Where’s the LOVE button! I couldn’t love this image and story more if I tried. And you’re a ginger!! Awesome!! (My favorite hair color) It looks like your mom was a master tailor... that shirt cannot be easy to make, and from what I can see it looks impeccably made. So many memories in one image.When I had hair(!)
View attachment 109380
This is just for fun since it isn’t really an iPhone photo except I photographed it from an old print made before the digital era.
I always find it quite a shock, or humerous, to see old pictures of myself when I still had hair and it was still red. And a beard! My beard hair was curly so when it got long it didn’t lie flat and smooth but wildly curled together like curly steel wool. It was better to keep it from getting too long so I wouldn’t look like a wildman - not that that bothered me much.
I’m sitting in the last Mini I drove. It reminds me of all the fun and adventures I had driving my different Minis through the years.
I’m wearing my Maritime Mini club hat which is another marker of a time period. I’m wearing it higher than normal to prevent too much shadow on my face. This was a self portrait with a tripod & self timer since no one else was around at the time. There’s another time marker - when I realized if I didn’t take pictures of myself then I didn’t exist at all in the family photo album. Even so there aren’t very many.
I see that I’m wearing one of the corduroy shirts my mother made for me. They were more durable than store bought stuff and really very well done. That’s another marker for a period in time.
I bought this 1971 Austin Mini 1000 in 1979 for $100. That must have been the second year Minis had roll-down windows. The engine had been ruined and the car had been left sitting in the grass for a couple of years so the floor was rusted out. I welded in a new floor and some of the trunk and rocker panels and put in a 1300 Austin America engine that I had rebuilt from a previous Mini I had. (The Austin America and the Mini were in the same parts family and swapping the engine was pretty much a bolt-on operation, if you picked the right parts) I also replaced the rear subframe from another Mini. I replaced the front drum brakes with Cooper S disk brakes. I had the same Minilite magnesium alloy wheels they used in the movie The Italian Job. Of course it needed some other work too but it ended up a very reliable car and I drove it year-round as my only car for another 12 years or so with only occasional repairs. It was very cheap to run. It never once failed to get me home. If it ever had any problem it was at home where I was able to fix it myself. In those days if your starter, or some other part, conked out you could take it apart and fix it yourself. Take 2 dead alternators and make one good one out of them. I needed to be quite independent since I lived far from town and there was nowhere that had Mini parts anyhow. I kept the most usual parts in stock as well as parts from a few dismantled Minis. The car was 22 years old when I decided to retire it in favour of something newer.
The first Mini came out in 1959 and was the first mass produced front wheel drive car. It had a sideways engine, which was very unusual at that time. It was the first car to have constant velocity joints in the axles - nowadays just about every car on the road has constant velocity joint axles, except trucks and rear wheel drive cars. Looking back I can see it was incredibly advanced for its time. I remember when I had my first Mini, 1968, people used to laugh when I told them that in the future there would be a lot more small cars, rather than the giant gas guzzling boats people used to drive, and that they would be front wheel drive. I wish now I had put some money on those predictions. So many of the Mini’s innovations have been copied by other cars people have forgotten where it all began - with a little British car.
Edit: I just had this notion so I’ll put it here. You could almost say, that no matter what make of front wheel drive car you have, if you look far enough back there is a Mini on one branch of the family tree.
And, it sounds like we have a case of Six Degrees of Mini Cooper.
I overwater or forget about them, and no matter how hardy or easy they all end up dry in a bin! So I admire gardeners 
, but in late July, some friends and roommates and I sat around the b/w TV and watched the first moon landing.
at the end of the shopping spree (which then was getting a necklace, a pair of earrings and something for the hair for 5/10 moneys altogether, me and whoever ventured out with me would top it off with a visit to... yes, sorry, McDonald’s 
