And he started what would become a lifelong ritual of refurbishing ramshackle cars, which he would buy on the cheap and resell at a profit.
Everybody had ramshackle cars, heaps of old scraps from the Soviet times, but there was always the typical bee's knees guy driving a magnificent Mercedes.
Doesn't this song sound like the Damned are a bunch of rowdy cartoon ghosts tearing through town in a ramshackle old ghost car like they're Casper's cousins or whatever?
There are the overdraft fees, the maintenance costs of ramshackle houses and cars, the credit-card debt accrued for necessities that low wages don't cover, the interest paid on loans for college educations.
Downpours on Friday and Saturday created raging rivers of mud which tore through the densely populated Bab el Oued, levelling high buildings, destroying ramshackle homes and overturning cars.
One afternoon in January, our team travelled a couple of hours from the state's capital, Lucknow, with its bleating cars and ramshackle shops, to a rural hospital surrounded by lush farmland and thatched-hut villages.
A day after the war started, Ruz and his extended family got in eight cars -- a ramshackle convoy of old Mercedes, Toyotas, Hondas and a van -- and headed north, a 12-hour drive, between shelling, over often mountainous roads.
The time frame is, apparently, today, and the setting a water-bound territory called the Bathtub, where the poor population (mainly but not exclusively black) live in lean-to shacks and sail ramshackle boats made from old car bodies.
At Leptis, coaches pull into a dusty car park fringed with ramshackle tourist stalls.
It was back in 1993 that Mr. Velasquez, a former used car dealer, converted a ramshackle bait shop into a three-table restaurant on the beach.
