¿Plaques?

     ¿Plaques?

     “¿Name?”  Tshirt asked as she tapped the front license plate of the automobile sitting in the mechanic’s garage.  She was our translator.

     Yes, “plaques.”  The guys all nodded, some excitedly, as they watched us.  What were these strange Yankees doing here in their garage on the main drag in the non-tourist part of town?

      We were off on an adventure.  It was 1995, our 25^th wedding anniversary.  We went to Cancun to celebrate. 

     It was Spring break, March.  That wasn’t a good choice.  Not because the natives were restless.  The detraction came from the U.S.  in the form of college students.  College students who were there to celebrate their Spring break.  Of course there were responsible students there, but they are not the ones you notice.  You notice the ones who felt being a United States citizen in Mexico gave them license to indulge in any kind of lewd behavior spurred on by over indulgence in alcohol. 

     Far from the typical story of a corrupt gendarme collecting a bribe to keep a transgressor out of jail, we saw uniformed folks patiently trying to herd drunken youths away from committing crimes or endangering themselves.  We asked one man if this was normal behavior.

      Oh yes he said.  It’s pretty much this way from February through May.  Not many families like us here during Spring Break.  Well, we could see why.  Nobody told us.  We forgot to ask.

     We didn’t come to Mexico to see drunk American college students making fools of themselves, so we boarded the bus into the old part of town where the natives lived and shopped.  We were there for mercenary purposes, too.  A liter of bottled water cost four or five dollars at the hotel.  The very same jug in the downtown supermarket was about 75 cents.

     Even here in the local market place, we saw inebriated students.  It made us ashamed to be Americans, not a comfortable feeling for a tourist.  But Bill rose to the occasion.  He said the best way to learn about a new location was go on a quest, or have a project to complete.

     Bill had this old sixties era Dodge van.  It was a dog.  Once he took New York native Joe to Denver (from Kansas) in the van.  Early on Joe had misgivings.  Joe remarked that he could look down and see the pavement passing beneath them through the rusted holes in the floorboards.

      Bill assured him all was well.  He had what his old mechanic friend deemed necessary for a successful road trip: a log chain, jumper cables, toolbox, and a gas can.  They were prepared to handle any problem, should one arise.  Bill fully expected that a problem would not arise.  He was right.  They made the trip without incident.  Joe declined any further road trips with Bill after that. 

      Bill loaned his Dodge van to favorite students at Halloween.  They painted and decorated it appropriately for the season.  Then they could chase about town hauling their friends to parties or using it to go trick-or-treating.  They rarely cleaned the van up after their holiday.  The decoration would weather off as the van sat parked on the street or in the alley.

     The van was the object of Bill’s Cancun quest.  Kansas issues only one license plate per vehicle.  Bill decided a Mexican license plate would be fitting and proper on the front of the poor old van.  On the morning of our third day, we set out on our quest. 

     We took the bus to the far east stop in town. We dismounted and started hoofing it back west.  Staying on the main drag, we could catch a bus back to the resort if we wearied of our sojourn.

      On our leaving the airport on our first day in Cancun, we changed busses near the resort area.  Tshirt stepped up and asked the driver, in Spanish, if this bus would take us to our hotel.  The bus driver eyed her and said “Yeah.”  What a disappointment!  Everyone in the resort area spoke American English.  No chance to really use her Spanish.

      Here on our quest, many of the folks we encountered knew about as much English as we knew Spanish.  Tshirt would get her chance to try speaking Spanish for real.  As the cab driver who was drafted to be our Rocinante in our Quixotic adventure said, first gesturing toward us, then to himself, “No Spanish, no English, no problem.”

     At our first stop, we decided we needed to know how to say “license plate” in Spanish.  Tshirt tapped the front plate on the car sitting in the garage and asked the dumbfounded mechanics, “Name? What’s it called?”  The question took a while to soak in, then in a chorus, not quite coordinated, they all brightened and said “Plaques”.  “Plaques?” we echoed.  “Si, si plaques.”  We all were excited.  We had communicated with them, they with us. 

     With Tshirt’s Spanish and our gestures, we managed to get it across that we wanted to buy an old auto license plate.  Disappointment registered on the mechanics’ faces.  No plaques to be had.  We thanked them and walked on. 

     Stopping in various garages and dealerships along the way, we figured out that there would be no old license plates lying about as there were in nearly any of our garages.  Two places stood out in our adventure.  One must have been an upscale dealership.  The floor, even the pits in the garage, were tiled with pale yellow tile.  They were spic-and-span clean, too.  Any grease that hit the floor must have been quickly mopped up.

     The last place we tried turned out to be a motorcycle shop.  No, they had no plaques, not on premises.  The owner had a salvage yard where he might have a motorcycle plate, but that wouldn’t do for Bill.  However, the proprietor did have a control handle and cable that Bill needed for one of his cycles.  It too was at the salvage yard some miles away.

      If we would come back at four o’clock, he would have the handle at the shop.  We did make a special trip and arrived back at the motorcycle shop precisely at four.  When we showed up, the owner threw his hands up in the air and his face registered shock and surprise.  He never figured these Gringoes would keep that appointment.  Off he rushed.

      We waited.  It was difficult to converse with the mechanics.  They knew no English.  They weren’t as friendly and outgoing as the boss.  We walked up and down the street.  Close by an eatery had a stack of meat that looked like a giant hornet’s nest.  It was shingled around this drum which turned over a fire.  It wasn’t quite done yet, they explained when we wanted to try some of it.

    Five o’clock came.  Still no owner.  One of the boys went out and came back with a six pack of Corona.  Shoot, we should have bought it for them.  It might have loosened them up a bit.  As it was, they stayed to themselves and shared their beer.

     We had about given up on the guy ever coming back, when he did come back.  He had the motorcycle handle complete with cable, and he had a bagful of motorcycle plates, one from each Mexican state.  He had the motorcycle part right away.  It took some time to find a plate from every Mexican state.

     We already had the plate we wanted by that time, but still, what a deal.  He asked for 50 pesos or something, which he obviously thought was way overpriced.  Bill gave him a fifty and he was overjoyed.  The mechanics laughed and nudged each other.  The boss sure had put one over on the Yankee tourist.  

      When we left the motorcycle shop earlier that morning, we wandered into an older marketplace in town.  The streets were narrow and winding.  We ran across a motorcycle cop directing traffic away from a street that was temporarily blocked for some kind of work.  On a lark, Bill told him what we were looking for. 

     At first he just shook his head.  Then he brightened.  The city-run (or state-run, maybe) impound yard would have lots of plates.  He wasn’t sure they would give us one, though.  He pulled out his business card and wrote an address on the back of it.  While he was writing, we directed a few cars away from the street he was blocking.  The drivers would give us a suspicious eye and try to turn into the street.  Then they would see the cop and divert to another route.

      With the address, we flagged down the first taxi we saw.  We showed him the address on the back of the card.  No way.  He wouldn’t take us Yankees to that part of town.  Turn the card over.  The cop sent us there.  Well, okay, reluctantly, he agreed to take us.  Soon, he was in the spirit of the quest.

       His English was better than he had first let on.  He gave us a tour of the town enroute to the outskirts where the police junkyard was. The driver assured us this was a police junkyard, not a taxi junkyard.  Taxi drivers didn't get into accidents.  We laughed.

      When we got to the yard, it was fenced, gated, and locked.  Bill approached the gate.  The cab driver honked.  Finally, a guy came to the locked gate.  It took a while for Bill to make him understand what he wanted.  The gatekeeper disappeared. 

       A crew of linemen across the road watched and wondered, joked and laughed.  I yelled at them, “Crazy Yankees!” and made the circles around my ear with my forefinger in the universal symbol for insanity.  They laughed, agreed, and continued watching.  We milled around the taxi and watched the gate. 

     The gatekeeper came back to the gate, and sure enough, he had an old Mexican license plate in his hand.  He unlocked and opened the gate enough to give Bill the plate.  He started to close the gate, but Bill offered him a twenty.  He opened the gate, took the twenty, looked at it, looked at Bill, looked at us, and brightened up enough to challenge the sun.  He was thrilled.  He waved the twenty towards the linemen.  They laughed and cheered him and us.  

      On the way back to the hotel, the driver took us on another route.  He showed us the section where the doctors and the lawyers lived, where the teachers lived, when he found out we were all teachers.

       Back at the hotel, the price of the taxi ride was something ridiculous, like 5 pesos.  It seems that a taxi ride anywhere in the resort area was 10 or 20 pesos, but anywhere downtown, for the natives, was like maximum of 5 pesos.  The driver wanted to charge us the native rate.  Bill gave him a ten and I gave him a ten.  He was happy and so were we.  Later, the Goodwife read that average pay for workers was less than 5 pesos per day.  No wonder we made them happy. 

      We had met a lot of people, had seen a little of the local culture, seen very little of drunken college students, had had a good time.  With our second trip to the motorcycle shop, we had had a very adventurous day.  It would be the highlight of our Cancun trip. 

    

Fixing the Wrong Problem

     For the sixth or seventh time, I carefully lowered the stool onto the flange, aligning the small holes in the base of the stool with the bolts protruding from the flange.  The first time I proceeded thus was August 22.  I had refined the technique quite a bit since then.  I learned to use a nut and a quarter inch bolt on the stool securing bolts.  That enables me to line up the stool before I mash the wax ring into the wrong place.

     Progress always begins with dissatisfaction.  Queen Eve found fig leaves too rough of texture so she cultivated silk worms.  That’s probably a myth, but it serves to make the point.  I was dissatisfied with the basement bathroom stool.  It was a contractor model, supposedly a water-saver, but most events required two flushes to do the job, so where was the saving?  It was not exactly self-cleaning, either.

     The upstairs water closets had American Standard chair height models that saved water, disposed thoroughly of their loads, and stayed pretty clean.  I researched models on the internet and found a suitable model that would match the upstairs facilities, available at Lowes for a decent price.  I bought.

     I installed.  The stool came with its own wax ring.  I followed the instructions and felt certain I had solved my problem.  The next morning, after my early-morning rest stop, I found, to my chagrin, a small pool of water on the bathroom floor.  Elementary detective work traced the source of the mimi-mini-Nile to the front of the stool base.  Hmmm.  Must have done something wrong with that wax ring.

     An extenuating factor was a missing floor flange.  Whoever installed the first stool mounted it directly to the floor, no floor flange.  That might be a factor, but it shouldn’t matter.  If it worked before, surely I could make it work here, I reasoned.  I bought a super thick wax ring and stool  reset number one happened.

     With the same results, a small stream of water which never appeared until after the third or fourth flush.  The third reset a day or two later involved using both wax rings to make a huge gasket.  It still leaked.

      Must be the lack of a floor flange, my next theory.  I bought an easy-fix floor flange that fit inside the existing pipe and required no gluing or chipping of cement or tile.  I did have to drill holes through tile and cement and use anchors and screws to secure the flange to the floor.  This time I carefully levelled the stool over the flange.

      With this fix, the stool didn’t flush as well as it had proved it could do.  (One of the reviews I read said the stool could flush a bowling ball.)  In order to be an easy fix, the flange choked things down too much, right where stool and flange meet.  But it didn’t matter whether it flushed well or not.  It still leaked.

      Every time I went to the wax ring section in Lowes, I eyed the non-wax rubber gaskets ballyhooed to replace the wax ring and work better without the sticky mess of the bees wax.  I succumbed to the hoo.  What would it hurt?

     Off came the stool for the fourth (? I’ve lost count) time.  Out came the screws, out came the easy-fix flange.  On went the new super-duper rubber gasket with four inch tail piece which went down far enough into the sewer pipe to be sure the leak wasn’t happening at the top of the pipe.  I was back to no floor flange again.

    Well, guess what, it leaked.  So maybe the rubber gasket was being driven off the stool by the powerful flush.  Off came the stool one more time.  I used wax (I had collected quite a pile of twice and thrice used wax) to prop up the rubber gasket.  Now it couldn’t shy away from the stool.  It still leaked.

     Back to Lowes for the correct UPC-certified floor flange.  It fitted over the three inch sewer pipe (could be connected to four inch pipe by using a coupling) and did not reduce the opening.  I had to carefully chip away floor tile and two inches of cement to make room for the flange to slide down to floor level.  I had to drill two new anchor holes.  Two of the former ones still lined up properly. 

     Now it was a standard, code-approved installation.  It still leaked.  It was beginning to occur to me that something must be wrong with the stool itself.  “Beginning” is a stretch.  I had inspected for cracks in previous installations, but I never saw anything that looked suspicious.  By now, the malfunctioning appurtenance was becoming the only possibility.

      I had tried to pinpoint the leak in previous attempts by rolling up squares of toilet paper to cigarette size and taping them on the floor in various places and even inside the stool cowling.  Two problems arose.  The squares taped to the stool cowling remained dry.  The ones taped to the floor pretty much got wet because the water spread in all directions.

     One more time I pulled the stool.  I used silicone on top of the rubber gasket and on the stool base at the right point.  I let it set overnight so the silicone could cure.  It still leaked.   

     I called on Lowes.  I really didn’t want to go through American Standard’s warranty process.  The return desk clerk looked at my receipt (this was October, the recipt date was August 22) and said I was within the 90-day period stated on the back of the sales slip.  Return the stool for a refund or replacement model.

      One last time I removed the stool.  One of the rolled-up toilet paper squares had fallen off the stool and landed in front of the “wax ring” and was still dry.  Aha!  The leak was not at the wax ring.  I began to hope.

     This time I disassembled the stool after removing it.  Lurking in the back of my mind was still the thought I had done something wrong.  (It’s the Lutheran conscience.)  What if I brought a new stool back, installed it, and it leaked?

     I hauled the stool up the steps and out into the back yard.  I propped it up on a bucket and a step stool.  While I was at Lowes, I had checked out the test plugs.  The only one that worked was thirty bucks.  My conscience didn’t feel that bad.

     A Styrofoam cup the right size worked to plug the stool outlet.  It wasn’t water tight, but it held well enough for my purpose.  I filled the bowl with water until it was dripping around the improvised plug.  Sure enough, there was a slow drip coming from the front of the stool.  Real slow. 

     I tried to look up the stool skirt to see the source of the leak.  I couldn’t get a good look.  Mirror and flashlight weren’t much help.  The drip was there pretty slow.  To simulate a flush, I grabbed a plunger.  I couldn’t really give it a good plunge due to the stool’s precarious balance on the bucket.  I had to hold the Styrofoam cup with one hand and operate the plunger with the other.  But I got enough pressure to step up the drip considerably.

       My frustration reached its end.  I cleaned and dried the stool (taking a dirty stool to Lowes would be akin to going to the emergency room in dirty underwear).  I turned it over in the bright sunlight and here is what I saw.

 

     There is a crack right where the apron meets the bowl.  It’s hard to see.  If I hadn’t already been to Lowes to check on the return, I would probably have got out the JB Weld and tried to fix the crack.  I wasn’t ready for another failure.  Into the back of the pickup went the stool, tank, seat, bolts, etc. 

      I didn’t get too many funny looks while I rolled the cart with stool parts spread out on it across the parking lot and into the return desk.  I presented my receipt and my case.  I was prepared to explain my testing to prove the stool was defective to the clerk who was not the same as the one I visited with earlier that morning.  But it wasn’t necessary.

     She asked me if I wanted refund or replacement.  I said I wanted the same product that didn’t leak.  She asked if I minded going to get the new toilet.  I said “no” and set off to find a person in the plumbing department.  A young guy got the heavy box off the shelf, put it on a cart, took it to the return desk. 

    The clerk verified the number with the young guy.  I didn’t have to rerun my credit card or anything.  She said “okay” and he said to get my vehicle to the loading zone and he would meet me there.  Which he did.  He loaded the box into the pickup for me, and off I went.

     One more time I installed a stool.  I used the silicone on the rubber gasket.  I let it dry overnight.  Still not ready for another failure.  With trepidation I hooked up the water line and flushed. 

     No water on the floor!  Three days later still no water on the floor after regular use.  I still look every time I use it.  I’m beginning to believe I fixed it at last.     I would like to say this the only time I have spent a significant amount of time fixing the wrong problem, but alas! it’s not true.  It's only the most recent example.

      

                   

      

'55 Chevy

     At 4:08 p.m., it roared to life.  It roared because what was left of the leprous muffler had scraped itself off on the cement threshold of the barn as it crossed over, ending thirty years of captivity in that barn.

     This time it was different.  It wasn’t my hand turning the ignition switch to the right to activate the starter.  The starter drug down a couple of times.  Release the switch, then try again.  On the third try, it took off.  The unmuffled roar challenged the south wind and rose above it.

     The new owner smiled, waved, shifted the Hurst Mystery shifter into first gear, released the clutch and he was off.  It was a reunion of sorts.  The new owner had driven the car when he was a teen and his buddies had revamped the car. 

     “Revamped” meant replacing the column three-speed shifter with the Hurst conversion.  They installed a rear end lift kit with chrome brackets that raised the back end of the car and made it look like it was going downhill permanently.  Two chrome bugles channeled the exhaust over the rear axle and terminated about a foot or so before reaching the back bumper.      

      Only one of the bugles ported the exhaust.  The other was a dummy.  Those chrome bugles would be the first thing the car would shed during our ownership.  The dummy left with a rough bump on some highway somewhere.  The real one rusted out and had to be replaced with a real tail pipe.           

     The rear wheels were chrome.  The chrome wheels were relegated to the trunk sometime in the early eighties when I was still driving it as my second car.  One of them functioned as the spare.  Now as it left the yard, one chrome wheel served as the right front wheel.  It was the only tire that refused to hold air when the resurrection process began this summer.

 

     The sixties revamping included covering the car with a coat of sky blue paint.  We concluded as we conducted the obligatory presale inspection that the car was probably originally two-toned with a white top.  When we raised the trunk lid, the drain channel running around the trunk perimeter was still original white.

     We were probably the fourth owner.  None of us knew the first owner.  The revampers were probably the second owner.  The third owner was a young lady from Genoa.  She bought it from the revampers who moved on to a GTO.  The young lady wanted to get married, needed the money, didn’t need the car because her intended had a car.

    It was 1969.  The Goodwife, who wasn’t that yet, was entering her final year of “Normal” school.  To complete her degree, she must do her student teaching.  Her appointment was in the Greater Denver area.  She would need some way of commuting to and from her “job.”

     She was looking at all kinds of used cars, like MG’s and Volkswagen beetles.  I knew this car was available, and I preferred it because if I was going to be responsible for maintenance and upkeep, I was much more familiar with the Chevy.  At the time I was driving my skunk, a black four-door 55 Chevy with white top.

      Her father okayed the car deal, but he remonstrated with her long distance over the phone from Hawaii (expensive call) when he found out she had bought a Chevy.  “Why didn’t you buy a Volkswagen?” he asked.  “It would have better resale value.”

       “Yes, but it has a better resale value now, too.  I couldn’t buy a Volkswagen.  Too expensive,” she explained.  She paid $250 for the Chevy.

      When we got married a few months later, it was our only car.  The old skunk bumped out a rod as I returned to my Kansas job after attending her graduation in Greeley and meeting her family for the first time.  Our wedding was a week after her graduation.

      It was replaced as the primary mode of transportation in August of that year when we bought a new 1970 Ford pickup in Montrose while on an end-of-summer camping trip.  After that, the Goodwife drove the new pickup and I used the ’55 to drive to work and to the golf course and airport. 

      We actually had it sold once in 1971, for the original $250.  But the kid backed out of the deal at the last minute.  It stayed on until 1979 when it was demoted to third place by the acquisition of the Molly McBride Dodge.

      It was rarely used for a couple of years.  Then in 1981, I was commuting to Goodland to attend Vo Tech school.  The price of gas went up to over a dollar.  The Dodge and the Ford both got about 14 or 15 miles per gallon of gas.  The Chev could do nearly twenty on the road.

     I had this propane conversion kit that had been installed initially on the skunk when I first started teaching.  In those olden days, I could fill the propane tank for $3 and go about 250 miles on that. 

      When the skunk died, Dad sold it for $50.  Before the guy towed it off, I pulled the propane equipment. Later, I would install it on the 70 Ford pickup.  The tank wasn’t big enough (22 gallons) for that application.  The pickup would only go a hundred miles or so on a tankful.  Plus I experienced fuel pump problems when I ran it on propane.

      In 1981 when the price of gas went over a dollar, propane was still going for 70 cents.  It wasn’ too hard to convert the blue 55 to propane, since I had all the stuff.  It cut down the expense for my Goodland commute considerably.

      At first, I filled at the Coop in Goodland about every other day.  After a while, they said they wouldn’t fill it unless I put access hoses to the outside of the car.  I opened the trunk and hooked their hose directly to the propane tank.  Against safety regulations, they said.  The truth was it was too big of a pain for the propane guy to mess with two or three times a week.

      I found a local propane dealer who set up a 300 gallon tank near his bulk tanks.  I could fill from it and have him fill the main tank as needed.  It was a much better deal.       

     Until 1985 I used the Chev for a work truck.  I had the pickup, but the problem with it, I had to be continually moving tools in and out, lacking a cover for the bed.  I could keep a few tools locked in the trunk of the car, out of the weather, and it was still more economical.

     In 1985 when we moved to Colorado, the Chevy was a superfluous expense we could no longer afford.  Into the red barn it went, still equipped to run on propane.  There it sat until 2015.  The tires were all flat.  I had managed to keep the mice out of it until a couple of years ago.  They got in and made a mess. 

     A neighbor “kid” knew we had this old car collection.  I think he must have been a piano student who snooped around when it wasn’t his turn at the piano.  He always wanted to buy the 1960 Pontiac rusting away in the current bushes.  As I didn’t own the Pontiac, we never could make a deal.

      Then he found out his dad had a history with the ’55 Chev.  His dad was a good friend of the revampers.  The quest was on.  Dan struck a deal with the Goodwife.  It was during the rainy wet Spring of 2015 when all the farmers were idled by the rain and mud.  The car would be a birthday present for his dad.  It was my obligation to get the car out of the red barn where it could be trailered to its new home.      

      The coming-out effort began during the wet weather during harvest.   Brother Harry ferried the air bubble back and forth from air compressor to car.  Remarkably, all the tires except the right front one inflated and stayed inflated.

     After removing the worst of the mice nests and droppings with the shop vac,  I worked on getting the engine to run.  I had to remove the propane conversion from the top of the carburetor.  There was no propane left in the tank. 

     The electric fuel pump worked, for a while.  It pumped some pretty rotten stuff at first.  Adding a a couple of gallons of fresh gas didn’t get immediate results.  Harvest beckoned and the project was abandoned temporarily.  The battery had to go back into the Ford tractor that ran the auger.

      Sometime after harvest, I returned to the project.  I had to replace a leaky fuel line or two when the electric pump shoved the new gas up to the carburetor.  By trickling a few drops of gas into the carburetor throat, I got it to start and run, roughly for a few minutes.  The dust flew, the blue smoke wafted.  I was dialing Brother Harry so he could hear it roar.  Before the phone connection was made, the engine stopped running.

     It was a lengthy process to determine the fuel pump had ceased working.  I replaced filter, added gas, before taking the fuel pump off and determining it was shot.  Some weeks later, I finally put a new pump on it, but not until I had tried a couple of times to repair the old one.

      With the new pump, it fired up and ran, eventually fairly smoothly after it warmed up.  A more thorough vacuuming followed.  All the stuff was out of the way.  Time to try backing out of thirty year old ruts. 

       The car started, but depressing the clutch pedal produced no results.  I couldn’t get the transmission into reverse, or any other gear.  The clutch plate was rusted to the flywheel.

      Out came the battery and back into the Ford tractor it went.  With the tractor, I pulled the Chevy out of its tracks.

     Then around I went and hooked to the front and the Chevy saw the sunlight for the first time in thirty years.  Out in the open, I reinstalled the battery, put the car into first gear and tried the starter.  Reluctantly the starter pulled the engine and the car.  The engine fired and we were off.  I made two or three big circles around the farmyard, pushing the clutch pedal down, releasing, down again. 

      Finally, the clutch plate left the flywheel and I could shift gears.  Not too fast, the brakes were not working.  Oh well, I thought.  We can get it on a trailer now, with a winch.  Time for one more cleaning.  This time, I gave it a bath.  Some of the thirty years of dust was kind of oily, from tractor exhaust?

       Well, there it was, ready to go.  I eased it into the garage and there it sat for a couple of weeks until the deal could be consummated.  Wet weather again.  Dan called.  Did I think they could limp the car to their place?  Their trailer wasn’t exactly made to haul cars.

    “The brakes don’t work, Dan.”  He decided to try it.

     So Dan and his father showed up on a windy cold early October afternoon.  I jacked the car up, one corner at a time.  While Dan operated the brake pedal, I opened up the rusty bleeder valves and bled all four brakes.  They worked!

     I fired it up and backed out of the garage.  Fifteen minutes later, Dad drove the 1955 Chev known as the Patti Wagon into the sunset.

  “Don’t wreck it!” Dan hollered as his Dad eased out on the clutch.  I laughed.  How many times had his dad told him the same thing?

      The new owners promise to keep us up on the progress of the restoration.  I look forward to the new old car.  While I am sad to see it go, I am relieved that someone else has charge of its care from here on.

                  

Molly McBride’s ‘68 Dodge

       It was a 1968 Dodge with a history.  I bought it at an auction.  I paid $1000 for it.  My competitor in the bidding came around as I was getting the title from Jerry and mentioned loud enough for me to hear, “I didn’t want to see that car go for nothing.”

     I turned to look and I could see he wasn’t too happy.  It occurred to me that he was hoping to see the car go for nothing, to him, not to me.  He ran a service station and probably knew what condition the car was in.

     His comment, meant for me, was saying he really didn’t lose the bidding war to me.  He was just in the bidding for altruistic purposes, to see that Molly got something for the car.  I wasn’t concerned about winning a bidding war, or any of those other games that auction-goers play.   I had the car I wanted at a decent price, and if the service-station man thought it was worth bidding on, then I had made a good buy.

      It was 1979.  We were new parents.  Our “good” car was a 1970 Ford pickup, the only new vehicle we have ever owned.  Our second car was a 1955 Chevrolet.  It was old and two door.  Not exactly a family car.

     We knew about the Dodge because we lived across the street from the American Hotel where Bert and Molly McBride lived.  They were brother and sister.  The hotel was in a neighborhood of single family houses, a block and a half off Kansas Highway 25, a half mile from Highway 36.  Not a likely place for a hotel.

     Where we lived was once the site of the local livery stable.  Perhaps that was why the American Hotel was there.  I never figured out why it was there.  In the seventies, the “guests” were long-term boarders who couldn’t or didn’t afford a better place to live.   The most infamous renter was Bill Ely.

     Bill had a reputation as a ne’er-do-well, one of the town drunks.  He had lived at the American Hotel off and on for many years and was a familiar sight in our neighborhood when we moved into our house in the Fall of 1970.

      Molly was an old maid who had been the county school superintendent in the days when one-room country schools still functioned.  As the schools faded into history, so did her job.  She bought the American Hotel and brought brother Burt along to fix it up and serve as maintenance man.

      Molly bought the big old Dodge brand new from the local dealership.  The Dodge was famous from its beginning. It was the first car the dealership sold with factory-installed cruise control.  It had a 383 V-8 engine.  If you had the cruise set at 65 mph and had slowed down to 35 mph, when you turned the little ring on the turn signal forward for “Resume”, it would sit you back in your seat as it got back to 65 as fast as it could, and that was pretty fast. 

     And  Rod, the local dealer, could lie down in its trunk and stretch out, no bending.  Its trunk was that big.   

      Molly was a small woman, so small she had trouble reaching the foot pedals and seeing through the windshield at the same time.  She had a small pillow which she placed between her and the seat back. The pillow pushed her forward enough so that she could reach the pedals and still see to drive.  The pillow came with the car when we bought it.

      Molly’s driving habits would not be remarkable in the cities today.  She always had her right foot to the floor—either on the accelerator or on the brake, just like modern city drivers.  It was a bit unusual in our village, however.

      When we heard the roar of a person in a car in a hurry, that would be Molly.  If we heard the screech of rubber on pavement, it was Molly coming to a stop, a usual one, not necessarily an emergency.

     Molly saw to it that her new car was well maintained.  Every November, the car would go to the Dodge dealer’s garage and the rear tires would be replaced.  She had a set of studded snow tires mounted on their own rims.  Off would come the regular tires and on would go the snow tires.  The extra set of tires and rims stayed in the trunk until April when the regular tires and the snow tires switched places.  The extra tires and rims came with the car when we bought it.

     Molly always parked the car in its place in front of the hotel.   One winter afternoon, with the studded snow tires in use, Molly came out of the hotel, jumped in, backed out, felt a thump, pulled forward, felt another thump, stopped and got out.

        Behind the car’s back tires she found Bill lying.  “Don’t run over me again,” Bill is purported to have said.  “I’ll get up.” 

      Molly helped Bill up, got him into the car and took him to the emergency room.  Bruised and maybe cracked ribs, that was all.  Everyone attributed Bill’s survival to his relaxed state.

    It seems Bill came home pretty well under the influence.  He leaned against the car while he rested up and prepared to tackle the steps up to the front door and then another set of steps up to his room.  He went to sleep, or passed out, and fell behind the car. He was behind the right rear wheel where Molly didn’t see him when she came out and got into the car.

      He was relaxed.  Plus he had on a fairy heavy winter coat.  The car had on its studded rear tires.  Bill survived and went on to die another day, I’m not sure where, when or how.

     The day came when Bert and Molly could not keep up with the rigor of maintaining the building and dealing with the renters.  She sold the hotel.  At first it was a group home for adults working in a sheltered workshop.  Then a lady bought it and converted it to a private residence.

     Meanwhile, Molly moved to a retired teacher’s home somewhere east.  A group of locals organized and held an auction to dispose of all the things she no longer needed in her new home, including the Dodge.

     One evening I had a high school dance to chaperone.  The Goodwife thought it would be a nice outing, so she dressed up and went with me.  All the kids were going so we had no regular teen baby sitter.  We convinced our day time baby sitter to take on the extra job.  She had no car.  So I went to get her before the dance and brought her to our house, thinking that way not to have to disturb the sleeping baby when the dance was over.

     The dance did get over and we returned home, driving the Dodge, of course.  It was a cold evening so I left the car run while I escorted the Goodwife into the house.  I helped Laurine on with her coat and helped her down the steps and around to the driveway, but Alas!  There was no car sitting in the drive!

     Had someone stolen the old thing?  I had heard of sneak thieves taking running cars or cars with keys in the ignition from private driveways.  Was I a victim of a thief?  But I was only gone five minutes or less.  Who would want an old ’68 Dodge, anyway?

     Gradually my eyes adjusted to the darkness.  Then I could see it.  It was across the street, the left rear wheel sitting on my neighbor’s lawn, the right wheel up against the curb, the front end dipped down nearly touching the street. 

     I left Laurine standing in the driveway while I ran across the street.  The door open, the dome light on, I could see that the car had slipped out of park and into reverse.  There it was, still in reverse, still doing its best to climb up the curb.  Silently, I thanked God that the curb had stopped the car’s journey.  I had visions of the car backed into the neighbor’s living room wall. 

     Another fifteen feet to its right and the car would have been in the driveway of the old American Hotel, now the private residence of a single lady with two teenage daughters.  No curb, no parking blocks, nothing to get in the car’s way.  It would have hit her house.

     I got Laurine safely home.  I made sure the shift lever was in park and set the parking brake, a thing I rarely do, while I helped Laurine into her house.  Again in my own driveway, I made sure the car was in park when I shut it off.

     Contemplating the incident after the shock wore off, I came up with this theory.  The old car just wanted to go back to its rightful home, to its parking place in front of the American Hotel.  It almost made it.  We should have called it “Christine”, but Stephen King hadn’t come up with that yet.

     There was one other exciting incident with the old Dodge.  Once I was changing the spark plugs.  Like most V-8’s, the spark plugs are rather inaccessible, especially the back ones.  As I pulled the socket wrench up from the back plug, somehow I knocked the socket off the wrench handle.  The socket fell down on the battery cable attached to the starter solenoid.  No, the starter didn’t begin to run.  Instead, the socket created a dead short between the battery cable and the engine block. 

     Sparks were flying.  The socket got instantly hot.  Grabbing it bare handed was out of the question.  I tried the pliers but I couldn’t get a hold of it.  The battery cable insulation began to melt.  The battery was boiling.  I used the plier handle to pry the hot cable clamp off the positive battery post.  The welding stopped.

      I should have replaced the cable, but no need to spend that money.  Some electrical tape covered the spots where the bare wire melted through the insulation.  Good old duct tape provided a protective covering for the electrical tape.  All was well.      

     The old car saw us through two babies.  It was replaced in 1986 by a 1980 Grand Lemans which was much more compact and more economical to drive.  I wanted to donate the Dodge to the local museum since it had a real and amusing history.  The museum had no room for such an artifact, of course.  Eventually, the opportunity to sell it to a college student arose, and we got rid of it.  I’m sure, knowing whom we sold it to, that it has gone to the car crusher, many years ago.

     The old Dodge lingers on in my memory.  It is a pleasant memory of a young family and the old car that served us well, even if it did have a mind of its own. 

     

Small Town America--Meg and Ernie

     “Ernie!” Meg exclaimed as she looked out of bleary eyes through her storm door.

     Her exclamation expressed shock, surprise, disbelief, wonder, maybe even a little fear.

     Meg and Roe participated in the guidance of the small community.  They both held seats on various boards and committees.  They had plenty of support from the community, enough to keep getting elected and appointed to those various boards and committees.  Unfortunately, such positions also create detractors, adversaries, enemies, even.

     Ernie probably fell into the latter category.

     In a recent campaign, a poster touting Roe for a political position appeared on Ernie’s fence smack dab in the middle of town.  The poster had been defaced, Roe’s picture doctored unfavorably, the campaign message altered, also unfavorably.

      Some community members voiced their opinion that such tactics were unsavory and uncalled for in a decent community, which we certainly were.  Ernie blamed Roe.  Roe had defaced his own poster and pinned it on Ernie’s fence in the dead of night when no one was watching, to make Ernie look bad.  So Ernie claimed.

     Once many years ago, in a fit of discontent with the city dads, Ernie had filed for and run for mayor.  He won.  He beat a respectable businessman.  The businessman was so incensed and humiliated to have been beaten by an iconoclast like Ernie, he vowed never to have anything to do with community government ever again.  So far, he has kept his promise.  He probably wouldn’t have been a very good politician, anyway.

     Ernie held the position for maybe six months.  Apparently, he found life on the dais as unfair and stacked against him as life had been on the floor.  Anyway, he abdicated, mothballed his local interests, and moved to California.  The council chose his replacement from among their own and life went on, a little more smoothly than before.

       Some years later, Ernie returned to his hometown.  He drove the vehicles and displayed the equipment of a man who had started and run his own successful business. 

     Things picked up kind of where they left off. Ernie bought a local beer joint and started an eatery, a successful one—while it lasted, which was less than a year.  He was living on the premises.  When he closed the business, he continued to live there.

     While Ernie was away in California, the city had struggled through a zoning ordinance.  Ernie’s place was zoned commercial and private residences were verboten.  Ernie was in violation of the zoning ordinance, another of the city’s attempts to infringe on his right to use his private property as he saw fit.  He refused to move. 

      The battle was joined again, this time with Meg and Roe the human faces of that amorphous evil force called “the city”, the thing trying to control private persons.    

      It had been a long day for Meg.  Cataract surgery thirty miles away in the Oasis where bigger and better medical facilities attracted doctors who came from yet bigger cities to staff satellite clinics on weekly and monthly visits.  The clinics were equipped well enough that the itinerant physicians could do outpatient surgery.  Meg had been one of many patients to be treated by the ophthalmologist on that day. 

      The physician and the nurses and the checkout lady had all impressed upon Meg the necessity of using the eye drops, the same ones that had been administered by them while she completed the post-op procedures, at regular and frequent intervals for the next two days.

      As soon as Roe helped her into the house, she searched for the drops to administer them to herself as directed.  The little squeeze bottle in the plastic zip lock bag was not to be found.  She looked in her purse, in the carryon bag, everywhere.  Roe went back to the car.  Not there.

       It was in near panic she called back to the clinic and got the checkout lady who was just about to leave for the night.  What should she do?  Was it possible she had left the eye drops there?

    A slight pause while the lady looked, then sure enough, the drops in the bag were right there on the counter.  Meg had neglected to stow that bag safely in her purse before leaving.  Would the local pharmacy be able to duplicate those drops?  Doubtful.  Then Roe would just have to make the 60-mile round trip again.

     But wait, there was someone standing at the receptionist’s desk who was from Meg’s town who was just headed back that way just now.  This person volunteered to deliver the drops and save 60 miles of carbon footprint.  She would get the drops sooner and be more nearly on schedule, a lot closer than if she had to wait for the hour it would take Roe to make the round trip.  Oh, thank goodness!

     So it was that thirty minutes after she hung up the phone, Meg’s doorbell rang, and there stood Ernie on her stoop, holding out the plastic bag with the eye drops.

      “What the . . . .?” Meg wondered.  Then it dawned on her.  Ernie was the local standing near the clinic’s front desk when Meg put in her emergency call.  Had Ernie regretted volunteering when he saw whom the drops went to?  Had he been reluctant to back out when he found out?  Had the nurse, knowing Ernie and Meg were from the same town, pressured Ernie into delivering the eye drops?

     Then, more sinister thoughts flickered through Meg’s mind.  Had Ernie doctored the drops?  Did the bottle now contain some kind of acid that would blind her if she put it in her eyes?  There wouldn’t have been time for Ernie to think of that and to actually make the change, she reasoned. 

     The need to administer the eye drops took precedence over all else for the moment.  “Oh thank you, Ernie!  You saved us a long trip and I have to do these eye drops.  I just had cataract surgery.  I really do thank you.”  She took the bag proffered by Ernie.

     Ernie turned and stepped off the stoop.  He muttered something as he left.  It might have been “Welcome.”  Meg wasn’t sure.  Meg didn’t have time to watch Ernie or wave goodbye.  She had to get those eye drops in.

     When that job was done, she did have time to speculate.  Roe had nearly missed the whole episode, it had been so brief.  They pondered together.  Had Ernie changed his stripes?  He had offered to do somebody a good turn when he volunteered to act as courier and save that somebody a 60 mile journey.  True, he probably would not have volunteered if he knew whom he was serving.  Or had they been wrong about Ernie all along?

     In the next week or two, after a suitable recovery time, and a suitable time to cogitate on things, Meg made up a batch of cookies.  She arranged some nicely on a fancy paper plate that would not have to be returned and paid a call on Ernie.  He answered her knock and accepted the gift.  The conversation was brief and one sided, Meg again expressing her gratitude and asking Ernie to accept her gift as a token of her appreciation.  Ernie said little if anything.

      Did Ernie eat those cookies?  Like Meg, did Ernie suspect that some of those chocolate chips might be Exlax?  Meg said she wasn’t concerned about that.  She had made the effort.  She had returned Ernie’s favor.  What he did with her gift was his business. 

      There it ended for the time being.  Both fighters returned to their corners it seemed, to rest and to prepare to resume the battle, maybe. 

    The zoning commission granted Ernie a variance which allowed him to continue using his former business place as a residence.  Ernie used his place to manufacture, display and sell some artistic creations, so he wasn’t entirely out of compliance.  The fence that began life as the enclosure for a beer garden now protected Ernie’s privacy and hid from public eye things that might not have found favor in the eyes of the compliance officer.

      Ernie has managed to find himself in court since then, not as defendant, but as plaintiff, in a harassment suit.  Imagine that.  Meg isn’t involved in this one.

     Life goes on in small town America.  Neighbors settle their disputes with words, mostly.  There was a fistfight at a county commissioner’s meeting 20 or 30 years ago.  It didn’t last long.  Most folks sided with the aggressor.  Harry had it coming to him, they said. 

     Aren’t we glad that issues are settled with elections and meetings and, once in a while, in the courtroom?  It could be worse.  Watch the news.        

   

March 30, 1981

     Smoke would rise, not fall.  I would have known that if I had been thinking.

     But I didn’t think well hanging upside down. 

     It was March 30, 1981.  I can be sure of the date because I spent all day listening to the breaking news events on the radio.  It would be a day that changed things for everyone in America. 

     Only two months earlier I had listened in similar fashion to routine accounts of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration turn exciting when the radicals in Iran announced that the American hostages they had been holding were being freed.  That January day, the news would keep me awake on my trip in the Outback.  Why had the riffraff chosen Reagan’s Inauguration day to make the release?  Were they rubbing salt in Jimmy Carter’s wounds?  Was it a goodwill gesture towards a new regime in the United States? 

     On March 30, 1981, James Brady would take his last steps on his own two feet.  For the rest of his life (he died in 2014) he would be confined to a wheel chair.  John Hinckley Jr. would spend a year in jail and several years in a psychiatric hospital.  He is currently on highly supervised release.  As a result of his sentence, the “Innocent by reason of insanity” defense would be changed to “Guilty by reason of insanity” in most jurisdictions.

     President Ronald Reagan suffered a bullet wound to the chest, apparently a ricochet that struck the presidential limousine before hitting him.  The country would wait to hear if the curse of the president elected in a year ending in “0” would be perpetuated.  I was listening.

     Reagan’s wound turned out to be non-life-threatening, and he took it pretty well.  Not as well as Theodore Roosevelt, who sat on the dais, arose and gave a speech before allowing anyone to attend his bullet wound.  Well enough, though, and friend and foe both were happy that America had avoided another presidential assassination.

      Concern for President Regan would take a back seat to my own predicament.  The radio I was listening to would come to a screeching halt, probably because the antenna on top of the truck cab was wiped out.

      It was a weird weather day, too.  At my home base in Kansas, it was overcast but dry.  Further west, it had rained and snowed, snowed so hard that I 70 east of Denver was closed on March 29, opening on the morning of the 30th.    

     The folks had gone to Denver for some reason on Sunday.  They spent the night in the Bennet Fire House with several other folks when they had to get off I-70.  They weren’t surprised that it was muddy in Eastern Colorado.

     In Kansas, people were a little skeptical when I blamed muddy roads for my accident.

     I was on the “Colorado Route.”  I had hired on with the local cheese plant.  They got milk from three routes, two fairly local ones, and the Colorado Route.  Two truck drivers hauled the milk from the dairy farms to the cheese factory.  Gene drove the local routes, two days on, one day off.  I drove the longer route, one day on two days off.  We used the same truck, a recent model Ford, single axle with a Cat diesel engine. 

     My route had one dairy in Kansas near Goodland.  The rest were all in eastern Colorado.  I could go a couple of different ways, but usually I would go to Goodland, then Burlington on I-70 and make a stop.  From Burlington, I would go south to Cheyenne Wells for a pickup, then west to a farm near Eads.  Those stops were all reached by paved highway with gravel roads out to the farms.

     The area north of the Arkansas River is pretty barren and deserty in eastern Colorado.  Two things kept life interesting.  A military base somewhere used the area for practicing air maneuvers.  Most days, I could watch aircraft of some type, fighters, bombers, cargo carriers, stealth spies, crossing the area.

     The other pastime was imaginary.  Erase the fence and utility poles from view, and the land looked just like it must have centuries ago, sand, sage, grass, antelope and deer.  It was cattle country with few cultivated fields.  From the hilltops on the road, I could see forever, the tips of the Rockies pinpricking the horizon to the west, the sky meeting uninterrupted earth in the other three quadrants.

     From Eads, I headed back north on unpaved county roads, making two stops near Flagler, one on each side of I-70.  The eastern and southern portions of my territory were relatively dry.  As I approached I-70, the roads showed signs of recent moisture. 

     After taking on milk from the producer south of Flagler, I would stop and fuel in Flagler.  The biggest milk producer was north of Flagler.   By the time I reached Flagler, I had put in a fair day, but I wasn’t done.  I headed back east for three more stops, two south of I-70 and one north.

      Going south out of Seibert, I had paved road all the way to the farm.   For the next stop, I left the pavement and travelled east on graveled road.  Except after six miles, I crossed an intersection and two miles of dirt road, no gravel, lay ahead of me.  I only made a few hundred yards of those two miles.

     As I crossed over and left the gravel, I soon appreciated how much moisture had fallen in this area.  I hit ruts still muddy and wet.  I slowed down considerably, but not enough as it turned out.   

     Now when I dream about what happened, a voice in my head trills, “Stay in the ruts, stay in the ruts!”  Because of course, I didn’t stay in the ruts.

     The ruts had some kinks in them.  Like a boxcar on railroad tracks, the milk truck followed the doughy trail.  Left and right motion of the truck churned the milk in the unbaffled tank and shifted me and all the loose objects in the cab left and right.  I thought I could make better time outside the ruts.     

     I didn’t.  Once out of the ruts, the rear end of the truck went towards the right ditch.  I turned the steering wheel to the left, trying to get back into the ruts.  Wrong move.  I should have turned the wheels right, into the skid, to get in line with the rear end.  I knew that would put me in the right ditch.  I didn’t want that. 

     I turned left.  The rear wheels swung further right.  I was crossways in the road.  I was still going east, but I was headed north.  The right rear wheels caught in the ridge separating the road from the ditch.  They stopped.  The left rear wheels wanted to keep going.  So did the milk in the tank.

     The tank was about two thirds full, just right so I could feel it every time I changed directions or put on the brakes.  I felt it now as it wanted to keep going east. 

      Whump!  The truck rolled onto its right side. 

      Whump!  I was upside down.  The seat belt did its job.  I was suspended upside down.  I hadn’t been going fast maybe 10 or 15 miles per hour, but it was fast enough.

      What I had mistaken for smoke was dust floating around after having fallen from the floorboards to the ceiling.  The engine was still running.  I reached down, no up, and switched off the ignition.  I rolled down the window, released the seat belt with one hand and let myself down to the truck cab’s ceiling with the other.  I wasted no time crawling out of the window.

      Well, there it was, rear end in the right ditch, cab still in the road.  I was in shock.  Had I really done this thing?  I walked a mile and a half to the place where I was to pick up more milk.

     Nobody was home, at least so I thought.  I had to call the boss at the cheese plant.  Of course I couldn’t remember the number, or much else.  I managed to find a Kansas phone book and made the call.  Later, I found there was an old sick guy in a bedroom who heard me knock several times, but he couldn’t get up or even answer.  He heard me entering and making the call. 

    I walked back to the truck.  A farmer from a place located near the intersection of the road came up in his little Versatile tractor.  His adult son was lying down in the scoop (not enough room in the tractor cab for a passenger).  The son had seen the truck lying in the road and they decided they had better investigate.  They declined to attempt up righting the truck.  They thought the best thing to do was notify the sheriff’s office.  I agreed and they returned to their work.

      Why didn’t I walk the few hundred yards back to their place instead of the mile and a half to the dairy farm?  Thinking clearly wasn’t something I was doing on that day.

       Eventually a deputy sheriff showed up and filled out a report.  He observed from the tracks, now hardened in the afternoon sun, that I had not been going very fast at all.  I didn’t get a citation.  A few months later, I would run into a college roommate living in Burlington.  He would entertain me with his account of the newspaper story about my accident compiled from the deputy's report.

     The deputy called a wrecker from Vona, which showed up an hour or two before dark.  The wrecker man insisted on draining the milk before trying to roll the truck back to its wheels.  The cheese plant boss wasn’t too happy about that.

     Sometime about 8 o’clock, the truck, the wrecker, and I were in Vona and the boss arrived to take me home.  He didn’t fire me.  He wanted to take me to a hospital to see for sure I was all right.  I convinced him not to do that.

      I did get to run the Colorado route for another month using an old International truck.  It was not nearly as nice as the Ford.  Then we had a GMC.  Finally, the Ford came back.  It had to have the dents taken out of the stainless steel tank, the right side had to have bodywork where the right mirror dented the door as it rolled on its side, plus a dent on top of the cab where the radio aerial had been mounted had to be repaired.  The Cat engine had to be overhauled, something about a head gasket leaking caused by running upside down.  It was an expensive repair bill.

     Gene, the other driver, called me when the Ford came into the factory.  Come help him get it set up.  We had to mount hose, sample case, sanitizing equipment, a few other details.  When we were done, he said, “See if you can keep it on its wheels.”

     We both laughed, but it wasn’t funny.  I endured a lot of ribbing as the story spread.  Since it never rained at all at home, many accused me of fabricating the muddy road story.  At that time, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post were still available in the community.  Their stories on the closing of I-70 corroborated my story.

      I survived the accident.  The dent in my ego would eventually scar over.  Thirty-three years old and not know enough to keep a mil truck on its wheels?

    Good friend Earle, a former dairyman, consoled me.  He said there are only two kinds of people in the world.  Those who have never driven a milk truck, or those who have rolled a milk truck.  Did all those others in my category mistake floorboard dust for smoke?

           

    

    

    

     

Free Fall

     First we heard the scream.  Then we heard the gunshot.

     Yes, I know, that’s backwards.  You should hear the gunshot.  Then somebody should scream.  This time, somebody screamed, a scream of terror, then there was the gunshot, not a high caliber gunshot, a gunshot more like a .22.  Pop!

     Like most things optional, not food or sleep, but things recreational, aviation ebbed and flowed in the community.  At the time of building Bill’s four-place hangar, aviation was at full flow.  The hangar stood a good chance of being occupied (with airplanes, not dilapidated vintage cars, motors, transmissions, anything that couldn’t find a place elsewhere, like it is now).

     Donated labor accounted for most of the construction of Bill’s hangar.  A former not-so-good student wrote on a rafter with an indelible felt tip marker, “This hanger was built by slav labor.”  His former teachers laughed and laughed.

     “Troy, you mean Bill is no longer Irish/German.  Now he’s a Slav?”

      I probably contributed as much “Slav” labor as anybody.  But it was not unrecompensed. As we packed stuff preparatory to making our move from the community in the spring of 2014, in one corner of the garage I started a pile of tools that had been on, shall we say, long term loan from Bill.  It was an embarrassingly-large load when I transported the tools down the hill to their rightful home.

     There were other more immediate rewards.  Bill had a financial partner, a banker, also named Bill.  Bill the banker loved to stock his motor home with Coors and drive up to the airport on a Saturday or Sunday to watch the hangar being built.  He was quite generous with his stock and I frequently honored his offer.  

      A glider ride constituted another immediate reward.  A friend of the airport manager, probably a fellow Viet Nam vet, spent a month or so taking advantage of the local heightened interest in aviation by selling rides in his glider.  We kept an eye on things as we worked on the hangar.  That included the glider trips.  

     I’m not sure of the details, but somehow, I was on the glider-man’s schedule and Bill had paid the fee.  The day for my glider ride was a beautiful fall day.  The only glitch in the way of a perfect afternoon was my schedule conflict.  I had to referee a football game at the local field at 6 o’clock, so I would need to be there about 5:30 or so. 

    It was about 4:30 when the glider wiggled its rudder back and forth several times and the tow plane hit the throttle.  I was in the front seat of the tandem-seated glider, the real pilot in the back seat.  The snug rope grew taut. In the first few feet of travel, the glider pilot rolled the glider upright off the left wing dolly wheel and we were off.

     The tow plane was an old workhorse, a 182 Cessna, one of the first 182’s ever built.  It was a community project, involving some local pilots and a source of capital. 

     The real persuasive force in the deal was a skydiver from a nearby community.  He was a jump instructor.  He charged for lessons and had a bunch of students, including high school students who could convince their parents that skydiving was safe, maybe.  Renting an airplane from which to jump cut into his profit.  A low-cost plane big enough to haul four guys up 4 or 5 thousand feet was a necessity.

    Skydiving is hard on an airplane.  The door has to be removed so the jumpers can exit.  Seating has to be modified or removed so that the jumpers can get to the doorway.  The plane takes off with a heavy load and bears it up thousands of feet.  When the jumpers have all exited, the much lighter airplane needs to get back to ground, usually in a hurry.  So the hot engine is throttled and the rapid descent super cools that hot engine.  

     The old 182 answered the call.  All necessities were there, enthusiastic jumpers, an instructor, everything but the capital to finance the plane.

     Kathy had graduated from the local high school with high honors.  She went on to earn her pharmacy degree and had returned to fill prescriptions in the local pharmacy as well as pharmacies in neighboring communities.  She was single, was making good money, and was adventurous.

    The aviation flow grabbed her.   The jump instructor persuaded Kathy to try skydiving.  She was hooked.  Kathy was persuaded to invest in the old Cessna. 

    Glider-towing was a sideline for the 182.  As our glider followed the 182 down the runway, the glider pilot gave me a few pointers about following the tow plane—most important, keep the same angle and direction as the tow plane even if you are not in the same path.  You do that with the foot pedals, the rudder.

     A few feet off the runway, he turned the controls over to me.  He complimented me on my rudder work.  I told him I had a few hours in an Aeronca Champ, and he said “Aha!”

     The tow plane pilot made big circles looking for the thermal that would lift the glider and allow us to break free of mechanical propulsion.  Sometimes the tow rope would go slack, followed by a gentle jerk when the rope tightened and the tow plane encouraged us to catch up. 

      After one of these jerks, while the rope was taut, the glider pilot pulled the release lever.  The tow rope dropped below us, still hooked to the 182, and we slowed.  He explained you had to release while the rope was taut because the tow pilot would feel the release.  If you released during slack times, the pilot would not know you were gone.  The old 182 didn’t have a rear window that would allow the pilot to turn and take a look.  The 182 turned one way, and we turned the other.

      We circled gently in the thermal.  The altimeter showed we were gaining altitude while the glider remained level.  The huge wing span gave us a great glide ratio—we could go a long ways on the altitude we had to sacrifice in order to keep up our airspeed.  The pilot said we could stay up all afternoon if we wanted.  But there was that dang football game.

     The pilot took me through several maneuvers, sharp turns, stalls, and such like.  He offered to do some acrobatics.  I knew he could do it, having watched the glider a lot while working on the hangar.  I opted for a gentle one, a hammerhead stall.  Anything more radical might relieve me of the contents of my stomach.  Barf bags weren’t standard equipment on this glider.

     Everything in the glider was much gentler than in a motor driven craft.  For one thing, there was no vibration from a power plant, and the only noise was the whistling of the wind in the hatch seals.  We could carry on a normal conversation without yelling.  So maybe I could have survived a loop or barrel roll with stomach in place,  but there was that football game.  Better be safe.

    In a hammerhead stall, you pull the stick back, nose up until you are vertical.  The bird will stall—that is it will lack the air movement under the wing that keeps the thing afloat.  It will stop flying and give in to gravity. 

     Aircraft that we amateurs fly have to be engineered so that when the wing stalls and the plane starts to fall back to earth, the plane will pitch nose down.  A fellow student pilot (he quit flying after his experience) stalled a Cessna 150.  He couldn’t get out of the stall.  The plane went into a spin.  He let go of the yoke and clasped his head with both hands in fear and despair.  The 150 righted itself while the pilot had his hands on his head.  He landed the thing on its wheels, parked, got out, and never went back.                   

     As we pulled the glider into vertical position for the hammerhead (I’m sure the pilot had to grab the stick and assist, as my muscles were flaccid at the thought of lying on my back in that glider a couple thousand feet above the earth like an astronaut on the launch pad), the glider slowed and the noise ceased.  We hung motionless.

    At this point I had probably four choices.  Fall left, right, forward, or backward.  If you guessed I chose to fall forward, you guessed right.  I jammed the stick forward and kept the wings from moving by using rudder and ailerons.  (If the wings turn into a propeller, the craft is in a spin.)  It was a gentle fall and recovery was equally smooth.  Had I stayed up there a while longer, I might have tried a loop.  But there was that football game.

     The only exciting incident came upon landing.  The pilot talked me through lining up on the correct runway.  He had me gently deploy the “spoiler” which destroys the efficiency of the wing by sticking panels up from the top of the wing and the glider loses altitude.

     As we approached the end of the runway, I started to “flare”.  That is, I pulled the stick back gently to raise the nose and lower the tail of the airplane.  That is proper procedure for landing a three-wheeled craft, but not a glider.  This glider has one main wheel under the body and you try to land on that wheel with the glider level left to right AND front-to-back.

    The pilot started to warn me not to flare just as I started to flare.  “I got!  I got it!” he cried.  I let the stick go and we touched down, seemingly doing about 20 miles an hour.  We didn’t coast a hundred feet.  He kept the wings level until we were near a dead stop.  He gently lowered one wing to the ground and we were done.  

     I couldn’t tell you one thing about that football game.

    

    The fall airshow was a big deal.  It attracted many spectators, many pilots flying in to enjoy breakfast, flour bomb contest, landing contest, display aircraft, the stunt pilots, and skydiving.  Bill wanted to get as much of the hangar completed as he could for the big show.  We were putting on the roof tin.  A crew was drilling holes in the tin, another boosting tin to the roof, the roof crew placing the tin sheet properly and nailing the tin down with washered ring shank roof nails.  (Bill’s son came in for ridicule  because he used pliers to hold the nail while he started it into the tin.  He’s probably the only one who doesn’t have an arthritic left thumb from off-target hammer blows.)

     In another hangar the boys harnessed themselves to the rafters, released, and practiced making correct landings on the old mattress on the floor.  Out on the runway the 182 lifted off with a load of divers. 

     In going about our tin business, I was on the north side of the structure when the plane reached altitude in the jump zone.  It was a little south and a little west of the runways.  As we watched, a tiny person fell away from the plane.  A second person fell away just about the time the scream began.  

    Both jumpers disappeared behind the hangar.  No chutes had popped open.  I heard the shot as I ran through the open hangar to the south side to get a look at what was happening.  We reached the other side of the building to see two chutes open.  From where we stood, it looked like they could get hooked on the power lines by the meat packing plant.  They were too close to the ground to practice any avoidance techniques.

     The two jumpers hit the ground and their chutes collapsed around them.  Nothing got caught in the power lines.  Well, ok, all’s well that ends well.  But that was close.  We could guess what the scream was all about, but who fired the shot, and why were there two jumpers in such a predicament?

     We went back to work.  It would be a while, a day or two, before we got the whole story.  The first jumper was Kathy.  The target was the airport near the grandstands that were being set up for spectators.  Her main chute failed to deploy.  She pulled, tugged, jerked, but the emergency chute would not open.  She screamed.  The jump master saw she was struggling to get a chute to open, so he jumped.  He free-fell in an attempt to catch up to Kathy.  He deployed at the last second.

    The shot?  The divers explained that a safety feature on the gear, a small shell in the .22 range was set to go off at a certain altitude.  Somehow, the exploding shell was harnessed  to the rip cord of the emergency chute.  It succeeded where Kathy had failed.  It opened the emergency chute in the nick of time.

     Kathy had some nightmares after that.  She never jumped again.  Her enthusiasm for aviation was extinguished.  She had no need for an airplane.  Without her support, the 182 club couldn’t survive. 

     The skydivers drifted away.  They found they would rather spend their entertainment dollar in some way  other than falling out of airplanes.  The jump master moved on to greener pasture.  The cold weather sent the glider-man south. Another year rolled around, another airshow, but it lacked the excitement of previous years.  Aviation had reached full tide and began to ebb.

      At one time there were five or six flight clubs, each club owning an airplane for its members to fly.  When members who wanted out of the clubs could find no one to sell their shares to, clubs sold their planes and folded.  Today, one club clings to life.