Hm, I must have a minor Healey buzz going (or I located a folder of long-forgotten scans on my computer, I’ll never tell). This is my 100-Six in the snow of 1989–the Healey and I were stuck from 2:30 in the afternoon until midnight on the 520 floating bridge. We didn’t turn a wheel for nine hours. I ran out of gas, sat in a stranger’s car to stay warm, caught a lift from a crazy guy who drove 15 miles to deliver me to my house two miles from where we started, and there found a foot of snow at 3:30 in the morning. This was a big snow (there were more local news reporters than snowplows running around) and it stayed below freezing for two weeks, unusual for western Washington. The Healey was actually a pretty decent car to drive in the white stuff!

I bought this car in 1989, when I was 22. It was a rattly, smokey, tired old car–I loved it anyway. I went through 17 cases of oil in the year I owned it; about half went out the tailpipe and half went onto the ground. Environmentally sound it was not.

How did I get it? I was working on a local British car show at the time, and been wanting a “big” Healey forever (it seemed). They just looked great and made a wonderful sound. They weren’t really much more powerful than an MGB, but the style was enormous. This car came to my attention because the owner was entering it in the show in the “for sale” area. He wanted $4500, cheap for a big Healey even then. I had about $3500 in my current MGB, and managed to convince a friend to loan me the remaining money (not the smartest thing they’ve ever done…).

It was a bitsa, but pretty, with the tri-carb engine out of a later 3000 in it. It had lethal brakes, which make me wince thinking about them now–you had to pump the pedal twice to get any pressure. It also had about 90 lbs of compression across all six cylinders. In other words, it was totally worn out.

When people talk about certain old cars being hot inside, I always think they don’t know hot until they’ve been in a Healey in the summer. I used to keep a thermometer in the footwell, it would regularly hit 165 degrees in there.

But it was a great car, none-the-less. It made a wonderful sound, and was pretty much dead reliable, even for being worn out. I drove it for a year before finances forced me to sell it to a friend, who subsequently restored it.