Another bad teenage idea: the $113 GTO - Autoweek
I had a minimum-wage after-school job stocking beer fridges and otherwise preparing a herpes-vector singles bar for the night's barely-post-disco-era business, and so I had saved up some cash to buy a project car more interesting than my Corona. I'd considered a '67 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, a Hillman Minx, and a partially-burned '55 Bentley S1, assuming that a real muscle car was far out of reach… but then one of my mother's coworkers gave her husband one day to clear out the... He had paid $112 for it a few years before, and next thing I knew I'd handed over $113 and a tow truck was dropping off my second car in the driveway. In 2015 terms, this would be like a high-school junior getting an E36 M3 or Integra GS-R for 272 bucks (however, American kids in 1983 were far more car-obsessed than they are now, so the impact was all the stronger for me). I felt ten foot tall... The car had come from the factory with a vinyl top, which had been scraped off by a drunk using a hammer and chisel. The seat belts were sliced off crudely, apparently with a rusty machete, the seats were slashed up and smelled like a goat's bladder infection, and years of leaky weatherstripping had saturated the carpets to the point where large mushrooms were... At this time, the students at Alameda High who drove "real" muscle-cars (e. g. , big-block Chevelles, Olds 442s, Plymouth Super Bees) tended to be the football stars and/or those with well-off parents. Source: autoweek.com
