I remember two things about the time my friend Hunter wanted me to come check out a derelict Chevrolet LUV pickup truck with him on a sunny afternoon: one involved riding down a grass hill and nearly garroting myself with barbed wire that I didn’t see until it was too late, and the other was being rather underwhelmed by the object of my buddy’s fixation. I knew what a Chevy LUV was. My stepdad had a few hovering around the property at the time, one dumped low in the weeds mini-truck style that he used as a daily for a couple of years, and a couple of four-wheel-drive versions that came and went. They were raspy, they seemed cheap, they were nothing I cared about back then. Hunter, however, was over the moon, excited at the prospect of dragging home about three thousand pounds of what I considered “bad idea”. Kind of rich coming from the kid whose 1975 Camaro had more rust than the Titanic’s forward deck at the time, I know, but that’s one thing that keeps nagging at the back of my mind: two kids, two cars.

I remember all the shit I got for the Camaro. It was the wrong year. It was the ugly one. It was slow, would never be fast, would never be cool, wasn’t worth the effort. I had one kid in particular take one look of a picture I had of the car, when it was sitting proudest on slot mags, and ask me point-blank if my mother and my father shared parents…and not in those exact words. In 1996, a ragged out ’70s Camaro was only barely above hopeless. In 2020? Have you looked up values lately? Even the shovelnose Camaros are climbing in value, even if you built your own “beater Bumblebee” Transformers clone. And the LUV? Clean ones are doing quite well for themselves and in the age of higher gas prices, a nimble little Mikado 4×4 that’s sorted out would be a neat little pickup truck. Yet back then, it was only our personal likes at kids that made either ride worth anything.

This is why it pisses me off when I hear someone shit all over someone else’s vehicle choice. It’s nothing new…trashing that Model T project as some old flivver that ain’t worth a dime, trashing the DeSoto as some rusting hulk rot-box, the Firebird as a mullet-mobile, or so on and so forth. It’s one thing to have an opinion, but it’s best to remember the analogy that compares an opinion to someone’s fourth point of contact. Take the 1982 Ford Thunderbird that Junkyard Digs recently got to light off after a short sleep. To most of us, it’s a Box Bird. It’s only saving grace is that it’s a Fox body, but it’s the wrong one by a mile. Smog engine, horrible looking, and of course the damage from an incident involving something heavier. If 95% of you saw this car sitting in the pile, you’d look away as if somebody had started playing Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” all of a sudden. But to some kid, the kind who has grown up with crossovers their whole lives, the kind who has been looking for something old they can get into for a few bucks, this could be the car that they link to. Fox body? This? It wouldn’t be Mustang money and they will learn that some of the parts on this car aren’t going to be cheap, like those taillights, but it’s not so far gone that it can’t be fixed.

Remember the AutoZone commercial that came out about ten years ago, where some kid on a dirt road finds a beat-to-hell Ford Gran Torino with a note that says, “If you can fix her, you can have her”? The theme was that the kid busted his ass off to get his own car running on his terms while making the chain look like the angel, saving him every time the car threw another problem the kid’s way. But watch, trust me…complain all you want about most of the youth being uninterested and lazy, but there’s a whole heap of them who are watching YouTube videos that feature vehicle revivals, who are getting inspired to go out and save some derelict from a date with the crusher. This Thunderbird is certainly not my jam and probably isn’t yours. But some kid, somewhere, just sat up and took notice of a car they hadn’t thought of before.