It's a nice day for a white wedding...

[hamondale]

    Still fairly new here, I did an intro post on my bugeye Sprite back on October 10th or so.  (I refer to it as "the Austin," in memory of my Dad, who bought it in 1967 and always called it that.)  Then I did a couple of short posts on youthful hijinx in it.  Now that it's salt season here and the Austin is in for the winter, I'll have some time to post a bit more.  This post is a short one on "the early days."

    I think I mentioned that I drove it my senior year in high school in '72.  Then a couple more years until it started showing the usual rust.  I didn't want to let it go, so I took it off the road and chipped away at it over the next four years while I was in college.  Totally stripped it back to the bare unibody shell.  Then when I got my first job, I was able to turn to the expensive stuff. Building a hot 1275, paying for body work and a paint job, that sort of stuff.  I got it back on the road in the spring of '81.  It looked good and was pretty peppy compared to the 948.

    By that time, I was engaged and we had set a wedding date of Halloween.  No reason other than that was the soonest the church and reception place were available.  I said that if the weather was good, I wanted to drive the Austin in the wedding, from church to a park for pictures, and on to the reception hall.  Patty was all for it - is that a good future wife or what?

   As luck would have it, it was sunny and low 70s on our wedding day, which is unusual for the Rochester NY area.  The first photo here is leaving the church.  She was beautiful and had classic '80s Big Hair.  The route to the park had a half mile four lane grass-down-the-middle boulevard and I hit 80 traversing that.  Big Hair got thrashed.  But her maid of honor had a can of spray in her purse and rebuilt it before the pictures were taken.  (A well prepared woman has emergency hair spray, and a well prepared man has a roll of duct tape.)  Then thrashed again on the way to the reception hall.  The second photo is us leaving the reception hall.

   We had some good years with that 1275, but by then those compact GM 60 degree V6s had come out, and I kept thinking wouldn't that be cool...  So in 1986, I bought one out of a wrecked Chevy Citation X-11 and started down that road.

   Sometime in the next month or so, I'll put together a "How It Was Done."  But my next post will be the story of the years 1986 - 2000 that it was in gestation, and titled, "How It Should Not Have Been Done."  If any of you guys get the Hagerty Drivers Club magazine, you may recall a recent story by Wayne Carini of his saga of buying and restoring a 60s vintage Ferrari.  The Austin has a lot in common with his Ferrari.