Humans of Downey - George

"My first car was a Volkswagen van. A friend of mine wanted to sell it and he wanted $300. He had done some work on the van to make it more distinctive and he even showed me a photo album of the tickets he had gotten while driving that van. I said, 'That's quite a collection of tickets. When I fix it up, I'll try and not get so many tickets.'

"I was a young kid still in high school and didn't know very much. Early on, I drove it down to Huntington Beach. On my way back home, I blew an oil seal and was blowing a lot of smoke out the back. My oil was pretty dirty and so the smoke was pretty black. It was so thick I couldn't see anything out the back window. I just wanted to get home so I could fix it. But before I got home, the police pulled me over. I didn't know what neighborhood I was in but my friend did. The police gave me a sobriety test and asked me some questions and were giving me a hard time. My friend told me that we were in the 'industrial area'. When the police decided I was harmless and not from that area, they let me go with a warning.

"I went home and ended up selling that van to a junk yard for $100. To this day I regret selling it. It had a pancake Porsche engine and I let it go for $100. What was I thinking? I was told that there will come a lot of women into my life. They will come and they will go and you will never remember them all. But you will always remember your first car."

~ George