Media | Articles
Picture Car Confidential #8: My Favorite Car, Part One
Tell people you write about cars, run a picture car company, and own forty of the infernal wheeled things, and they’ll often inquire, with a smile, “What’s your favorite?” Though not unreasonable, it’s kind of a trick question, since the people who might really care to know your answer tend to already be some stripe of car persons with opinions of their own. Soon enough, they’ll ask, “What cars do you own?” You start to tell them, then they get to bore on about their cars, and the next thing you know it’s a regular hoedown, trading car facts, stories, and opinions. You meet some mighty knowledgeable and friendly folks that way.
Of course, many posing the question don’t care about cars and aren’t really interested in the answer. They ask anyway, reflexively, a normal and well-meaning human attempt to connect. In fairness to them, you soon learn, it’s best to keep your reply short. Lose the tortured explanations, philosophical asides, and watered-down, if still heartfelt, musings about favorite old cars; they’ll be lost on your listeners. Distill all the thought and emotion the question might trigger into a single, firm answer. Otherwise, you’ll talk too much. And discussing cars with the general disinterested public is like appearing on TV news: Keep it simple, or wind up on the cutting room floor. Don’t sound like the blowhard you really are.
Following this advice, I confidently tell people that my favorite car is my first love, the MGA. Here, among like-minded individuals, though, I confess it’s more complicated than that. We’ll get to that in another column.

Meanwhile, make no mistake: The A remains dear to me, and my low mileage, all-original 1962 1600 Mk. II roadster is aces. Sometimes I really do feel that if I had to sell all my cars—and one day we all must—this could be the last one to go. Because, for me, the MGA was always the first. As those who read the “MG at 100” piece I wrote for Hagerty may recall, an MGA was the formative sportscar in my life. My first ride in a car was in one—a black 1500 my parents had bought the previous year— headed home from Brooklyn Jewish Hospital a few days after being born.
An MGA also became the first car I ever bought, in 1972, a ’57 that had suffered an unscheduled engine fire with its previous owner, allowing us to acquire it for $50. (“Us” being a consortium of four ninth graders who each tossed in $12.50, which in my case constituted my entire net worth, much of it in coins.)
Marketplace
Buy and sell classics with confidence
Arranging to have the charred but not inoperable patient delivered to an empty wooden garage unused by a neighbor, we then spent months cleaning and readying the car so it might run again. Dan Marx, Bob Klapisch, and I worked under the surprisingly able direction of our sensei and uncontested project manager, 15-year-old Peter Voorhees. He had the good fortune to have an engineer father who well understood the workings of the internal combustion engine and passed them on, while the rest of us arrived deeply in the dark, with fathers and mothers who knew not from combustion, much less the mysteries of generators, voltage regulators, starter solenoids, brakes, kingpins and so on. Hence, Peter did most of the thinking and delicate work, while the rest of us did the degreasing and parts hunting, finding a convenient old MG parts supplier in the then relatively new Moss Motors of Goleta, California, still in business today selling replacement parts for little British cars that some still make fun of. Not me.

Living in Leonia, New Jersey, by then the U.S. headquarters of British Leyland, one necessarily ran the risk of automotive Anglophilia. A high percentage of the cars that would pass by our schools were Midgets, Marinas, and Austin Americas. If that wasn’t enough to make you feel a loyal team player, we were only a five-minute drive from the Jos. Lucas American HQ in Englewood, New Jersey, which had its own parts counter. I remember paying $17 for a distributor there and gasping at the nerve of these people. And that was before I learned that they were already the butt of a vast catalog’s worth of jokes. That both Lucas and Leyland would be gone within a few years hadn’t yet occurred to me.
That MGA taught me what all the bits under the hood were called and for what systems they toiled. I did some occasional light wrenching, which proved useful in the long run. The countdown to blastoff had begun. But just when we were about to ignite the inline-four for the very first time in a long time, someone came along and gave us $125 for the car, then promptly proceeded to cut its body in half before our eyes.
Three years shy of receiving my driver’s license, the money won. But it made for a bittersweet occasion. The MGA bug had burrowed under my skin.
Aged 15, I still didn’t have a driver’s license when I bought the first car I’d ever buy all by myself. It was the first of four 1600 Mk II MGAs I’d own, this one the last-year 1962 runout model with a more powerful 1622cc motor, different taillights, and a recessed grille.

It helps to understand here that I’d been working for months as a stock clerk in an office machine store, an occupation I really wasn’t cut out for. It was a wild place. Some of the store’s copious mechanical offerings in those pre-computer days were so obscure I never did fathom their function. But with duties including inventorying paper clips and rubber bands—by size, mind you—to say the job was stultifying dull would be to overstate its inherent interest. Pay was lousy, benefits were nil, and new vistas of boredom such as I’d never experienced presented themselves daily. Alas, the new ones were as monotonous as the old ones. Still, I managed to save $250.00 before I got fired and, because the money felt so very hard-won, I couldn’t bring myself to spend it. Many months passed, during which I held the funds close, until I finally found a way to blow it all: an MGA for sale in my town. I went to see it and snapped it up for asking price.
Painted an orange-y red to Earl Schieb’s most economical standard several years prior, it had begun life 12 years earlier as an Iris Blue car. It ran, just, but time had been a cruel mistress. Bad paint. Rusted sills. Comprehensively fried interior. Check, check, check. An ominous rattle piped up from below when my pal, Jim Travers, took me out for an uninsured test drive. (Given that I didn’t know how to drive and didn’t have a license, that seemed to make sense.) Being a year older than me, Jim had both a license and an uncanny ability to identify any car at dusk down to the model year by looking at its taillights, which made him an across-the-board, full-service expert in my book. That rattle? Probably a faulty speedometer cable, he theorized. A bit too hopefully, as it turned out; the transmission locked up along with my rear wheels on a furtive sortie with me, the new owner and still unlicensed driver, at the controls a month or two later.
Before I knew it, I was involved in a body off semi-restoration of the car—getting high school credit, fortunately—and pulling the transmission for a rebuild in a nearby shop. ($75 labor and $124.00 for a new cluster gear, which was almost as much as the car had cost!.) I learned so much that it prepared me for a graduate degree in the same field, that is, learning the hard way how not to do things, how not to buy and fix cars, and how to spend too much money doing so. Yet most of all what it taught me was the underlying, eternal excellence of the MGA.

How so? The way it looks, the way it sounds, the way it drives. Vaguely quick for its day, it imparts a sense of speed that even today is magnified by the sounds it makes, as do the cut-down doors with their side curtains removed 98 percent of the time. An MGA still holds its own in traffic, its rorty exhaust a constant companion along with the mellifluous sound of twin SU carburetors hoovering air. Steering is the most direct one could ask for and full of feel, a short-throw gearbox among the best I’ve ever encountered, front disc brakes that brought stopping into the modern era, and a surprisingly amusing chassis.
Though the only thing I had to compare it to was my parents’ Volvo wagon and my friends’ old Darts and Buick Specials, I thought it was great then and I still do. Even today, when driving on the interstate and dwarfed by elephantine SUVs captained by distracted moms and dope fiends, I have every misplaced confidence in the MGA. These are among the reasons I’ve owned one since I was 14, save short intervals totaling maybe three years.

The MGA became the blueprint in my mind of how cars worked. Looking under the hood as I first got to know it, everything seemed perfect the way it was. I learned the name of all that was to be found in the engine bay, where it was and what it did. Sure, I’d come to wonder sometimes why three wildly inaccessible bolts were assigned to a job where perhaps one would have done, but the car was solid.
I’m not saying that road salt couldn’t kill the metalwork or that you wouldn’t freeze in winter. The Smiths heater is valiant in failure, but not up to much. Among hundreds of memories, I remember driving my battle-scarred MG in winter in NYC during college, carrying my Ampeg Gemini II amplifier to practices with the crappy band I was in. With the top up, it barely fit in the seat next to me. Nor will I ever forget the smell of warm vacuum tubes mixing it up with the ever-present aroma of wet, decaying leather, decomposing wool carpet and damp plywood (aka the floorboards.) Strangely intoxicating stuff. But the sheer fun of blasting down winding roads made it worth more to me than the price of admission (which it certainly cost me). It even made my next job, as a teenaged delivery boy for a no-name fried chicken chain, bearable, weather permitting. As I discovered, nobody likes wet fried chicken.
The crappiness of my first MGA and the less than perfectness of my next two (one bought for quick resale when I was in law school) is what made the all-original 29,000-mile MGA I’ve had for just over 20 years so special. It is the exact opposite of that first car, looking as much like it just left the factory as any car that’s survived 63 years without restoration. One unfortunate day, though, a 90-year-old lady in a Subaru lightly tapped my MGA from behind when I had the temerity to stop for a red light.

“I didn’t hit you,” she swore. “I was just reaching for my handbag and…boom!” Copy that, I thought, as I removed pieces of a Subaru directional signal from my lightly nerfed bumper. Today, a mismatched European amber lens on the left rear turn signal memorializes the near tragedy in which the North American MGA’s original red lens lost its life. A small band of missing paint on the rear deck memorializes the rubber weather seal at the base of the factory vinyl-covered fiberglass hardtop I’d acquire for it. With its top installed it looks to me even more like the MGA coupe, a beautiful and highly underrated thing I’d also very much like to own, but likely won’t. A car known for roasting its occupants three seasons out of the year might see limited use.
Unjustly dismissed today by many casual car fans for unreliability, MGs have a bit of a bad name. Which is unfair. With a caveat or two. Worse still, younger people in America have mostly never heard of MGs and when they do, they’ve often gotten the poisoned view.
Facts: The MGA looks cool, with an excellent dollar-to-fun-to-drive quotient and—excuse author conflict of interest—its criminal undervaluation. Far more solid and rigid than an Austin Healey 3000, better screwed together than a Triumph, there’s really nothing like an MGA anymore, a particularly pleasing blend of robust old-world flavor and clever post-war technology.
I once spent a few days with the great Spen King, chief engineer of the original Range Rover, among other Rover and Triumph worthies. I got to ask him—you guessed it—what his favorite car was. He thought for a moment and said it was the MGA coupe he’d owned in the early ‘60s. He regularly commuted in one, often at high speed. He said it felt perfect to him. I knew how he felt. Or did I? Maybe he just didn’t want to go into it.
***
A man of many pursuits (rock band manager, automotive journalist, concours judge, purveyor of picture cars for film and TV), Jamie Kitman lives and breathes vintage machines. His curious taste for interesting, oddball, and under-appreciated classics—which traffic through his Nyack, New York warehouse—promises us an unending stream of delightful cars to discuss. For more Picture Car Confidential columns, click here. Follow Jamie Kitman on Instagram at @commodorehornblow; follow Octane Film Cars @octanefilmcars and at www.octanefilmcars.com.
My first car was a ‘59 MGA…something broke or fell off on a weekly basis, it leaked in the rain, was terrible in snow, and the heater was a joke. Yet I absolutely loved the car, a top down ride on a backroad here in Connecticut in Autumn was just a dream come true. I’ve had lots of great cars in the intervening years, but that MG showed me how much fun driving could be, and 60 years later, the joy is still there.
I’m on my second MGA. After a frame-off refresh of all rubber parts, fuel lines, brake lines etc (I’d call it a restoration but it doesn’t really qualify compared to what most people do these days) it’s an absolute champ. In several years I haven’t had a single problem with it. That being said, because it was my second one, I did a lot of the little things that the forums say make them better cars and… well, it seems to have worked. It’s sunny today and I’ll probably take my boy to his karate class in it. It’s a blast to drive. I autocross it (never get close to winning, but that’s because I put a MGB motor in it, so I’m in the open class with the insano cars). I take my wife on date night in it. It looks nice even though it’s only amateur restored. Etc. Great car, very happy with it. It has defrost, wipers, heater, side curtains and a top (and I have a hardtop I haven’t restored yet in the side yard) so I can drive it in winter, etc. Is there an easier classic? Or more affordable? Or with better parts availability? Although, it was starting to get tight during the build. Found myself buying one or two parts for MGTDs when the MGA places were sold out.
We have a nice following of MGA’s here in my area. I can totally see why you love them. Looking forward to Part 2.
Jamie, I couldn’t agree with your assessment more, having owned 2 of them and had my current ’58 for almost 25 years. As I age and it is becoming harder for my wife & I to get in and out of, I sometimes find myself considering it’s sale, but I quickly come to my senses and think of how much of my life and pleasant memories of long trips made and the people with whom I hang out are wrapped up in this simple little machine.
As a collector car, you just can’t beat them for their affordability (still greatly undervalued as you noted) and ease of ownership if you are at all mechanically inclined as well as it’s pure driving pleasure. What MG intended them to be in the first place.
Appreciate your perspective.
Heck yes. I’m on old musclecar guy, who was then dragged over into old Willy’s Jeeps, but a friend has an MGA. Black original paint. It looks beat on the outside, but the interior and driveline are all new and I have to admit I’m jealous when I see him zip by. He was also in a fender bender with it. The rear quarter dented. He also complained that this person dented a car that made it all this time without a scratch. Well, maybe a couple little ones. I said spare no expense! Find the best dent guy around and pay him the long dollar. That car deserves it.
People who have a favorite car have one – maybe two including the daily driver. People who love cars have many
Great article! A very effective “summation”.
Any chance you’re related to the great Marvin Kitman?
Jamie is Marvin’s son!
God, I loved that man… “Must Flee TV”; Five Antennas!
Jamie — so sorry for your/our loss.
Around 1980, I attended a Commercial Photography class with your Mom Carol; at the School of Visual Arts.
Favourite car is an interesting question. As the owner of four MGs of various vintages, a first series MX5, and a newer generation MINI Cooper I enjoy them all for different reasons. My thought as to “favourite” is simple, it is the one I am behind the wheel of and driving.
I have my 1958 MGA for 54 years and still love it since I fell in love with the A in 1960. I have managed to keep it on the road since 1971, with it’s cooperation !
I purchased my first MGA in 1984, a 57 MKI, and my second was purchased six years ago, a 62 MKII. I’m still driving the MKII, and at seventy three years old, I still find the drive exhilarating, and the car is still comfortable to drive. Getting in and out however, is a different story!
I’ve followed a very similar path. Just substitute Midget for MGA. The Midget was the first car bought with my own money. Did not know what I did not know. The car is long gone, but it did teach me a lot, and it did bring me to this place. I do miss it. “Unscheduled engine fire”, laughed at that one.
Great article but you might be ruining everything by telling people how wonderful old British roadsters really are!
I love my old Sprite despite the fact that it always was cheap, slow by even 1960 standards, and plagued by weird problems, patience and perseverance has paid off well and I absolutely adore the car. Let the big shots drive their Mercedes and Ferraris of which cost hundreds of times more, I will cheerfully soldier on my 0-60 time of 21 seconds, with a huge grin.
If you want to make money from cars look elsewhere, if you want to live a life well spent buy British!!!
Well said, John. There’s no substituting anything for an English vehicle, 2,3 or 4 wheels….
Had a customer (more accurately, a “hanger on”) who used to come to my motorcycle shop in Miami, driving a dark blue 1958 MGA. One day he shows up without the car. “Wouldn’t start, I had it towed away, you can have it for the tow charge.” A whopping eight whole dollars later (obviously, this was “some years” back), I had a non-running dark blue 1958 MGA.
Starter was stuck. I put the car into third gear, sat on the front bumper and gave a mighty heave – SNAP, it unlocked. Drove the car for a year without too much trouble (notable incident, the crank pulley came apart on I-95, I bolted it back together and it was fine), and the exhaust system was, as they say in the UK “perished”.
Had a tomcat who liked to roam. He didn’t come home for three days so I got into the MGA and went looking for him. About three blocks from the house, he comes charging out of the bushes because he recognized the sound of the car (!) jumped in, curled up in the passenger seat, and got a personalized ride home. (He later “helped” me do a clutch job on a V4 Saab Sonnet, but that’s another story.)
Finally decided to replace it, sold it for $400 to some idiot who assured me he knew how to drive stick. Next day daddy brings him in – “Transmission blew up, I want my $400 back.” Nope, you broke it, you own all the pieces.
Loved this!! 👍👍
(Full Disclosure: 1961 MGA owner)
My 61 Rambler American, the first car I ever bought myself, required much the same learning experience as your MGA did. While a far cry from an MGA (wouldn’t mind having one of those!), it has to be my favorite car for pretty much the same reason the MGA is yours. I bet most of us gear heads favorites are our first. The Rambler was intended to be a temporary thing, just a cheap car to drive, but it quickly grew on me. It was unique amongst all the other cars in the 1979-80 high school parking lot for one thing. There were other older car, but none quite that old or “different” looking. Compact, but not tiny like most of the foreign cars. Perfect for four friends to go anywhere in, unlike my best friend’s Pinto, so the Rambler with a well worn front end (I was the only one who could steer it straight down the road with one hand… ) became the travel car. Didn’t know just how bad the seized lower trunnions had worn into the lower suspension arms until I decided it needed to be fixed! I’ve had several 61-63 Rambler Americans since, getting a bigger 63 Classic in 1999 and having that one since then. I was without a Rambler for about 18 months in 1983 to mid 84. Sold mine when I got married then went into the USAF. Spotted one for sale in Idaho and I just happened to need a second car… and couldn’t resist it. Now I have another, a 61 American convertible. It’s being resto-modded, but mildly. 2003 Ranger 2.3L Duratec drivetrain going in. That’s a 37% increase in power over the Rambler’s 125 hp (gross.. about 90 net compared to the Duratec’s 143 hp, the numbers I used). The Rambler 195.6 weighs in about 550 pounds, Duratec about 225. The old Borg-Warner cast iron M-8 weighs in around 215 pounds with 10 quarts of ATF, the 5R44E about 175 with fluid, so that’s a 48% reduction in weight. Between the two the Rambler will be quite lively on the road. Not building a hot rod, just a nice cruiser that will easily keep up with modern traffic — like my hopped up 4.0L in the 63 Classic wagon.