Pedallin' my Pontiac ...

One of the (many) reasons I haven’t been blogging as much lately is that I’m trying to develop a new feature that will change some of the character of the blog: people telling stories about important or memorable family cars from their youth.

I don’t have a name yet (any suggestions?) for the feature, but I’m going to get things rolling with a story that’s not about a car at all.

It’s about a pedal car.

A while back I found a photo of me in my old pedal car, a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am 4.9L Turbo, in black with a big red “screaming chicken” decal on the hood. (See this link to Jalopnik.comfor a photo and a brief description.) First of all, how awesome was it that my first pedal-car was a miniature of one of the strangest, most kitchy-awesome 70s cars ever?

Secondly, I loved it. I’d get in it all the time, and I’d refuse to get out. Then I got a little bigger and I would get stuck in it. Which was a pain in the ass for my parents, who would pull me, crying, out of this too-small toy only to have me get back in. Who could resist the pull of the Trans Am? Not me.

One day, on the way up to our lake cabin in my dad’s loaded-to-the-gills pickup, the Trans Am was hit by a gust of wind, and since it wasn’t that well secured, fell off and disintegrated on the highway. I was devastated.

Nonetheless, that car sparked an interest in weird, obscure (and by any objective standard, crappy) cars. And that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.