Wendy Kozma, 58, a real-estate agent living in West Bloomfield, Mich., on her 1966 Ford Mustang, as told to A.J. Baime.
I was the youngest of three kids, and my parents promised us kids that if we worked and we could pay for our own gas and insurance, they would help us get a used car when we turned 16.
When I turned 16, my father asked me what I was thinking. “I really want a Mustang, Dad,” I told him.
At the time, the Mustang II of the 1970s was the model I was thinking of. He said, “That’s not a real Mustang.” He thought a Mustang from the first generation of the 1960s would be cooler and would hold its value.
We started searching in newspapers, but the cars we found in Michigan were rust buckets because of the winters and the salt on the roads. That fall and winter came and went, and in the spring, I went on a trip to Mexico with my high school marching band. When I came home on the bus from the airport, I was excited because this was my first time on an airplane and my first time away from home without my parents. When we got to the high school, my parents were there in the parking lot with this car.
