"Rosebud" the Pacer

Kristin Olson reminisced about her family's Pacer, "Rosebud".

When I got my license, the only car I was allowed to drive was my mom's old AMC Pacer, an embarrassment at the time... but the hilarious memories we have from that old Pacer. I wouldn't trade them for the world! Our poor Pacer had a lot of things wrong with it, which made it all the more amusing to drive.

I remember one night after visiting at my sister's house until late my roommate and I staggered dog tired to the car, jumped in, and I turned the ignition to let the car warm up a little. The Pacer (a.k.a. "Rosebud") was purring away when I realized I was still holding the key in my hand -- it wasn't in the ignition! From then on we never needed to use a key to run the car. Fixable, I'm sure, but we preferred it that way.

After a while of driving the car around the city my friend and I decided to "spruce" it up a bit, and we bought brightly coloured "bath tub flowers" to stick on the sides of the Pacer. We got a lot more amused looks tooling around in that baby!

More crazy quirks of our Pacer... Driven by two poor students, one with a part-time job... Half a gas tank, horrible brakes which you had to pump several times just to get them to work, and an entertaining high-pitched squeal which accompanied my foot on the gas pedal. Who knows? And no key to unlock it -- we had to crawl through the trunk once!

Rosebud is now parked for good. I still walk by her once in a while to remember good times... and they were good!