Kids will groan when you tell a story, complaining that they've heard it a hundred times. Then, one day, unaccountably, they'll ask you to tell it again. So it goes.
AUTOMOBILES
I once casually asked my wife’s father how many
cars he had owned. I think the number at
that time was 52, and he proceeded to fill me in on the details of each vehicle
over the next several hours. My own list
is shorter.
The 1951 Ford
I got my first car as a sixteenth birthday gift from my parents in
1958, toward the end of my junior year in high school. My father took me out to shop for a vehicle,
and we hit many low-rent used car lots around Temple City, where we lived. Shopping with my father was no picnic, as he
believed that every salesman was a low-life bastard trying to screw him, so his
demeanor ranged from stony silence to terse, caustic remarks to the sales-force
felon. At the time, this embarrassed me,
as I didn’t yet understand that my father was right. After several high-tension encounters at
various car lots, my father settled on a tan 1951 Ford sedan, at a cost of $150,
and asked me if I wanted it. By then, I
would have accepted a pogo stick if it meant I didn’t have to go to another lot
with my father, so I said yes, and we bought it. $150 was a low price even in 1958, but the
car had previously been owned by a mailman, who had racked up over 200,000
miles with it. Also, the trunk lid had
been damaged and couldn’t be opened, so on the way home with the car, we
stopped at a junkyard, where my dad purchased a somewhat rusty, chalky,
powder-blue replacement that he installed when we got home. So it was an unconventionally two-toned
car. But it was wheels, and it was mine.
Another problem, it turned out, was that the front seat had been worn
out during its years in the postal service, so that the seat rolled backward or
forward as the car accelerated or decelerated.
Since my father’s trunk replacement had slightly unnerved me, I fixed this problem
myself by jamming a wooden coat-hanger into the seat mechanism. Worked fine.
The next day, I drove my new car to Arcadia High School (we were in the
Temple City mailing district, but the Arcadia school district). As the day wore on, I offered rides home to
just about everyone I knew. Um, every girl I knew. Five accepted the offer, and I felt like a teen prince as I slowly inched my carload
of chicks out of the school parking lot.
I drove up Santa Anita Boulevard and stopped for a red light at the
four-lane Colorado Boulevard. When the
light changed, I pulled into the intersection, but botched the stick-shift move
into second and stalled the car. Other
motorists were immediately irked by the delay I was causing and honked at me
mercilessly, and a couple of the girls rather stridently urged me to get
going. I finally forced the clutch into
first gear and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. Unfortunately, the weight of the two girls
and me forced the front seat backward, breaking the wooden coat-hanger, so
that, while the car started inching slowly through the intersection, I was unable to
reach any of the foot controls, and could barely get my hands on the steering
wheel. After too many agonizing moments,
I got the girls to coordinate in scrunching the front seat forward, so that my
desperate feet could once again reach the pedals.
The rest of the trip is still a blur, but couldn’t have been much fun,
since a couple of the girls lived in the hilly area toward the north end of
Arcadia.
Later, drawing upon valuable lessons learned in shop class during my
freshman year, I found a new and permanent solution to the seat problem by
using a wire coat-hanger.
Though the seat issue was resolved, other matters
occasionally arose to bite me or my passengers in the butt. One summer day, when my life-long friend Bob was riding shotgun, we stopped at a Foster Freeze for a couple of tall
cones. As we pulled out of the lot, Bob
was holding both of them so I could devote my attention to a left turn through
a busy intersection. Midway through the
turn, the right door suddenly flew open and Bob tumbled out. He rolled once, but somehow kept the cones
upright as he came to his feet. Both he
and the Frosties were unscathed. Or at
least the cones were. He may have had
complaints that he never complained about to me. He was always a good athlete, but in this
case, I think it may have been family frugality that was most at
play. In those days, those cones must
have been 15 cents apiece, at least.
I wonder if I ever had that door repaired. I can’t see how a coat-hanger would have
helped much. Probably I just warned
people not to lean on the door.
