My first car> Regardless of condition, everyone has fond memories of the vehicle that gave them initial taste of freedom

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It’s a milestone like no other, almost eclipsing such revered remembrances as your wedding day or the birth of your first child.

It marked the brief time in your life when you possessed true independence, when the world was truly your oyster, when you finally knew that you were really going places and had the wheels to set your destiny in motion.

Say it quietly to yourself.

“My first car …”

Close your eyes and you are back behind the wheel. You can see every detail of the dash. All of the radio buttons are set on the coolest stations. The gas gauge is on “E,” whether the motor is idling or off. A personalized key ring, for which you spent months searching before you even bought the car, dangles from the ignition. You loved that car, bondo and all. It was as close to nirvana as you will ever get. And some days, if the planets were in the right order and if it wasn’t raining too hard, you could even get it to start.

If Americans are in love with their cars, their first courtship with a Vega or Falcon was blind adulation. Oh, how that first car treated us, always breaking down, barely passing inspection, always taking and taking and rarely giving anything in return. But how we loved it.

A 1959 English Ford Thames, an import minivan, was Stephen McCausland’s real first car, although a same-year English Ford Prefect, about the size of McCausland’s desk, was the one that the Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman used to get his driver’s test in the mid-’60s.

The metallic blue, 12-seater Thames was a great vehicle, McCausland said. Luckily, his father was a mechanic and saw quite a bit of the Thames, for which parts were very hard to come by.

“I toted half of my high school class around town in that thing,” McCausland recalled. “It could seat a dozen people. I tell you it made me a popular guy.”

Years later, McCausland saw a van that looked similar to the Thames in a Brunswick junkyard. Unable to resist, he walked to the van, opened the door and slipped in behind the wheel. He then got out of the vehicle and popped the hood. There, after all these years, were his initials and those of his friends still carved into the roof of the hood.

McCausland has owned dozens of vehicles since then, but the Thames remains a great memory. He even has a picture of the Thames on the wall of his Augusta office.

Mathys Van Dam’s first car was a 1934 Ford convertible. Pittsfield’s recycling coordinator can still remember every detail of the car he drove around Boston as a teen-ager in the 1940s.

“It was black with a white top and had yellow wheels,” he recalled. “The upholstery was brown leather, and it had a rumble seat.”

Back in those days, “you were a rich man if you had a car,” said Van Dam. He drove all over Boston in the car, paying between 15 and 17 cents a gallon to motor his way through the city’s notorious traffic.

Van Dam says the car held a lot of great memories, as did his second car, a 1935 Pontiac in which he courted his wife. The Pontiac was not always as cooperative as the Ford, though, and had to be parked on a Boston hill and allowed to roll before it would start during the winter months, he said.

Karen Allen’s first car was one some of us could only ever dream about having.

“It was a 1979 Ford Mustang, gray with maroon interior,” recalled the assistant to the president at Kennebec Valley Technical College in Fairfield.

Allen’s father bought the car for her while she was a junior in high school in Windham in 1984, and she made weekly payments to dad to reimburse him.

“A lot of people liked to ride with me,” she said, laughing.

There was that day when she first drove the car. “I remember sitting in it for the first time and thinking, `This is great!’ ” Allen said.

She kept that car in great shape, probably better than the upkeep of her present car, washing it every week and having it waxed at least twice a year.

Steve Whitesel, Dexter town manager, remembers his first car, bought in 1959, like it was yesterday.

“Oh, was it a beauty,” he said. “It was a 1938 Chevy coupe, hand-painted gray, with alternately painted black and white louvers. It was just a beautiful car.”

Whitesel’s father bought it for him during his sophomore year in Idaho.

“I’d gotten five A’s and one B on my report card, and my folks decided that I was grown-up enough to have a car. Oh, it was just a gorgeous car. I tell you, I was the envy of my classmates.

“The next semester,” Whitesel said, laughing, “I got five B’s and one A.”

While working at a canning plant, Whitesel let one of his friends borrow the car. It later came back with a cracked windshield, a grinding transmission and a knocking rod. The windshield and transmission were fixable, he recalled, but not so with the rod.

“I still think of that car a lot,” he said. “In fact, I just saw one just like it the other day, and I said, `Hey, that’s my car.’ ”

Whitesel still has pictures of the car back home in Idaho, and to this day, can still remember the first song he heard on the radio, which he had to personally install in the coupe.

“It was `Kansas City’ by Wilbert Harrison. I started it up and that song came on, and, well … I just loved that car.”