Wall Street Journal Feature

By A.J. Baime | October 8, 2022

Melon Doris, 73, an architectural designer living in Beaufort, S.C., on her 1962 MG MGA 1600 Mk II, as told to A.J. Baime.

In 1968, I graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. I always loved cars, even though no one in my family knew anything about them. My boyfriend, Ken, had a 1956 Chevy Bel Air (he ran out of gas in this car on our first date), and when he graduated college, he bought a 1967 Corvette. He taught me to drive in that car. I was living in Brooklyn, and I needed a car to get to my first job on Long Island.

I saved like crazy. Ken found my MGA in a post on the bulletin board at his employer. I turned over $800, he bought the car, and he spent about a month compounding the dimpled paint. I have a photo of myself sitting in the car in his parents' driveway, in Hicksville, Long Island, the day I picked it up in 1968, which was the year before Ken and I were married.

That little roadster [referring to a two-seat, open-top car] was my daily driver for six years. In the winter, sometimes the engine wouldn't start, and I would have to roll it and pop the clutch to get it going. The car had no air conditioning, no radio—it was very rudimentary. The "A" model was built by MG in England, from 1955 to 1962. [The brand still exists today.]

As I got older, the thought of a real heater won me over and I bought a 1973 Chevy Nova. We pushed the MGA into the garage, as it needed repairs and wouldn't pass inspection. And that is where it stayed. Our son and daughter would get in it in the garage and go on imaginary road trips.

Then, one snowy day, our son (who had recently graduated college) said, "Mom, Dad, when you are...uh...gone, what should we do with the MGA?" That is when Ken and I decided to restore the car. It had been sitting for over 30 years; the tires were deflated and fused to the floor of the garage. Ken is an engineer and he could fix everything on the car. I worked a lot on the interior. It took about a year.

At one point, we went to Abingdon, England, where the car was built. There are records there, and we got the formula for the original paint—Old English White—so we could have the car painted just as it was when it left the factory.

We started taking trips in the MGA in 2005. We have been as far north as Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. I have driven it all the way to Key West. Just weeks ago, we drove the car to Colorado and back, with a sign on the car's rear reading "Colorado or bust!" But it was our trip to Savannah, Ga., with an MGA club, that changed our lives. As lifelong Northeasterners, we fell in love with the south. In 2015, we moved to South Carolina where we could drive the MGA all year long. I drive it nearly every day.

I often think that once you fall in love with a car you have an invisible tattoo that can only be seen by people who love a car, or cars, as you do. Some of our most treasured friends are in the MGA family. When our daughter asked to use the MGA to drive away from her wedding ceremony in 2014, I knew that this car was a family member that brings joy to us all.