Gordon Leadfoot

    His name was Gordon right enough.  But not Leadfoot.  That was a moniker I bestowed upon him.  It had nothing to do with his musical abilities.

     He had one good eye, and one not so good, as in legally blind in that eye.  He wore pop bottle lenses for glasses, for both eyes, the good one included.

     He was from Oklahoma.  He eschewed being called an “Okie”.  I never saw him get angry.  But if you called him an Okie, he would hasten to correct you.  He was an Oklahoman.    

     He stood about 5’6”. He probably weighed 200 pounds.  On roller skates, he was anything but lead-footed.  Backwards, forwards, tight circles, he could do nearly anything on roller skates.

      At the local swimming pool, he could put on an exhibition on the diving board.  He had played college football.  He was that good of an athlete.

     He once ran a foot race against one of his eighth grade students, for maybe forty or fifty yards.  He won handily.  There had been a bet.  The student had to stop wearing colored glasses in the school building as a result of losing the race to a ”short, fat, old man.”

     I got to know him the summer of 1972.  I signed on to help him move alfalfa bales one June day.  We were on a county road in his pickup.  He was taking me somewhere to get a tractor with a loader.  He was driving.

     We were doing sixty miles an hour on the gravel.  Gordon decided his glasses needed cleaning.  He took them of and started in on them with his handkerchief.  We were headed north, still doing 60 mph.   In an instant, we were in the west ditch, still going 60 mph.

      “What’s goin’ on here?” Gordon asked.  He put his glasses back on.  “Oh.”  He pulled the pickup out of the ditch and back on the road.  He never let up on the gas pedal.  I had made an instantaneous grab for whatever I could get a hold of to survive the inevitable rollover.

      He looked at me and I looked at him.  He went on with our conversation, as though nothing had happened.  I made a mental note:  don’t ever get into a vehicle this guy is driving.

     The lead-foot moniker didn’t come about then.  It would be many years later when Tisha and I rode to an out-of-town football game with Uncle Bill in his hot Red Dodge.  On the way home, somewhere east of Colby, Bill managed to overtake Gordon driving his big old Ford.

      The race was on.  Bill knew a shortcut through Colby.  When we pulled up to the stop sign at the highway that would be the final 30-mile stretch home, Gordon’s Ford blew past us.  We tailed him for several miles, both cars doing 80 to 90 miles per hour.

     Finally, we reached a flat stretch with no traffic coming our way.  Bill floor boarded the Dodge, the turbo kicked in, and we soared past the 100 mile per hour mark.  As we went past Gordon, I could hear the Ford’s exhaust pipe shrieking and I knew Gordon had his foot “in the carburetor” as thy used to say in those olden days.  The big old Ford just didn’t have any more to give. 

     (Someday there will be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Old Automobiles and Bill and Gordon will both be enshrined in the Hall of Infamy.)

     The Dodge won the race, but we all won in that nobody got killed that night on the way home from a football game.  Then it was I named Gordon, Gordon Leadfoot.

      Gordon was always a farmer at heart.  He quit teaching to try farming full time.   But the 1980’s were a huge disaster for farmers, many who had mortgaged heavily to buy land after the explosion of grain prices following Nixon’s grain deal with the Russians in the 1970’s.  Gordon had to return to teaching.

      He returned to, or took up, school bus driving when he went back to teaching.  I advised my girls, “Don’t get on any bus Mr. C. is driving, if you can help it.”   Of course, they couldn’t help it.  They were on a bus or two that lost a little paint as a result of Gordon’s driving.  Gordon’s driving was a bit of a joke among the students riding his bus. 

     But I am happy to report that nobody ever suffered an injury as a result of Gordon’s driving.  I am sorry to report that Gordon is gone now.  Oklahoma’s loss was Kansas’s gain.  I am glad I got to know Gordon, leadfoot and all.  Adieu, friend.