saw them drive. A couple of days after my grandmother's death it showed up in our driveway.

"Grandma has left us her car, which you will be allowed to use," my mother said when I walked in the house from school, "as long as you treat it respectfully."

I went out to look at the angular two-door barge quietly taking up a huge portion of the driveway and thought, "Ugh."

It was a 1965 Mercury. More specifically, a 1965 Mercury Montclair Marauder. It was nobody's idea of hot wheels. You can almost see the Ford marketing guys sitting around a 1963 conference table needing to invoke the staid, manicured lawns of Montclair, New Jersey, where their customers lived — grandparents, every last one of them — but wanting to bust out just a little bit for those that still clung to fading memories of an imagined youth.

Late this week, it was reported that Ford is close to deciding to phase out the Mercury line. But in Central Ohio, in the mid-1970s, the Merc had its hidden charms. The thing was in pristine condition. It had a radio that could be heard around the block. And it had an engine that could have pulled a truck at top speed uphill: a 400 cubic inch V8.

It had some serious go.

I realized that all this Mercury needed was what they nowadays call rebranding. And so the Mercury was quickly re-christened "The Bomb" and it became a mainstay in my youthful misadventures. Three of my siblings learned to drive in the Bomb. Other explorations were undertaken in its vast, cream-colored, leather back seat.

We gave it some road tests early on. Within a week of its arrival, one of the engine mounts on the monster V8 was history. The original back tires, nine years old and showing full tread that first afternoon in our driveway, lasted just four weeks, having been deposited in black stripes all over town. The Bomb rarely negotiated a corner without shedding a hubcap. Pretty soon, like a feral cat, it had become the marauder it was always meant to be.

In the winter, after a good snow, we would drive The Bomb over to St. Catherine's, the local Catholic church where snow drifted deep across a large parking lot out back. Building up a good head of steam on the driveway, we would snap the car into a wild 360-degree spin all the way across the parking lot — with the windows open.

After a few runs you'd have to shovel out the interior.

On Thursday evenings we would take The Bomb to Yellow Springs, Ohio, about 60 miles west of Columbus and home to Antioch University, where we folk-danced on a brick patio under the stars until 11:30.

The trick was to get home by midnight, and we usually made it.

But one evening, my sister drove the full run from Yellow Springs back to Columbus on I-70 with the parking brake on. When she exited the freeway and stepped on the brakes, nothing happened. We went screaming over the shoulder and into the clover leaf. The Bomb dutifully ejected its hubcaps, and came out the other side of the field intact.

That night, we gained an even deeper appreciation for the two-ton hunk of steel.

And so a fond goodbye to the noble Mercury brand.

You were the car of my grandparents' dreams — but the wheels of my best memories.

Williard is a renewable energy consultant in Belmont, California

• Tom Williard
• An elegy for a car brand that was the stuff of many grandparents' dreams — and the wheels of many younger people's best memories