My Favorite Ride: An Armenian immigrant’s 1964 Pontiac Tempest lived on

Laura Lane

The Herald-Times

Almost everyone has a story about their first car. Mine, not so great: I inherited the family station wagon, a blue 1968 Pontiac Catalina with a pointed nose out front and a back-facing rear seat.

Krista Hollenberg-Cussen has a much better story about her first car, also a station wagon and a Pontiac. She told it to me, so I’ll tell it to you. This column includes an advertisement in my collection for an early-1960s Tempest. A cool convertible, not a utilitarian station wagon.

They don’t make car ads like this one, for a Pontiac Tempest, anymore.

She was living in Boston and dating a man named Arsen Mikaelian, known as Mick. He bought a van to drive cross country to California, where he intended to break into the restaurant business.

He would have to leave his late father’s 1964 Pontic Tempest station wagon behind. Instead of selling the car, he offered it as a gift. “It had 82,000 miles and was pretty rusted and banged up, but the V-8 engine was in great shape,” Hollenberg-Cussen said this week. “It was smaller than other station wagons of the time.”

The Tempest’s original owner was Haig Mikaelian, an Armenian immigrant who painted houses to support his family. He had special-ordered the car with heavy-duty springs to support the weight of his painting ladders on the station wagon’s roof.

“Sadly, his father died on the job, in a fall,” Hollenberg-Cussen said. Her boyfriend, a mechanic, had held onto the vehicle and kept the engine in top shape to honor his father’s memory.

“When I decided to go back to Indiana, he wanted me to have his beloved Pontiac,” she recalled. A thousand miles later, the car was in Bloomington. “I drove it for six years, putting 22,000 more miles on it, until my parents decided it was time for me to have a more reliable car.”

By then, the Tempest was 16 years old. The body was in terrible condition, she said, there were wiring and electrical issues and the tail gate wouldn’t open.

“I was going to Alaska that summer for a job and left the Pontiac at my parents’ house. My mom said that when I got back the car wouldn’t be there.”

And it wasn’t. “My mother sold it at a garage sale for $80 to an old man who wanted it to haul his fishing gear,” Hollenberg-Cussen said.

She was fond of the car, had enjoyed driving it and was sad to see it go.

And what became of the old boyfriend? “Mick moved to California after I went back to Indiana. He wanted to own and operate a restaurant. I’m not sure if he realized that dream or not.”

Cars, and people, have a way of coming and going in our lives. Too often we don’t know where they end up.

Hollenberg-Crussen’s next car was a 1966 Mercury Commuter, a full-size station wagon produced from 1957 to 1968. It was a present from her next boyfriend. Really.

(An aside: Hollenburg-Cussen confided that between various boyfriends and family members, she didn’t actually purchase a car until she was 48 years old and bought a used 1984 Toyota Corolla.)

While she appreciated the Mercury Commuter, it was a beast that she described with the word “ugly.” “He got it from an older man who lived down the street whose children had forbidden him from driving any longer,” she said. “It was so ugly, and the man had wrecked the front end a little bit.”

The car was baby blue, she said, with a turquoise-colored doghouse engine cover. “This was around 1980, I think, and the car had just 21,000 miles on it. It looked really bad so I got a cheap Earl Scheib paint job.”

(For the uninformed, Earl Scheib was a man whose company was famous nationwide for painting cars at a low cost — from $19.95 in the early days to to $99.95 as the years went by. Most locations had closed by 2009.)

Since she bought that used Corolla, Hollenberg-Cussen has been stuck on Toyotas. She’s owned a few Corollas and Camrys, and is now behind the wheel of a Prius.