When I was young, women didn’t get to have their own bank accounts. I was fortunate that my family didn’t draw money from my account; many of my friends, when they tried to work to save up to buy something, had all of their money confiscated by their parents.

Anyway, I was a bit of a gearhead growing up. I was into cars, and I wanted a Jaguar. I wanted a Jag badly.

Now, it was extremely difficult back then to get a British car in the United States, and many people in Detroit especially acted like I was a traitor to Ford, GM, and the other American car manufacturers for wanting a British car.

For five years, I worked my a** off doing any odd jobs I could, especially helping at a mechanic’s shop when I could, to buy myself a Jag. (Although, back then, most mechanics were leery of letting a woman do gearhead work where the customers could see us. They often made me be a secretary.)

By the time I got my entrance papers for college, I had my Jag. My high school boyfriend was very jealous of my car. We were going on a date together, probably our last date before I left for college. (He’d gotten an internship with a mechanic.) He kept begging me to let him drive my car.

Finally, I gave in and let him drive it. We stopped on the side of the road and started to switch places, but while I was heading toward the passenger side, he leaped into the driver’s side and stole my car!

Along with everything in my purse.

Like most young women back then, I kept some change in my shoes in case I got robbed so I could use a pay phone — which I did, to call my dad. Technically, the car was in his name, and I knew that the police wouldn’t believe me that it was my car.

He came and picked me up, and we went to the police station to make a report. They recovered my car from the driveway of my boyfriend’s parents’ house. The police gave him a stern talking-to but refused to actually charge him with a crime.

Needless to say, we broke up that day.