When I graduated from engineering school, I was still driving the Renault I’d borrowed from my dad. I knew he’d soon want his car back, so I bought this Chevy Beretta, which I owned for almost a decade, through some major changes in my life.
I graduated in 1989. Barely — my GPA put me near the bottom of my class. Even so, dozens of my classmates couldn’t hack it and had dropped out. I’d gotten through and had the credential, and it was enough for me.
Despite interviewing all through my senior year, I graduated without a job. The software industry was quite small then compared to now, and economic prospects were down nationwide. Also, being unflinchingly honest, I was a mediocre software developer. Available jobs went to the gifted ones.
I got permission to stay on campus for the summer. My argument to the dean was that I wanted to stay close to the Placement Office, but the truth was I had no interest in going home to South Bend to live with Dad, who could be hard to live with.
In time, through connections at my school, I landed a job at a local software company. But I wasn’t going to be a developer — I was going to be a technical writer. It was an unexpected turn, but I didn’t care. I was happy to be employed.
I wanted a used car, but I had no cash or credit history and no bank wanted to lend me money. Yet Ford, Chrysler, and GM had all sent me letters promising to lend me up to $30,000, calling me a good risk because of my degree.
I was determined to own a coupe, so I test-drove a Tempo, a Sundance, and a Cavalier. I found them all to be crude and flimsy. The Chevy dealer talked me into trying a Beretta despite it being slightly more expensive. It was so much better than that Cavalier — roomier, more comfortable, better built — that it won me over instantly. Never mind the 12 percent interest rate. I needed a car, and this was how I could get one.
I owned the Beretta longer than any car since. I was 22 when I bought it and 31 when I sold it. A lot of life happened in those years.
I was thrilled to own a brand new car, but the monthly payment made me anxious. I’d lucked into a terrific apartment that rented below market, and thanks to financial aid, I’d borrowed a manageable amount to get through school and the payments were light. My car payment was my largest monthly bill by far. At first, my bills and routine expenses took my entire paycheck. I felt quite vulnerable. One stroke of bad financial luck could undo me.
I’d owned the Beretta only a few months when someone sideswiped me.
I didn’t know how insurance worked, and nobody was there to explain it to me. I thought I had to call my insurance company and they’d handle everything. They did, all right, but because I’d called them and not the at-fault driver’s insurance company, they assumed that the accident was my fault. Rather than asking me for a police report to clarify fault, as they should have, they doubled my rate and charged me an instant $600 penalty on top of my deductible. I didn’t know they could do that. Paying that fee drained every penny I had in the bank.
Bills were coming due. I called my parents, but Dad was between jobs and his cabinetmaking business wasn’t producing enough to make ends meet. We were mutually skint. I had to solve this problem on my own.
The solution came in the mail as one of the many credit-card offers I got every week. I’d always ignored them, but now one could be my way through this mess. I figured if I chose a major bank, I’d be okay. The card came shortly. I floated cash expenses like groceries on it while I paid bills as late as I could without incurring fees. I ate nothing but hot dogs and peanut-butter sandwiches, but after a few months I was in the black again.
Oh, how I enjoyed driving the Beretta. It wasn’t powerful — 60 came in about 12 seconds. Yet after the slug-slow Renault, that felt plenty quick. I liked the car’s handling, though I assume now that was because it was new and tight. The Beretta may have been a step up from the Cavalier, but was still a basic economy car.
The Beretta got me to work and the grocery store. But I’d also drive it just to drive. Out into the country I’d go, following back roads just to see where they led. Terre Haute is in Vigo County; its northern neighbor is Parke County, well known for its wooden covered bridges. It was always a thrill to come across one. One particular bridge became a favorite and when I was feeling down I’d go visit it. Read its story here.
The Beretta became my companion for bigger journeys, too. A year into owning it, feeling established in my life, I wanted to work out my relationship with my dad. I wanted to try to steer our relationship from parent-child toward adult-adult. He would always be my father, but I wanted to signal clearly that the game was changing: I wanted us to know each other as men.
I proposed that we drive together to Handley, his West Virginia boyhood home. Just him and me in my brand-new car. I imagined him telling me his childhood stories and us bonding in a new way. Son and father sharing an experience and moving into an exciting new phase of their relationship.
It took a little convincing, but Dad finally agreed.
I didn’t know much about Dad’s childhood then. Strange to remember that now, since he spent the last 20 years of his life telling his stories over and over. Frankly, he had a terrible childhood, one that left him feeling unwanted everywhere he went. His stories helped him make sense of his difficult youth; they gave him peace.
Dad had done none of this work when he showed up at my door that summer day in 1990. It was a straightforward drive — I-70 into Ohio, then US 35 almost to the Ohio River, and then I-64 to Charleston. We shared the driving and took pride in both knowing how to drive a manual. He’d taught me.
As we drove, I played tapes of some of my favorite music. Dad asked if we could listen to talk radio instead. I tried, but couldn’t take it. We spent most of the drive in silence except when Dad criticized my driving.
We roomed in Charleston for the night. The next morning we drove a half hour down Highway 61 to Handley. He showed me the house he was born in and the four-room school he attended. We went way out to Mt. Nebo to find his mother’s sister, Zelta. Dad was Zelta’s favorite nephew. After getting directions at a general store, we found her house and knocked. Zelta opened it, burst into tears, and cried out, “There’s my Jimbo sneezer!” — Dad’s admittedly unusual childhood nickname.
I’m glad we made the trip, but I learned that Dad wasn’t ready to have an adult-adult relationship with me. He didn’t become ready until more than 25 years later, near the end of his life. It started with the purchase of what turned out to be his last car. I’ll tell about it when the time comes in this series.
A year or two later, I took the Beretta on another long journey. Even though driving the Pinto that one summer had helped me overcome most of my driving anxiety, Interstates were still a little frightening to me and I avoided them. I decided to face that fear head-on with a week-long trip that forced me to drive them. I visited friends in Detroit, Toronto, and northern New Jersey, and then headed home.
It was great to see my friends, and equally great to finally become comfortable on major highways. But I did have the greatest scare of my entire driving history on this trip.
I was bored with I-70 by the time I crossed into Ohio. When I saw an exit for US 40 at St. Clairsville, I took it. I knew US 40 would take me all the way home if I let it.
I regretted it almost immediately. I wasn’t amused by all the stoplights in St. Clairsville or the fellow in front of me driving 15 miles per hour under the speed limit. I got out my big Rand McNally atlas (which seems downright quaint now) and looked for a way to get back onto I-70. It showed that US 40 merged onto I-70 ten or so miles ahead, just past Morristown. It showed that the road widened to four lanes a few miles ahead of the merge.
The slowpoke turned off. In relief, I put my foot into the gas pedal. I reached an intersection where signs said to turn left to reach I-70, which puzzled me. I blew past them, eager to drive the four-lane US 40 just ahead.
I had the highway to myself. A rusty guardrail divided the eastbound and westbound lanes. Then I passed a road sign covered in black plastic, and then another. Was the road closed? Had I missed a detour? But I was cruising happily at 65 miles per hour and let my concerns roll off my back.
Then I rounded a curve and found myself staring right into a hillside. With no warning, the road ended right at its base! I slammed on the brakes and stopped just feet from the end.
Rand McNally was wrong. US 40 didn’t merge onto I-70 here; rather, I-70 was built on top of US 40, at least 30 feet up. This four-lane section of US 40 had been decommissioned!
I returned to the scene of my fright 20 years later. Here’s the old highway at its dead end. I’m told that the road is pretty much always flooded here now. Also, the dividing guardrail was removed at some point.
Back in Terre Haute, life settled into a rhythm. My college radio experience helped me land a part-time gig on the air. I worked two years at the city’s flagship AM station — news on the hour, middle-of-the-road music the rest of the time. I went on to two years at a rock station. Great fun, and I’m glad I got to have that experience. If you’re curious, you can hear me on the air here.
I integrated into the city — made friends, built a social life. I started attending church. There I met the woman I’d marry.
Meanwhile, things weren’t going well at the software company. We’d lost a huge customer and were struggling to recover. I feared the company wouldn’t survive. There were no other software jobs in Terre Haute. To keep my career going, I’d have to move to Indianapolis.
While driving to an interview in Indy, my little car crossed the 100,000 mile mark. I pulled onto the shoulder of I-70 to photograph it, but my point-and-shoot camera couldn’t focus closely enough and this is what I got. But at least I have the memory of it.
I did move to Indianapolis in 1994, and I did marry the woman in 1995. I got a terrific stepson out of the deal. We made a home together and I kept driving the Beretta. We soon learned we were expecting our first child. I brought that baby home from the hospital in the Beretta in 1997.
(From here on out I will write about my stepson as my child, as he was in every way that matters. But also, it’s important to say that as an adult, he transitioned to live as a woman. I have her permission to refer to her as him, and as son rather than daughter, when telling stories from before the transition.)
Lots of little things went wrong with the Beretta. The windshield-wiper motor burned out. I replaced shocks and mufflers over and over. The most frustrating failure was the ignition rack, a short piece of pot metal that connects the ignition switch to the starter solenoid — a weak point on Berettas. It snapped in half one day when I tried to turn off the car. I had to pop the clutch and stall it.
Yet even after the Beretta crossed the six-figure mark, it always got me where I wanted to go. Given GM reliability in this era, I did all right with my Beretta.
When we learned we were expecting our second child in 1998, suddenly my Beretta wasn’t enough car anymore. It was time to buy a family car.
I was okay with that. The Beretta had rolled past 150,000 miles by this time and had grown very tired. It was time to say goodbye. I replaced it with a station wagon. I’ll tell its story next time.
Related CC Reading
Curbside Classic: 1989 Chevrolet Beretta – Latchkey Kid
Curbside Classic: 1996 Chevrolet Beretta – A Dash Of Sportiness
That’s a sharp car. I rented a few of the 4 door version’s Corsicas back in the day. I enjoyed them until that unfortunate dash redesign late in their run. Good highway cruiser.
That makes me mad your insurance company did that to you, but doesn’t surprise me. That’s one fault of the education system even today, is they don’t teach much about dealing with banks, credit, insurance companies, employers, sales people, the criminal justice system and other important real life things one should know about. Algebra won’t help you there, except for maybe understanding the concept of negative. I’m trying to do do so with my children, but they think their old man is prone to exaggeration and confabulation.
Even my parents couldn’t teach me how to handle this as they hadn’t been in an accident since 1966 and things worked differently then.
There really does need to be education on things like this. I taught my sons a lot from my hard-won life experience, or at least I explained it to them. Here’s hoping that when they need it they remember.
Had an ’88 with the V6. Surprisingly good manually multi-adjustable seats. Mystified why they weren’t offered on more GM’s. It was roomy, comfortable, and for the era attractively styled outside and inside. Unfortunately had the gimmicky electronic gauges. But overall bang for the buck. And no other badge engineered version in the GM stable.
I’ve seen a lot of comments about this, and with high schoolers still at home, I know that many states now are requiring financial literacy classes. At my kids’ school they are teaching about banking, insurance, retirement accounts, warranties and taxes. It almost reminds me of a business law class I took in high school.
There was a lot of living and growing up done in that Beretta. Ten years felt more like an eternity at that age to me.
My father was remote too (to put it mildly). My solution was to leave home at 18 and move far away. Eventually he had to accept the fact that I had made a success out of my life, but he never really got over the fact that none of his five kids didn’t follow his footsteps and become academics of some sort. The reality is that would have been even worse, as he’s have been second guessing our work even more scrupulously.
But eventually he came to accept realities as they were.
You writing about your father over the years emboldened me to write about mine. He’s a thread through this series, right up until he passes in 2018.
It’s saddening that it took your father so long to accept.
I liked the Beretta being a constant in those years. Especially after I paid it off. It was a fairly reliable runner – minor issues here and there, but total cost of annual repairs was way less than a new car payment, so I kept going.
Jim, this is a well-told story — with a relaxed air of acceptance to the many moments in life that can drive our way. It’s not necessary to write Profiles in Courage to be a good writer; you need to connect with the reader, and you do that well — with a particular sensitivity to the connection between cars and every day life. Cheers.
What a great compliment, and I thank you.
It’s the truth Sir .
You’re an excellent wordsmith .
-Nate
Another wonderful Jim Grey story, if another not altogether pleasant one. Like you I did not graduate at the top of my engineering class. I did clear the bar though, and my dream of working in the auto industry morphed into the dream of having a reasonably interesting job that paid the bills.
Luckily I still have a good relationship with my father, but my late mother was very hard on me. I can still hear her shouting “Oooh you rotten kid!” when I’d messed up in some way, which was not true. Before she passed she told me she was proud of the man I’d become, so that’s as good as it gets I suppose.
Also luckily I had enough support from my parents that I graduated with minimal debt and was able to piece together a used car from a family castoff, rent a tiny apartment and launch my life. Lack of support for young adults is a real issue now with the high cost of education, and living in general.
You and I get each other, brother. It took me a minute to figure out that plenty of good times can be had in a career that I might not have charted the way it was going.
OMG to be called a rotten kid by a parent! That’s awful.
I’ll write more about it in a future article, but we’ve had to support several of our kids as they’ve tried to launch into independence. It’s a different time for sure than when you and I did it.
My situation was never as dramatic, but my adult relationship with my father was never all I wanted it to be either. I salute you for making this effort, which was more than I ever did. I’ll always wonder if it might have been better if I had made more effort than I did.
The Beretta – I don’t think I was ever inside of one. I salute you for making the kind of commitment to a car that I considered the ideal (yet could never make myself do).
I made the effort and kept being frustrated.
I considered adding to this story the time I almost bought a VW Corrado to replace the Beretta. The Corrado was super nice. It was an automatic, but I could forgive that because it was fast. What kept me in the Beretta was that it was paid off, or almost paid off. I didn’t love the idea of more debt. That was a guiding principle for me for a long time.
Great story, Jim. I also bought my first (and to this day, only) new vehicle in 1989 and remember those interest rates well!
Did the encounter with the end of US-40 help trigger your interest in old roads? Or had it already begun to manifest itself?
My inner roadgeek had not begun to stir at that time. But remembering this situation was a part of me deciding to explore the old roads, when I eventually did.
Here’s the full story of when I went back to visit that place in Ohio. You can see just how badly I-70 carved up US 40 in this part of that state.
https://blog.jimgrey.net/2022/11/18/the-national-road-in-ohio-old-alignments-in-belmont-county/
Knowing nothing about Ohio – is this the spot? West of Morristown where US 40 joins I-70 – IF you turn.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Morristown,+OH/@40.0585997,-81.1211706,334m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x88366eb4246cd7f1:0xd0a3db89d39d712c!8m2!3d40.0631256!4d-81.0742676!16zL20vMHl0MXo?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTIwOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
That’s the place.
I’m reasonably sure I’ve been here in the past. I remember diverting onto US 40 west of St. Clairsville back when we had our 1979 VW Rabbit and only our first son. I think we needed to change his diaper and decided to continue on 40 until we had to get back onto I-70 — didn’t miss the turn!
Your Beretta story has some parallels to my Ford Contour SVT. I bought it (used) up finishing graduate school, and it saw me through quite a few life changes in the decade that I owned it: Moving, dealing with job struggles, getting married, having kids. I never could have imagined that when I drove off the dealer’s lot in 1999. Eventually, it developed a few big problems simultaneously, and we needed a bigger vehicle anyway, so we got rid of it in favor of a minivan. But I always think fondly of that car.
I appreciate your candor in your stories about your dad. Your line of “We spent most of the drive in silence” hits home for me. When I was 16, my father and I took three weeks and drove cross-country. We enjoyed ourselves, though it was mighty awkward since we didn’t have much (aside from cars) to talk about, so… yep, most of the time we drove in silence. But somehow it was good silence. I remember after returning home, my mom asked what my dad and I talked about for three weeks – and quite honestly, I responded “Nothing.”
That’s an amazing story about the US-40 dead end – hard to believe there weren’t tons of signs. Good thing you weren’t driving at night!
OMG if I had been driving at night I would have just hit the hill.
I wish the silences with my dad had been pleasant rather than uncomfortable. I really wanted to be close to him. We couldn’t figure it out. I know Dad wanted a relationship on his terms, and I probably did then too, and the gap was too wide.
Another excellent chapter, Jim. You’ve packed so much goodness into this chapter and series overall.
Having spent some time in West Virginia, I particularly enjoyed the part about traveling to (a placed called) Mt. Nebo to meet someone named Zelta and to hear your dad called by his his decidedly local childhood nickname. That’s got to be a priceless memory that I’m glad you shared.
It’s a memory that’s burned into my mind, and I’m glad for it. Despite not achieving my goal with Dad, I’m glad we went to WV and I should have said so in the article. Another good memory is that Dad booked a night for us at Hawk’s Nest, and we took our breakfast in a dining room with sweeping views of the hills.
A wonderful story that I enjoyed much. Back in the day I thought the Beretta was a good looking car, and still good looking today. Our stories are slightly similar in context. I went to college, Dad was controlling and we disagreed where I should be going to college, I dropped out for a few years. When I returned to college, without his support (even though he offered), I was going to be in control. When in college, I fell in love, gifted a new 1976 Eldo conv., went to visit Dad and he never asked where I got the car, as by this time I was out of the closet. On one visit Dad said lets go for a drive, and we drove around North Carolina where he grew up. I have no idea why he wanted to visit these places. What I have learned his father was a mean drunk during the depression, nine kids. My grandfathers wholesale farm products business did take off during the depression but the family was never well off.
So I had that short road trip with my Dad in my Eldo visiting his childhood memories. I had my Eldo from 1975-85, and so many wonderful road trip memories with the man that became my one and only. We were together for 20 years and for ten of those years we had experiences with that Eldo.
Heck I would do guy stuff right now for a new Caddy!
OK for a Blackwing at least.
That sounds like a really good and important trip with your dad, and I’m glad you got to take it — in an Eldo, no less!
Conceptually, I really liked the Beretta. Chevy could have just made a tiny effort to build a 2-door Corsica, but they actually put in a full effort and built something unique for what was, at the time, a shrinking market, the personal coupe.
IKR? It was extra, at a time when Chevy didn’t often do extra, and in this case probably didn’t need to.
Nice to hear your stories, mine are not overly dissimilar but at the flat broke Blue Collar end of the spectrum .
It’s good you were able to make that bridge with your father, I never was although in his last few years we corresponded by E-Mails a lot, as a geezer (70) my ownself now I wish I could talk to him, I can see he loved me and tried in his own miserable way that mostly pushed us ever further apart .
I still vividly remember my initial driving experiences, exhilarating but also a bit scary, I had no one to teach me anything .
Those long drives just to see where the road goes, I still do them .
Paper maps will never, _EVER_ be obsolete to those who love to drive / ride .
Thank you for taking us along, I’m off to read your related comments .
-Nate
Thanks Nate, glad you’re along for the ride.
Well I do have a Beretta story, from the early 90s….. My first NEW new car had been wrecked (Grand Am SE H.O.Q4 stick, not my fault) and I was driving a base 4 cyl Beretta rental, white with blue interior. I would only own cars with the highest available engine and would not even consider a base model, but I recall rather enjoying that car overall. It was comfy and solid.
Comfy and solid does describe the Beretta well, and is why it was my choice over the Cavalier, Tempo, and Sundance.
Quick and fast do not describe the Beretta well, as you experienced, especially with the automatic. I got a loaner Beretta automatic after a fender bender and … it was terrible.
I foolishly didn’t take the ‘Home Economic’ class when I was in high school, I surely wish now I had done so as learning the basics on your own on the fly isn’t the best way =8-^ .
-Nate
You’re in great company. A lot of “life 101” classes weren’t offered in high school at my age, and the ones that were available were eschewed. We DID have to do something called “the economic game” as seniors, but there was no instruction on HOW to do Personal Finance 101, and all I learned was to never get married without a prenup, given a little thing called divorce.
Pre-nup is a fine idea in hindsight — my first marriage lasted all of 4 years and we didn’t have huge assets but it still represented massive expense and hassle. Having 3 kids in that short time certainly added to it. Wonderful kids, all now in College, but I do remind them how expensive they are LOL
I love my kid with all my heart and I’m glad we’ve had a wonderful relationship over these past 25 years of her life. But her nickname alternates between Ferrari and Beach House. Thank god she has a sense of humor.
I did take one Home Ec class in school and had some cooking basics under my belt. But that class taught nothing about life skills beyond the kitchen
I’m glad to report from the trenches that a common high school class nowadays is one that is roughly (i.e., different names in different places) named “Adulting”. This is a class that focuses on a lot of the social emotional skills – such as how to talk to people outside of social media – and really basic stuff like reconciling bank balances with debit card withdraws (which in a former world we called “balancing your checkbook”) – that are otherwise not transmitted to young people through the cultural zeitgeist…which is how society used to reliably assume that this stuff was communicated. But given that our cultural zeitgeist is now mostly nonsense and otherwise controlled by forces that are actively and purposefully counter to common sense, simply does not exist.
Every high school student needs an Adulting 101 course.
As for Dads, sounds like we all have some issues there. Love them of course, but there are challenges. For the past couple years the relationship has been very distant since mine has been shacked up with a woman who is not my Mom. No they aren’t divorced, he’s just living in a different house maybe 15 minutes away. Not seeing his grandchildren, etc. He does go over and take care of the large lawn for her, which I guess is nice – otherwise I or my boys would probably be doing it.
Now about your insurance incident – I am trying to understand how during the course of the rate hikes and surcharges it never came out that it was the other guy’s fault! I mean 3 minutes after that hit my mailbox (no Email back then) I’da been blowing up the phones of both my agent AND the corp. office setting the record straight! Not to mention letting the other guy off the hook is simply not in my DNA.
Oof, I’m sorry that’s the reality of the situation with your dad.
I didn’t understand FOR YEARS that my insurance company considered me at fault. I just assumed that this was how this worked and I had to suck it up.
That is brutal, and your insco no doubt MORE than made up for the payout because the damage doesn’t look bad at all 8^(
Kinda like casinos, the house always comes out on top.
Jim, this was a delightful story, wonderfully told!
I can relate on so many levels. However, unlike you and many others commenting here, my father died from leukemia when I was only 2 years old, so I have no direct memory of him, sad to say. My mother was overly protective of my younger brother and me, and only when I went away to college did I learn to become reasonably independent. Then at age 25 I got married, which really helped in that department. Unfortunately, my mother never took a liking to my wife until my mom’s last few years, so that became a constant sore point.
I grew up in Pittsburgh, and we had relatives in Wheeling, West Virginia, so I am familiar with US 40 and I-70, the latter as it was being built in stages between Washington, PA and Wheeling in the 1960s. Later, when I attended graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington, I became familiar with I-70 in both Ohio and the eastern half of Indiana.
Then after marriage, when we visited my wife’s parents in Indianapolis, we eventually found that the most efficient route was to use I-64 from our home in Charlottesville, Virginia to Charleston, West Virginia, where we took US 35 into Ohio to I-70 in Dayton, and then continued on to Indy on I-70.
Still, US 40 in eastern Indiana was a pleasant diversion, with much less traffic, a 60-mph speed limit and 4 lanes on the rural stretches, and picturesque towns to pass through. The photo below shows a group celebrating their 50th high school reunion as we passed through Knightstown, Indiana in 2007. Several other 1957 cars were parked at their venue.
Oh, and one other similarity — my college and graduate school major was astronomy, but I never found a job in that field. I ended up at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, where I had a (mostly) wonderful career over 40 years, now retired.
Thank you 210delray for that recollection! And I hope that you’ve found a place for your studies in astronomy regardless of whether it had anything to do with your career.
You’re quite welcome, Jeff! Now that I’m retired, I go out nearly every clear night to look at the stars and planets as well as the moon. I also look out the east windows when I happen to wake up in the wee hours to see what’s coming up.
Thank you for sharing these memories! It’s been a few years since I’ve been through Knightstown but a buidling still contained at that time a number of 1957 automobiles.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mobilene/51430185757/
You’re welcome Jim! Yes, we discovered that building on a later trip, and it housed many of the same cars we saw at that reunion. What a cool way for the owners of the cars to store and display them!
Your photo shows they were still there in 2021.
Jim, great read. An optimistic thought on AI & your experience as a young man with insurance claims.
Elon Musk has an alternative to Wikipedia which has become WOKE, try Grokipedia.com and search ‘dealing with automobile insurance claims’.
Dave
How in heaven’s name has anything attached to Elon Musk become woke?
He’s saying Wikipedia is woke (according to Elon). Either way…
My father died at 45 of cancer just before my 11th birthday. I didn’t always find him easy to relate to. I regret that I never got to relate to him adult to adult. From the stories I heard about him, I suspect he had a lot going for him on that level.
I was a Big Brother in the 90s to a young man who lost his father to cancer. I have empathy for what you went through in that loss as a result. My Little Brother’s song for his father was “In the Living Years.”
I always enjoy your writings, Jim, and I have been following your blog for a few years now. I had an 88 Beretta, with the 2.8L v6 and automatic. It had those same steel 14 inch wheels, which I swapped out for a pair of 15 inch honeycomb wheels from a Beretta GT (had a slight rubbing upon hitting large bumps in the road). It was a decent car for us too, but we experienced the dreaded ‘basecoat/clearcoat delamination’ whereby huge chunks of the paint blew off. Fortunately a kindly Chevy service manager clued us in on the secret password, and GM repainted the car for us. I was very satisfied with the results.
Keep up the good work!
I only had delamination on the door that was sideswiped. By this time the Beretta was old and tired, and I didn’t care anymore.
Back in the day, on a Lark, I test drove a Baretta, a well equipped V-6. My VW Jetta was giving me all kinds of trouble and I was thinking of getting rid of it. First all came price. The Jetta was $9200, but the Baretta was, get this, $13,500. The Baretta didn’t drive nearly as nicely as the VW, either. I ended up passing on the Baretta. Not long after, I sold the VW because I wanted to finish my undergrad degree.
I remember the V6 Beretta being surprisingly expensive as well.
Late to comment but this was a very enjoyable read. While I never rode in a Beretta, one lady I worked with had well over 200k on hers.
So many fathers can be so perplexing. A while back I was having to have a profoundly blunt conversation with an employee, who started blaming his bad behavior on his father. While I did not take well to that, it did make me wonder how prevalent the phenomenon truly is. I’m thinking it is scary prevalent.
200k on a Beretta! She must have gotten one built on Monday.
Nature and nurture shape us concretely. Then we spend the rest of our lives either behaving in the ways we were made and conditioned, or continually working to be better people.
Great story. Thanks for sharing. I am very thankful for my own parents especially after hearing stories of the ones others have had.
I’ve always thought the Berettas were good looking cars. Definitely a cut above a Ford Tempo or Dodge Shadow, both of which I have had lots of a seat time in.
My parents were on the balance good parents. Dad could just be a hard man, needlessly so, as he raised good sons.
I’m late to this one, but this was beautifully written – I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were so many points to ponder, including precarious finances, being an adult child and navigating family, overcoming fears, and not least of all, the subject car.
I never saw the still-beautiful Beretta as in the same class as the subcompact Cavalier, but rather as the “Nova” or compact coupe of the ’80s and ’90s.
Very much looking forward to your next entry.
That’s a great way to look at the Beretta — the Nova to the Cavalier’s Chevette.
Almost tempted to have said “Go west young man” meaning Northern California where software engineering resided. That was then but not now as AI will eliminate that soon enough.
My job search was nationwide and if a software company in the Bay, or even in Butte, Montana, had offered me a job, off I would have went. That I started my career in Terre Haute, Indiana, was 100% due to connections at the school I attended in that city.
Really enjoyed reading your story, Jim. Those long road trips and the ups and downs of early adulthood definitely brought back some memories for me.
I can relate—I also struggled to find work in the early ’90s after graduating with a BEE from Georgia Tech during the first Gulf War. I ended up selling long-distance phone plans door-to-door for MCI before getting into the grad engineering program at the University of Michigan. I financed (aka racked up debt) my way through and landed my first job at EDS, working in a GM powertrain plant in Romulus, MI.
The weekend before I started, I bought my first car—a brand new Honda Civic. I’m pretty sure my boss wasn’t thrilled when I showed up in it, but honestly, GM just didn’t have anything that could compete with the Civic at the time. For the price, it was more affordable, more reliable, got better gas mileage, and was built in Ohio. Plus, it had a manual transmission!!
And since then, I’ve never owned a car that wasn’t made by Honda.
Thanks for sharing your memories—brought back a lot of my own.
You chose wisely with that Civic.