By Robert Anthony
I bought my first car during my freshman year of college in 2007. Although I had been raised in a Honda family, a pair of E30-loving friends convinced me to buy a BMW. I found the 1995 E36 318i, a Boston Green 5 speed, on Autotrader and was soon informed by a BMW PPI that it needed about $6,000 of work. I recall my friend, Thomas, examining the report and saying, “Don’t worry; we can fix all of that for $2,000.” I bought the car for $3,500.
That night, I sat in a parking lot on campus until well after midnight just looking at the car. (I admit I sometimes still spend late nights doing this in my garage.) I couldn’t believe it was mine. There was no way I could have known how this boxy green sedan would be the first of 26 BMWs to pass through my hands thus far, and how this would change the trajectory of my life.
Thomas was true to his word in helping me start to address the car’s issues. The following week, he navigated me through the process of buying everything needed for a complete brake job. We drove out to his family’s property in Southeast Ohio, and he taught me how to do my first mechanical work on a car. Multi-day wrenching sessions in Yellowsprings, Ohio would become a staple of the next three summers. Thomas owned a 1988 327i (eta bottom with an “I” head) that we frequently took around town. E30s continue to evoke memories of this time for me.
A month after buying the 318i, the semester ended. My dad flew out to Ohio so that a 19-year-old wasn’t driving a questionable car back home to Oregon solo. A few months later, my mom accompanied me on the drive back to Ohio for the start of sophomore year. Despite having 190k miles, the E36 performed flawlessly on these two cross-country excursions.
Well…almost…another buddy had sealed my low-side AC port entirely shut as part of an attempted “repair,” so the 318i never again had working AC. My mom and I found that out in Twin Falls, Idaho, when I tried to recharge the AC in oppressive 95 °F heat. We had to stop for Gatorade about every 2 hours for the rest of the trip.
I met my wife, Christina, through Thomas, and we started hanging out more and more frequently after I purchased the 318i. When I got back to campus in the fall of 2007, I finally got up the nerve to ask her out. Of course, we took the green E36 on our first date, and on many more dates and other adventures to come. Christina and I got married in July of 2010. Thomas was my best man.
Shortly before our wedding, I purchased my dream car: a 1998 E36 M3 coupe in Dakar yellow near my hometown of Salem, Oregon. Christina and I started our lives together by moving to tiny Socorro, New Mexico in August of 2010. Part of our honeymoon included flying out to Oregon to bring the Dakar M3 down to Socorro in oppressive heat. At least the AC worked on it!
The next 15 years have been a blur of friends, memories, and life enabled by (and structure around) the deluge of 3-series cars that have passed through our hands. Coming from a GM family, Christina got her first BMW, a 2001 E46 330Ci, in 2011. We adopted our dog, Rayleigh, in 2013, and picked him up from the shelter in an E30 with the backseat replaced with blankets and a dog bed. After a few years in Colorado, we moved back to New Mexico and then bought our current house, selected largely for the ability to build a shop to store all of my BMWs behind it, in 2019. That year, I brought my Dakar M3 out of years of hibernation to attend the Drive 4 Corners event in Southwest Colorado. We met lifelong friends there and look forward to attending the event each year.
Christina and I joined the New Mexico Chapter of the BMW CCA in 2020, and I became the Driving Events Coordinator in 2022. Through the CCA, we’ve met even more amazing people.
We look forward to many more years of 3-series adventures, including planning our 15th anniversary trip this summer in the Dakar M3!
