A recent conversation with my 12-year-old son (who in the last year, has discovered that cars, mainly Corvettes, Mustangs and various exotics, exist) got me thinking about the origins of my love for MGB's in particular, and British cars in general. I can faintly recall being driven around in the back (sitting sideways - would we do this nowadays?!) of an MGB Tourer - medium blue in color - owned by a friend's father. This was around the late 1960's or early 1970's, so I would have been anywhere from 8 to 11 years old. I have long ago lost touch with the friend but the memory remains....
In the late 1970's, as I was attending college in Boston, I decided that I would hitchhike from Boston to my parents home in southern New York State. I obviously did not tell my parents how I was getting home from school...! Going home, I was lucky enough to get a ride in a truck almost the entire way. Heading back to school, I was not so lucky. I got a ride from Route 684 to the middle of Hartford (and I DO mean the middle - I was literally dropped at the side of Route 84 just past where Route 91 intersects, a horrible spot with no room for a car to pull over!) and had to wait quite a while until an ancient, creaking Chevy wagon pulled over in the middle of the right-hand lane to pick me up. He was going to the Massachusetts border and had plenty of cold beer - both in his system and in the cooler beside me. He dropped me off at the last exit in Connecticut... where I proceeded to wait several hours for a ride... I started thinking that a sleeping bag would probably be a good thing to have, when a Butterscotch MGB pulled over and offered me a ride to Boston.... Top down, of course! This ride I remember like it was yesterday, 25 years or so later... My father had owned a string of large American convertibles, and owned one at the time, so the 'wind-in-the-hair' feeling was not new - but the lowness, the communication with the road, the agility - these were all new to me. And of course, the sound of the exhaust was incredible!
It wasn't until almost 10 years later, when my wife and I were living in Albany, New York, that I got seriously interesting in buying an MG. We had attended shows over the years, both in the Boston area and Albany, and started looking through the want ads. This was 1988, before the Internet, and I had no idea what to look for. I still have all of my notes on the various cars we looked for. I saw an ad in the paper for a 1976 MGB that 'needed a little work to complete' (we've ALL seen those before, eh?!). It was an overcast day when we went to look at the car. It had recently had bodywork done to it so the Brooklands Green paint was interspersed with many spots of gray primer. All of the exterior body trim was off the car. The Monza-type exhaust had a hole (or several) in the muffler. The car had radial tires mounted on the front and bias-ply snow tires mounted on the rear. (There goes the 'never driven in snow claim!) And the top was up - amplifying every little creak and groan. The good news was the engine had recently been rebuilt. We took the car for a test drive - and after we switched so my wife could drive, I was trying to think of how to get out of this when she turned to me and said 'I think we should buy it!'... So we did!
Making a long story longer, we had the bodywork finished, had it painted and drove it for a year and a half, whereby I proceeded to get hit from behind and pushed into a pick-up truck. Four years (and three homes later) we again had the bodywork repaired and have driven it ever since. It's been incredibly reliable and requires little maintenance. I drive it less than 1,000 miles a year but always try to do at least one 100+ mile trip a year. The rust worm is starting to do some damage, so it looks like more bodywork may be in the future... But that will have to wait, as in August of 2000, I purchased a 1965 MGB Tourer project car that is slowly being taken apart prior to restoration! I plan to return it to original factory condition. That will probably be a whole other story......
