1974 Mercury Comet - My First Car

The great life lesson I learned from the purchase of my first car was that you shouldn't settle for something you know deep down inside that you're not happy with. Lucky for me that lesson came from the purchase of a junky car rather than find myself in a junky marriage. That car was this 1974 Mercury Comet and the circumstances behind my purchasing it came down to compromises I made with my parents and most importantly, myself. I owned it for only about 16 months between February 1982 and June of 1983. 

Allegedly an upscale version of the Ford Maverick, the 1974 Mercury Comet I had was Mercury's compact sedan slotted below their "mid-size" Montego. I say "allegedly upscale" since aside from some very minor styling details the Comet I had and the Maverick of the same vintage were all but identical. The best that could be said of them was that their underpinnings were direct descendants of the 1960 Ford Falcon which shared it's very modest chassis with the 1964 1/2 Ford Mustang. Therefore, I actually had a Mustang in drag, right? Oh, the lies we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night.  

I don't have many regrets in life and if I can honestly say I "regret" buying this car, I'd say at my ripened age I've done alright. That said, though, I quickly came to look at that sad little car with the disdain and disgust a terrible father looks upon their son or daughter who's not good at sports. To this day I'm so embarrassed to say that this was my first car that most times when the topic of "first car" comes up in conversation, "Car Guy" here skips over it claiming the car he replaced this with was his first car. As if a 1975 Chrysler Cordoba was anything to brag about but it underscores how much I hated my Comet. 

Had my Comet been a coupe would it have made me feel differently towards it? Had it been a Comet GT like this? Well of course it would have but only to a point. I had so many problems with my Comet that even something as good looking as this could not have ultimately deterred my eventual overwhelming loathing for it. 

More than likely had my Comet been a coupe it would have been something like this and not the sporty looking GT. Coupes were hard to come by back then because everyone wanted them. And with my budget being what it was, beggars couldn't be choosers. Pull the cladding and those horrible wheel covers off, throw on some Cragers, white letter tires and a matte finish rattle can paint job and you may have something here. Might. 

Further compounding my problems finding a suitable first car were inherent challenges back then in car shopping in general. Outside of word of mouth the only way to shop for an inexpensive car was to sift through the classified section of the newspaper or luck out and find something posted on the "community bulletin board" in a super market or library. An arduous, time sucking process that 99 times out of a 100 ended in disappointment. It certainly dissolved any joy of shopping for that "first car". Not unlike marrying someone for all-the-wrong reasons, I settled on the Comet to simply end the searching.