The first thing I did after I was discharged from the Marines in 1956 was go car shopping and rather foolishly bought a nine-year old Cadillac just like this one. I was starting college at Clark University in Worcester, MA in less than two weeks (I'd been discharged a month early in order to start college under the G.I. Bill), and I guess I thought I needed a Cadillac to present a proper image. Or something like that...

Mine was maroon and was more like a tank than a car, and what a fun tank it was to be tooling around campus in. A lot of kids showed up in college driving fancy cars their daddies had bought them, but I dug the whole $500 for mine out of my own pocket. It, of course, got terrible gas mileage, but I was generally able to scrape up the 25¢ per gallon it cost to keep it running.

One day, when I had stopped at a stop sign on an icy road. A fellow classmate behind me, driving his father's brand new 1956 Buick, tried to stop on the ice by hauling on the parking brake. How dumb is that! He slammed so hard into the back of my Caddy that my hat went flying into the back seat. Serious damage was done to the Buick, but all my tank suffered was a small dimple in the steel rear bumper. A new bumper would have cost me $75. Since that amount equaled two months' rent for my nice little apartment, I collected the money from the insurance company, ignored the dimple and paid my rent.

Unfortunately, a Cadillac being a luxury vehicle, all repairs were expensive. Cars of that era were always in need of repair.  I sold it for $500 and bought a '48 Willys Jeep wagon for about the same amount. It was also always in constant need of repair, but at least fixing it didn't cost as much.

Roger