Travel gave me wings, but there was something equally exciting waiting for me back on the ground.
Some memories don’t simply stay with you—they define an era of your life. When I think about my early twenties, I remember feeling almost unstoppable. I was young, ambitious, independent, and convinced the best years of my life were waiting just beyond the horizon. And nothing captured that feeling better than a 1980 Mazda RX-7—low, sleek, fast, with a five-speed transmission and a rotary engine that begged to be pushed. This wasn’t just the car I wanted to drive. It was the man I wanted to become: bold, confident, adventurous, successful, and maybe just a little dangerous. To me, that RX-7 wasn’t transportation. It was freedom on four wheels, and I wanted the keys.
The story actually began far from Wisconsin during the summer of 1980, between my junior and senior year. I was living in Washington State, working as an intern for Weyerhaeuser. I was learning about forests, mills, engineering, and corporate life, but somewhere between the Pacific Northwest rain and those long internship days, another thought kept working its way into my head.
Someday soon, I'm going to need a car.
Not just any car, either. A sports car. I still had a year of college left, but I was already looking beyond graduation. I expected to find an engineering job, start earning a real paycheck, and begin building a life of my own. A car seemed like part of that picture. There was only one problem. I didn't have the money. Fortunately, I had something better—a mother who trusted me.
We came up with an arrangement that seems almost too good to be true today. Mom would buy the car outright and drive it for a year while I finished college. Once I graduated and landed a full-time job, I would buy the car from her and pay her back every dollar. No bank. No loan application. No interest. Just a hug and handshake and trust between a mother and son.
At the time, I probably viewed it as a terrific financing arrangement. Looking back now, I see it means more. My mother was betting on me. She believed in me. I didn't have a paycheck. I had plans, ambition, and a word that has always been good. She simply trusted that I would graduate, find my way, and keep my integrity. And I did.
Of course, before Mom could buy the car, there was the extremely important matter of deciding which sports car deserved to become mine. This was long before Google, YouTube reviews, or endless online comparisons, so I studied car magazines, brochures, specifications, and anything else I could get my hands on, weighing every contender as if I were judging the final round of a television game show. Behind Door Number One: the unmistakable Chevrolet Corvette. Behind Door Number Two: the sleek Datsun 280Z. And behind Door Number Three: the Triumph TR8—with several others still waiting backstage for their chance to impress me.
Each had its advantages. But one car kept pulling me back. The Mazda RX-7. I didn't just want one. I had to have one. By the time I returned home from Washington, the decision had already been made. In fact, the car had been ordered while I was still out west. One of the first things we did when I returned was head to the dealership near La Crosse to pick it up. There it was.
A brand-new 1980 Mazda RX-7.
I can still picture myself standing in that parking lot staring at it. The car looked like it was going 100 miles an hour just sitting still. Its nose was low, the body sleek, and the lines seemed to flow from the front bumper all the way to the rear hatch. Compared with the sedans, station wagons, and pickup trucks that filled most parking lots in those days, the RX-7 looked like something from another world. I walked around it admiring every angle.
Then I climbed inside, and something changed. I settled down into that low driver's seat, stretched my legs toward the pedals, wrapped one hand around the steering wheel and the other around the five-speed shifter, and looked out over that long, sloping hood. For a twenty-two-year-old kid from Wisconsin, it felt less like sitting in a Mazda and more like sliding behind the wheel of James Bond's Aston Martin. I had grown up watching Sean Connery step out of those beautiful cars looking impossibly cool—confident, sophisticated, powerful, and completely in command—and sitting in that RX-7 gave me my own small taste of that feeling. The car fit around me like it had been designed for exactly the person I wanted to become. I felt bold sitting there. Powerful. Sexy. Maybe most of all, I felt grown up. I turned the key, heard that rotary engine come to life, and for a moment I wasn't a college kid with one year left before graduation. I was Sean Connery. I was James Bond. And somewhere out beyond that windshield, my life was waiting for me.
The RX-7 wasn't just good-looking. Under the hood was something relatively unusual—a rotary engine. It looked surprisingly small compared with conventional engines, but what it lacked in size, it made up for in personality. That little car had giddy-up. Real giddy-up. Push the accelerator, work your way through the five-speed gearbox, and suddenly driving wasn't transportation anymore. It was an event.
There was one amusing complication in our arrangement, however. For the first year, technically, it wasn't my car. It was Mom's. So while I returned to Iowa State to finish my senior year, my mother—then in her fifties—drove my sleek new Mazda RX-7 to work at the elementary school in Oakdale. I would have loved to have seen the reaction in that parking lot. In a small Wisconsin town in 1980, an RX-7 attracted attention. People weren't accustomed to seeing something that sporty rolling down Main Street. Men noticed it. Women noticed it. Kids noticed it. And there was Mom, casually pulling into the parking lot behind the wheel.
Apparently we were also doing some unpaid advertising for Mazda. Over time, four other people I knew ended up buying RX-7s. I should have been working on commission.
By my senior year, my enthusiasm for sports cars had become strong enough that I found a way to incorporate it into my education. One of my electives was a speech class, and for one assignment I decided to share my wisdom about automobiles. My argument was that people should spend a little more money and buy a vehicle that was actually fun to drive. I ended the speech with what I considered an absolutely brilliant piece of financial and philosophical wisdom:
“Remember, you can sleep in your car, but you can't drive your house.”
Brilliant, I thought. At twenty-one, I considered this an airtight financial argument. More than forty years later, I'm willing to concede there may have been a few flaws in the analysis. Still, I believed it. And soon enough, I was living it.
After graduating in May 1981, I began my dream job at 3M. Just as promised, I bought the RX-7 from Mom and took it with me to New Brighton, Minnesota, where I lived with my brother Dave for the next couple of years. Dave had a Camaro. I had the RX-7. He worked in the same building at 3M and frequently carpooled, alternating between the two cars. For a couple of young guys starting their careers, it wasn't a bad arrangement. We shared some great conversations during those commutes, and I learned a great deal from my brother about 3M, project management, and investing.
Naturally, having a great sports car wasn't enough. It needed a great stereo. The factory system wasn't going to cut it. I ordered a Blaupunkt stereo from Crutchfield and recruited my friend Tony for what seemed like a perfectly reasonable weekend project. We were going to improve the sound system in my nearly new sports car. How difficult could that possibly be? There is a moment in almost every do-it-yourself project when confidence gives way to a terrifying question:
What have we done?
That moment arrived somewhere between removing the dashboard and discovering wires seemingly everywhere. Before long, pieces of my beautiful alter ego were scattered around us. Low-voltage wires were hanging out of the dash. Metal and plastic had to be cut to make the new stereo fit. Rear speakers needed to be replaced. At some point I remember looking at my partially dismantled new car and wondering whether this had been one of my better ideas. But Tony and I kept going. Eventually everything went back together. Even better, it worked.
And that Blaupunkt sounded fantastic. It even came with a remote control, which was extremely important because apparently extending my arm twelve inches to turn a knob on the dashboard had become an unacceptable inconvenience. That little car with that sound system was incredible.
Then came Minnesota winter.
I drove the RX-7 through roughly nine of them, which says something about youth, optimism, and a budget. The RX-7 was rear-wheel drive, low to the ground, and designed for carving through curves—not climbing snow-covered Minnesota hills in February. You learned quickly about traction. Or the lack of it.
A traffic light on an incline could become a negotiation between driver, clutch, accelerator, gravity, and God. The light would turn green, I'd ease out the clutch, touch the accelerator, and the rear tires would politely inform me that they had no intention of moving the car forward. A little more gas. A little less clutch. The rear end might wiggle. The tires might spin.
Meanwhile, someone behind me was probably wondering why the idiot in the sports car hadn't purchased something more appropriate for Minnesota. But after enough snowy mornings and icy intersections, I became pretty good at the delicate dance between clutch, accelerator, and traction. I figured out how to feather the gas, anticipate when the rear end was about to wander, and resist the temptation to overpower a road that was clearly in charge. Snow, ice, hills, and momentum demanded respect, and the RX-7 had a very effective way of reminding me whenever I forgot. Somehow, through nine Minnesota winters in a rear-wheel-drive sports car, I never had an accident—which may have been equal parts skill, caution, and divine intervention.
And when winter finally released its grip and the pavement became dry? That was when the RX-7 came alive. It handled like a go-kart. There didn't seem to be a corner it couldn't take. You didn't simply point the car in a direction; you felt it move underneath you. I learned to double-clutch, work through the gears, feel the road through the steering wheel, and appreciate the relationship between driver and machine. The car begged to be driven, not merely steered. And I was more than happy to oblige.
Life in your twenties is "on the go". There were bars and softball games at Tartan Park. There were late nights with friends and weekend drives back to Ames to see Phil, Beth, Kevin, Tony, and others who were still in school. I can still imagine some of those drives—the road stretching ahead, music pouring from that Blaupunkt stereo, and the feeling that there was nowhere in particular I needed to be except wherever I was going. Friday nights felt long. Weekends felt even longer. And Monday seemed very far away.
There were downsides to owning something that attracted attention. At various times, the car suffered keyed doors and a broken antenna. It also attracted its share of suspicious glances from police officers who seemed particularly interested in young men driving sports cars late at night and saw opportunities for revenue. To be fair, their suspicions weren't entirely unfounded. I earned my share of speeding tickets. One particular day stands out.
I received two speeding tickets within about twenty minutes. The first was in Edina. I continued toward home after leaving a friend's party and, before I had much time to contemplate the financial consequences of ticket number one, flashing lights appeared in my rearview mirror again. This time I was in New Brighton. There was one immediate problem. The first speeding ticket was sitting right there on the passenger seat. Computers hadn't yet connected every squad car and police department, so the second officer had no obvious way of knowing I'd just been stopped. Unless, of course, he saw the ticket. I quickly grabbed it, crumpled it up, and threw it onto the floor. The officer never noticed. Two speeding tickets in twenty minutes should have taught me something. But I can't say that was my last ticket by any means. The rest of my life seemed to be accelerating right along with the car.
As a young engineer at 3M, I was traveling to places like Decatur, Germany, and Italy. I was being handed responsibility for multimillion-dollar engineering projects. I had expense-account cash in my wallet, frequent-flyer miles accumulating, friends to visit, places to go, and a sports car waiting for me when I returned home. It was life in the fast lane.
There is a unique swagger that comes with youth— a combination of arrogance and optimism. Before the weight of mortgages or the responsibility of being a parent, you believe you've got life by the tail. Mistakes seem temporary. Weekends stretch endlessly ahead. There will always be another summer, another softball game, another Friday night, another date, another road trip. You spend almost all your time looking through the windshield. There isn't much reason to look in the rearview mirror. The road ahead seems endless. And that RX-7 matched the feeling perfectly.
My relationship with Sue Ann had come to an end, and when I began to date again, that sports car brought me an extra bump of confidence when I pulled up. The car represented something bigger.
The keys to that RX-7 seemed to unlock more than the driver's door. They unlocked independence, adventure, and the growing realization that I could build a life for myself my way. The man writing these words today understands something the young man behind that steering wheel didn't. Those years weren't endless. I owned the RX-7 for roughly nine years. At the time, nine years seemed like an eternity. Now, it feels remarkably brief. When we're young, we assume there will always be another season just like the one we're living. Another warm summer night. Another drive with the windows down. Another weekend with friends. Another chance to take the long way home simply because the road has a few good curves.
Only later do we understand that certain seasons of life don't announce when they're ending. They simply become memories.
I can still picture that RX-7 sitting in the dealership parking lot looking like it was going 100 miles an hour while standing still. I can still imagine my mother pulling into the elementary school parking lot behind the wheel. I can see Tony and me staring at a dashboard full of wires, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. I can feel those rear tires searching for traction on a snowy Minnesota hill and hear the engine winding through the gears on a dry, curving road.
I remember the person I was when I drove it. Young. Hopeful. Independent. Certain that something wonderful was waiting just beyond the next curve. That RX-7 was the physical expression of that feeling of that decade for me—freedom on four wheels.
More than forty years later, I understand that some roads in life we travel only once. Maybe that's why we remember them so clearly. And while that sports car carried me down countless roads during those years, another place that shaped me wasn't found on a highway. It was a quiet lake, where my brother and I built a collection of memories that still make me smile today.