The MG Midget: Small, Sporty and Nimble

My friend Rick recently sent me several advertising postcards like this one of various MG automobiles. He remembered that I owned one once and of the cards he sent this one most closely resembled the car I drove in the mid 1970's. Mine was orange and was a great car because at the time it got an unheard of fuel economy. I loved my MG despite the fact it was continually going out of tune. It handled corners like a pouncing cat. I liked that it was so different than any car on the road and that people at stop lights would look down from their enormous American made autos -- in what I call the Big Steel Era -- and point and laugh. Many times in the summer with their windows rolled down I would hear, "Is that a real car?" I had a number of pat answers ready. One was, "Why no, it's a toy but I couldn't part with it since childhood." Another was, "Absolutely, it's the car of the future." I like to think I was ahead of my time driving my MG Midget. Though the cars were taken out of  production in 1979, they did point to an era of smaller and more economical cars that many of us Americans began to buy in the latter half of the 20th-century.