Natasha Brown of Broadview was not particularly enthused in 2005 when a car dealer told her she recently purchased a Dodge Neon previously owned by a man named Barack Obama.

“He was a state senator then, so it was not that big of a deal,” Brown said. “Not too many people knew of him.”

Like many 18-year-olds, Brown did not pay much attention to politics and the detail quickly slipped her mind.

Three years later, Obama’s presidential campaign had roped Brown into politics for the first time. She and her father were glued to CNN for the campaign’s duration, but the car connection never crossed her mind.

But just after the election, a Chicago daily newspaper reporter called to ask Brown about the president-elect’s former car.

“I said ‘Oh yeah, that’s right,’ and ran to my car and got the registration,” Brown said. “If she hadn’t called me, to this day, I probably wouldn’t have remembered.”

Brown bought the silver sedan for $6,000 just after she graduated from high school. Her father urged her to buy a larger car but she was drawn to the Neon’s size.

“I’m a small girl, and I liked the smaller car,” Brown explained. “It was cute.”

The car also did not have an ashtray and smelled smoke-free, another detail that attracted Brown, even though Obama had smoked before his presidential campaign. He sold the car in January 2005, just before being sworn in as a U.S. senator. 

Brown said she almost sold the car, which had 60,000 miles on it, when the transmission broke down last Thanksgiving. But, as fate would have it, her uncle, a mechanic, offered to fix it.

Now, she is not sure what she’s going to do with the car but wants to keep it for a while. She also wants to keep her eye on the soon-to-be president, for whom she stood in line for more than three hours to cast her first-ever ballot.

“I’m interested to see how he’s going to do. Every time he speaks, I always listen to him. He just speaks so well, he draws me to him,” Brown said. “I’m still going to be following him, definitely, because I have his car now.”