I had been reading Mechanics Illustrated's Tom McCahill, and Sports Car Graphic since I was in grade school. I had raced go karts on road courses, I liked drag racing and fast muscle cars but there was always something about sports cars that appealed to me. A ride in an early Austin Healy 3000, my old man's friend Ed tossing the keys to his brand new, red '63 Jaguar XKE when I was a senior in high school and saying, "Take it for a drive." And did I. The occasional use of a Corvette off the used car lot. When I was 19, this car happened into my life. It was a revelation.
What I knew about Porsches was what I'd read about Porsches, which was more than most people knew in my home town. My dad had taken it in trade, the car store had $1350.00 dollars in it and that's what I paid for this 1959 Porsche 356a 1600 Super Convertible D. The car sold new in 1959 for over $3,000. It was a steal. I didn't even know the Convertible D was the rarest of the rare. A Speedster with a taller windshield and roll up windows, fewer than 2,000 built worldwide. It was Meissen Blue. Meissen Blue is the color of the fine porcelain china made in Meissen, Germany.
The interior was red leather.
In those days there was no internet, the closest Porsche dealer was in Minneapolis. I was pretty much on my own. I signed up for an SCCA Driving School on the old Brainerd Road Course. I learned some driving lessons and some Porsche lessons as well and made a few Porsche friends, too. That came in handy when the clutch burned out a couple of months later and was told, "Forget the Porsche parts, take to a VW dealer and have them put a Transporter clutch in it, that's what the guys who race them use." I had a front wheel bearing go out, I measured it with a set of calipers, went to the John Deere parts depot and rifled through hundreds of bearings until I found one, I was back on the road the same day.
My Porsche had an Abarth exhaust system, when you wound it up it sounded like an Indy car. It stirred my soul.
The Porsche drove like a dream, it wasn't fast, it simply did what you asked it to do. If you kept the flat 4 in it's sweet spot it was quick and nimble. It went where you pointed it without complaint. The brakes were good, great, for the times, in fact. The cloth top was tight, the fit and finish on the car was perfect, everything worked including the Blaupunkt AM/FM radio with TWO speakers. Too bad the only FM was WDAY FM playing elevator music. CKY and KQWB sounded good on it, so did KOMA and WLS at night.
When you were behind the wheel, you felt like part of the car or the car was part of you. It almost seemed like if I could think it, the car would do it. An Airline Captain friend of mine said the same about the F 16 he flew in the air force.
A social note, the car had reclining seats, so it was decent for parking. One weekend in Bemidji a friend of mine lost his virginity to a BSU sophomore in my Porsche while I drank a flat beer and waited in the rain under a grove of pine trees. I'll never forget their heads hitting the convertible top. Pretty big of me, don't you think?
Porsche built variants of the 356 from 1948 to 1963, the best were the 356a built from 1955 to 1960. Mine, a Convertible D with the 1600 Super engine was only built in 1959, they are very rare. A perfect, numbers matching car like mine is worth close to $400,000 today. Little did I know.
I sold mine to a B 52 pilot, I hope she is still alive and making somebody as happy as she made me.
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