How the Mighty are Fallen

      It was about the size of a BB.  It was more cylindrical than orblike, like a short piece of a nail or a spaghetti noodle, less than 3/8 of an inch long.

     “It” was responsible for three days of agony, hair-tearing, and more than normal number of oaths I’ve vowed to stop using.

      All during the dry winter and spring, I held off stirring any dirt for fear that the terrible winds we had during May would start things blowing, like the 30’s or the 50’s.  Late in May, we got a nice heavy wet snow.  And before that all dried out, in early June we got a little over an inch of rain.

     Suddenly, it was time, past time, to get the ground ready if I was going to plant millet.  All the dry spring, the dry ground remained sterile.  After the snow, the weeds began to come.  Before the June rain had dried enough to farm, the weeds got to be 4—6 inches tall.

      So on a nice June day, I set out with the old Allis and the Calkins rod weeder and tried killing a few weeds.  It was still too wet, and the weeds were going over the rod alright.  But so was enough wet soil that some of the weeds were surviving.

       But there was another problem.  The tractor engine was dragging down, losing rpm’s as if it were overloaded.  Which of course it wasn’t.  Or was it?

       I decided the tandem disk offered a better opportunity to kill more weeds, so I returned to the farmyard and made the exchange.  All this took hours, of course.

       When I returned with the disk, the tractor still acted like it was overloaded.  No way.  Not with that disk.

     I found that if I stopped for a few seconds, the tractor would run top speed for about 30 seconds, and then start dragging down again.  I played that game for 30 minutes.  Stop and wait ten or fifteen seconds.  Go for thirty or forty-five seconds.  Do it again.

       I decided that was no good, so I headed back to the farm thinking, “What am I gonna do?”  It almost certainly had to be a fuel starvation problem, there being no ignition issue for a diesel. 

      The first thing I tried was changing the fuel filters.  Back in the field, it was stop and go, still.  This time, I pulled the fuel line off at the tank.  Plenty of flow there.  Next, I pulled the line off in front of the fuel pump.  Good flow there.  I pulled the line in front of the filters.  Fuel flow there seemed okay, though not as robust as in front of the electrical pump.

      Back to the field.  Same old problem.  Again, I managed to get over some acres when it decided it could run up-to-speed.  The key was once it got to running correctly, don’t stop.  Mother Nature determines that strategy has some problems, bladderly speaking.

      I got to thinking maybe the electrical fuel pump I added last years was too small, was restricting fuel flow.  The next morning, I went to town to try to buy a bigger fuel pump.  No luck.  All they had was what was already installed.

      With some vague hope that the problem had cured itself overnight, I went to the field with the disk.  But after about five minutes of the tractor dragging down, I knew that I would have to fix the problem some way somehow.

     Like most problems in life, determining that I could and would find and fix the problem set me on the right path.  That and centering on the fuel pump. 

      Back in the yard, it was quick work to remove fuel lines.  I had been down that road a few times very recently.  This time, I removed the line right in front of the filters and in front of the fuel pump.

      I put a piece of an old sheet over the fuel pump inlet.  I put some compressed air in the fuel line that connects to the filter, forcing air back through the fuel pump. 

     When I removed the piece of old sheet from the fuel pump inlet, there was my “rubber bb”.  Hard to imagine that a piece of rubber about the size of a whole peppercorn could shut down a giant tractor.

      Even the stone David used to take Goliath out of the picture was a boulder compared to what I held in my hand.  But the lesson was the same:  How the Mighty are Fallen.

      Back in the field I had every confidence that things would run correctly now.  And it did, too.  I finished disking the millet field and moved into the summer fallow that will be wheat in the fall (if moisture conditions allow).

     That afternoon as I retired from my day’s work and inspected things while the tractor filled with fuel.  I discovered two more problems.  One was quite apparent.  The air conditioner had stopped working.

     Two gangs on the disk had bearings that had failed.  My spirits sagged.  Would I never get this job done?

     I had to return to the city to keep an appointment with the eye surgeon.  (We scheduled surgery in October to correct double vision.)

      I used the trip to buy refrigerant but I couldn’t find disk bearings.  NAPA could get them in overnight.  It took one day to remove and disassemble the disk gangs.

      An eight-foot cheater (a section of 1-1/2 inch pipe in this case) and two big pipe wrenches were required to remove the nuts holding the disks on their shaft. Even had I the bearings in hand, which I didn’t, I was pretty much done for the day after that chore.  I’m not as young as I used to be!

       Another day of reassembly wore me out again.  On the third day, I began by recharging the air conditioner.  Success!  I headed for the field with a-c and disk working great.  Maybel

      I pressed the lever and dropped the disk in the ground.  I got ten feet into my chore when the tractor died dead. 

      What now?  When I tried to restart the tractor,  I found everything dead.  Pushing the starter button produced nothing.

      That has to be electrical, I thought.  I brought the portable generator and the battery charger to the field.  Still nothing.  An hour of checking battery connections and other electrical things led me to a solenoid that didn’t appear to be working.

      Back to town.  They had the solenoid.  When I tried the starter button after replacing the solenoid, I got the old “click-click-click” that means only one thing.  Dead battery, plural in this case—two of them.

       I put in a quick call to NAPA before closing time, in case they had to order the batteries in overnight.  They had the batteries.  For only $579, the two new batteries would be mine!

      The batteries are huge weighing about 80 pounds apiece.  Gravity assisted in getting them down from their perch above the tractor tires.  I wasn’t looking forward to getting the new ones in place.  Gravity switched sides in this battle.      

      Day four of this nightmare began with a trip to town.  The young lady who waited on me at NAPA had to have assistance to get the dolly with the batteries on it tilted back enough to roll them to my pickup.  Between the two of us, we got them loaded and the old ones on her dolly.  She didn’t volunteer to help me get them to their proper place in the tractor.

      The 4010 with frontend loader came to my rescue.  The scoop just below the tailgate of the old Dodge pickup made it possible to slide the batteries into the scoop.  With the scoop perched above the battery box, gravity was once again on my side and I managed to drop both batteries into the battery box.  

      Some minutes later, with baited breath, I tried the starter.  The tractor whirred to life almost before I could worry about what to do next if this didn’t work.

      Two days later, the summer fallow was done.  Now, to plant the millet.  But wait!  There’s more!

      Weeds were coming up in the millet field.  The disk didn’t kill everything.  The field would have to be worked again before planting.

      This job took only two days with the Calkins machine and everything running correctly.  Another two days of getting the drills calibrated and loaded with seed and I was planting.

     I finally finished planting July 7, about a month behind schedule.

     Is somebody trying to tell me something? I wonder.

     On the other hand, Mother Nature blessed me with .75” of rain the evening of July 8.  That should be the perfect amount to get the millet off to a good start.

     Another old saying:  "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

      

 

 

The Golf Cart

      It rolled off the assembly line in 1965.  It’s been rolling along ever since.

     It probably rolled across golf courses for some years, but for the last thirty-plus years, it hasn’t been too close to a golf course.

      “Uncle” bought the old Cushman many years ago to serve as a yard cart for the motel-RV Park.  The work for the cart wasn’t abusive.  But there wasn’t anyplace to keep the cart inside.  Local juveniles found they could easily hijack the old girl and take her on a joy ride.

       Uncle would have to go out and find the cart, where the batteries had run down, or in at least one case, pull it out of a ravine where the miscreants left it for dead. 

      Removing the keys was no help.  The thieves knew to hotwire across the switch.  Chaining and locking the thing to a light pole slowed things down.

        When “Auntie” and Uncle retired from the hospitality industry, Uncle sold the cart to Mom.  She wanted it serve as a carrier between the garden and the house.  Mom and I rented a small U-Haul trailer from La Junta and took her S-15 GMC to get the cart.

     The trailer opening wasn’t quite wide enough for the back tires on the old golf cart, but Uncle took care of that by taking a full-speed run up the trailer ramp.  The cart went in.

      The days of being garaged outdoors were over when Mom got it.  The old cart  had a permanent place in the garage.  One car had to be parked at a slight angle to make room for everything, but it worked.  It’s still working.

      The poor old thing has suffered some abuse in its present situation.  This time, from grandkids and even great grandkids, who also found thrills in joy-riding around the farm.  It has lost both bumpers,  lost a few screws and bolts, and suffered cracks to its aging fiberglass body.  But it still runs.

       Maintenance was highly necessary this spring.  I knew it would have to have  new batteries.  When I folded back the body to reveal batteries, I discovered a broken tube that serves as the frame for the machine.

       I can fix that.  I took one piece of angle iron that would fit inside the square tube, and another piece that would fit over the tube.  It took some doing, but eventually I got everything lined up and clamped in place. 

      I “rivet” welded the two angle irons.  That means I did what I usually do when welding—burned a hole through outside angle iron, the tube and even the inside angle iron.  Once the hole is through everything, I backed the rod out and attempted to patch the hole—also standard practice for my welding.

      So far, it is working.  The angle irons can’t move and they keep the tube in place.  That job done, I turned to replacing the speed switch plates.  There are four copper plates about an inch by two inches.  They are stationary.  A “movable switch plate” rotates with the foot pedal to vary the speed of the cart by contacting the stationary plates. 

     The old plates were burned and rough and the moveable plate couldn’t return to its resting place, so the thing was always in gear.  I had either to shut off the switch or grab the foot-feed and pull up to disengage the contact plates and stop the cart.

      A thorough cleaning and new batteries and I was ready to go.  Except:  after an initial lurch, the thing wouldn’t go.  It was dead. New batteries, cleaned cables and contacts and nothing.  When I hooked it up to the charger, it wouldn’t charge.

      To make a long story short, I spent a lot of hours when I wasn’t working on something else, while waiting for it to maybe rain, trying to figure out why that thing wouldn’t run.  I used an electric meter to test this lead and that lead.  I changed the solenoid.  Nothing.

      Finally, I traced the problem to one particular cable.  It would carry current when I tested it with the meter, but when it was under any kind of load, including charging, it finked out.  I had cleaned the terminal when I replaced the batteries, but the problem was corrosion where cable and terminal meet, the clamp that hold the cable wires and the terminal together.

       I used the most sophisticated of tools to figure it out—a pair of pliers.  Thinking maybe one of the new batteries was no good, I made brief contact across the negative and positive battery posts.  It would spark if I went directly from battery post to battery post.  But when I shorted from cable to cable, nothing.   

       It was a week or two of either walking or driving a pickup when I had to carry stuff around the yard, from shop to machine.  Redoing the cable connection took no time at all in comparison to the amount of time I spent scratching my head.

      You will have trouble imagining the thrill I felt when I first pressed the foot pedal and the old gal jumped to life. 

      So, the old Cushman golf cart rolls on.  It lives to serve another day.

      

          

Down on the Farm 2022

     Dry.  Windy.

     Not so dry as it had been.  We actually go .6” of rain and snow early in May.

     Wheat planted last fall is coming up.  A few patches that came up last fall now stands six inches or more.  The result is a field that looks like a coyote with mange.

 

     The newly-hatched wheat will have plenty of competition from weeds.  If the crop comes to fruition, it will be a miserable harvest.  Retaining organic status forbids spraying to kill the weeds.  Green weeds and ripe wheat don’t mix well from the combine’s point of view.

     The dry weather and the wind have put tillage operations on hold.  Time to do some maintenance. 

     I started on the “new” (1974 Allis) tractor last fall.  The two sizable cylinders that provide the steering both leaked hydraulic oil.  Greasing three or four zerks and checking fluid levels have to be done underneath the tractor.  Add some ubiquitous dirt from any farm operation and servicing the tractor makes for a filthy uniform for the service person.

      I removed the cylinders and took them to a shop.  Sometime this spring, I got around to installing the cylinders.  I removed the fuel gauge float assembly and assured myself that the problem with the inaccurate fuel indication is in the dash board.

 

                                                     Cylinders in place  

 

                            Cylinders being cleaned up to take to the repair shop

 

    Fuel gauge sending unit with the steering cylinders removed.  It's the little round thing, center back.

      A second problem on the Allis was the foot brake.  It ran out of fluid.  To get to the master cylinder, I had to remove the hood. 

 

      I thought I might need to change the hydraulic hoses that run from the steering wheel to the cylinders.  That would also require hood removal.  Hindsight:  I should have cut an access hole in the hood for adding brake fluid.

         Next on the repair list was the chisel.  When the bolts holding the right hitch beam sheared, the left beam took the brunt of the damage.

 

          The end of the hitch needs to move two feet to the left to get things back to normal.

 

   The red cylinder and chain weren’t enough to straighten things out.  I chained the 4010 to the hitch and blocked the wheels of the chisel so it couldn’t move.  By pulling at a right angle to the normal direction of travel, I got everything to move.  It took more tinkering to get bolt holes lined up, but it happened.

 

      

 Next on the docket was the old golf cart.  It remains a work in progress.  Electrical problems yet to be solved.

     The latest thing was the disk.  I had it pretty well-done last fall.  I had one disk to replace, but I couldn’t budge a nut on the end of the shaft.  An 8-foot cheater on a pipe wrench resulted in a broken pipe wrench.

     I pulled the disk around to the shop a couple of weeks ago.  When I finally got a windless day when I didn’t have to worry so much about setting the world on fire, I fired up the acetylene torch and applied some serious heat to the recalcitrant nut.  This time, with a bigger pipe wrench, the 8-foot cheater did its job.  The disk was soon replaced.

     Now for some moisture.  I lack a tool in the shed to do anything about that.

 

 

Collector Bill

       Bill was a collector.  All you had to do was open one of his garage doors to see that.  It was a three-car-plus garage, but you could only count on one bay containing a car.  Jeanie insisted that the  bay closest to the house proper was reserved for her car. 

     There could be another car or two in there, but it would take a goodly while to free it from all the stuff piled on and around it in order to get it out of the garage.

      Two or three times over the years, many of us pitched in and helped Bill clean up his garage so that we, the high school faculty, could hold our annual end-of-school party there.  One year we even took up a collection and hired the DJ who did the high school prom to set up and have a dance for our party in Beamgard's garage.

      For a while the garage would stay neat and organized, but the “rot” always came back and navigating inside the garage would be an arduous task.  One of our number once volunteered to clean up and organize Bill’s garage for him, if. . .if he could keep one of every tool that Bill had duplicates of.

     Bill’s habit was to look for a brief while for a tool or gadget in his garage, but when he couldn’t find it, he simply went downtown and bought another.  He had duplicates and triplicates of quite a few tools.

     The garage clutter attested to the many hobbies that Bill indulged in.  Cars and working on cars were lifelong hobbies.  Flying took a close second.  But he tried many others.  His Brother Rod once said to him, "Bill, if you started right now today working on all the projects you have started, you wouldn't live long enough to finish them." 

     One of the other things he tried was photography.  Back in the day, that meant buying film in cannisters designed to fit your particular camera.  The film came in a yellow box from Kodak, or later from Fujifilm in a green box.

     You put the film in your camera, clicked the shutter and wound the film two or three times to get the exposed film out of the way.  Then you took pictures till the film ran out, usually 8, 16, or 32 frames in my experience. 

      Then you rolled the film back into the cannister and removed it from the camera.  You filled out the form, enclosed a check and the film cannister, and sent it off in the mail.  In a week or two, you would get a fat envelope in the mail containing your prints.  Alternatively, you could take the film to the local drugstore and they would send it off. 

      Many times, it took weeks or even moths to use up a roll of film.  By the time you got it developed, you forgot what shots you had taken.

      Bill thought he could improve upon that.  He read up on film developing, ordered the chemicals for developing colored film, along with proper trays.  One of our acquaintances had an enlarger which Bill borrowed.

       One night, Keith Ross who in his prime stood over six feet and weighed upwards of 250 pounds, Bill, and I found ourselves packed into Bill’s bathroom.  It was the only room any of us could muster that had running water, apparently a necessity for developing film, and no windows to let in light and spoil the developed film.

       We stumbled over each other in the dark trying to develop three rolls of film, one provided by each of us.  Not a pretty picture for sure. 

      About the only other thing I remember from that night was that one step in developing colored film required the processor to select a gray square from a sizable grid of colored squares.  Keith and Bill laughed heartily when I selected a pink square (looked gray to me).  When everything was done, they agreed that I had the most colorful print, three floaty toys, red, yellow and blue, floating in the toilet bowl where number one daughter had put them.

      I was convinced that whatever the cost and delay in getting film professionally developed was worth it.  I never tried developing film again.

      I’m pretty sure that the chemicals and trays found a resting place in Bill’s garage where they remained until they were no longer useful.  Bill would have been among the first to try digital photography.  He had the first mobile phone in the country and must have been among the first to use a cell phone to take a picture.

       Bill collected a lot of things.  Perhaps his best collection was a collection of friends that loved him dearly and would do lots of things for him.  Thus it was when he took on the challenge of building a four-place hangar at the airport, he had lots of volunteer help. 

      Lions Club was also dear to Bill’s heart.  He went through several offices, including district governor and sight chairman.  When he was sight chairman, his garage was a collection point for all the used eye glasses gathered by Lions in our region.  There must  have been thousands of them by time Bill finally took them to Garden City to be cataloged and sent off to distant lands.

      As a Lion, Bill decided the state of Kansas needed a “Sight Bus” (now called a "Mobile Screening Unit," which also does other health screens such as for diabetes), a mobile unit with the equipment to do all sorts of tests on folks’ eyes, all at no cost to the “patient.”  That project took years, but again, Bill had a collection of friends who helped him get it done, and get it done he did.

      I was fortunate to be one in his collection.

 

 

 

 

“Give Him a Ticket!”

       “Give him a ticket!  Give him a ticket!” 

     It had become a chant, like pep clubs of old used to do, back in the olden times when there were such things as pep clubs, when girls were considered too fragile to participate in sports.  Boy!  Have we learned something about girls in the new days.

       It was another football game, this time in Oberlin.  There was a long string of cars ahead of us, all headed to the football game.  Traffic was slow because of road construction.

     While there was no work going on at six in the evening, there was the result of many days of work.  The eastbound lane was nearly completely repaved, smooth sailing, while the westbound lane had been stripped nearly bare of the old pavement.  There was probably a five or six inch drop off from the eastbound lane to the westbound lane.

     The sirens, the ones who tempted Odysseus, not the fire engines, were warming up in Bill’s ears.  When we topped a hill and could see the long line of traffic poking along ahead of us, maybe forty-five miles an hour, and we could also see a completely empty westbound lane, a rather rough westbound lane some six inches below the eastbound lane, the siren song went fortissimo in Bill’s head.

       He couldn’t help himself.  He must pass as many cars as he could before we started back up the incline from the valley we would soon be in.  We were in a smaller car, a bright yellow one, maybe a Horizon, but certainly a Dodge of some kind. 

     Bill pulled off the eastbound lane onto the westbound lane.  Three of the four of us tensed as the little car sashayed while transitioning uneven lanes.  Then we were rattling along the rough road. 

     Bill sped up and we passed quite a few cars before we started back up hill and he felt the need to get back over into the eastbound lane. Bill suddenly realized that dropping off the uneven lanes was one thing.  Climbing back up to the higher lane in the small car was quite another.    

     He slowed and prepared to head into the left ditch if a westbound truck should appear over the crest of the hill.  The cars we had just passed began passing us.  We were at the mercy of some driver who would slow enough for Bill to safely climb back into the right lane.

      We were nearing the crest of the hill when we saw him, sitting at the top of a hill on a little pathway from the highway to some farmer’s pasture.  The state patrolman had his car pointed south so he could observe traffic  headed both east and west.

     The other drivers saw him too and slowed enough for Bill to safely mount the new pavement and back into the line of cars.  Bill knew not to go far.  He pulled over when we came to the next crossroad, which was not far at all.

      The traffic flowed past us, and sure enough, the patrol car, roof-mounted red lights flashing, pulled out of the line of cars and in behind us.  Bill rolled down his window as the patrolman approached.

     He didn’t get to say a word before someone, Jeanie? Said, “Give him a ticket!”  The backseat passengers chipped in and it soon was a chant.  “Give him a ticket!”

     Having had our say, we quieted down and let the cop have his say.  “Do you know how dangerous that was?” etc. etc.

      “Give him a ticket,” got thrown in whenever there was a pause in the lecture. 

     I said, “His son is driving one of those cars we passed.  If  he gets home and finds out his dad didn’t get a ticket for doing what he did, it will set a very bad example for the boy.”

     Part of the problem was that the cop knew Bill.  The cop had been to a Lions meeting recently.  He spoke about safety, of course, and also about his experience as a highway patrolman.   When his presentation was over, he asked for questions.  There were a few.

     Somebody asked about embarrassing moments while on duty.  This was back in the day when Lions clubs were still all male.  The cop laughed a little, then decided to confide in us.

     He told about the little red sports car doing ninety.  He managed to catch up to it and stop it.  When he approached the car, the roof of which was about waist high to him, a window rolled down and he caught sight of a mini skirt a little more than thigh high in the bucket seat.

     “Where’s the fire, Lady?”  He used the old line.

    “I’m sttin’ on it.  Are you man enough to put it out?” was the reply.

     The cop blushed as he recounted his experience.     

     Don’t tell me that reverse psychology doesn’t work.  The same sort of thing happened one other time with four males in the car headed to a football game.  The driver got involved in an engrossing conversation and absent mindedly got a little heavy-footed on the accelerator.

      When the cop stopped him, his good buddies encouraged the cop to give him a ticket.  The driver got off with a warning and a “Have a good time at the football game,” from the cop.

     Bill did not get a ticket.

     Ambivalence:  Bill didn’t know whether to be angry with a wife and two friends who tried their best to get him fined, or happy that a wife and two friends succeeded in preventing his getting fined. 

     We, the passengers were a bit disappointed that he didn’t get a ticket, but also happy that the cop’s warning and the waning traffic, after the delay of the traffic stop, resulted in much saner driving for the rest of our trip.

Bill’s Driving

      Bill Beamgard was a charitable, altruistic person who would do almost anything for almost anybody.  Countless people overnighted at Bill’s house while waiting for repairs to a car at the family’s Dodge dealership.

       Bill once picked up a kid walking along I-70.  The kid had abandoned his car a mile or two back where it had quit on him.  Bill soon elicited the kid’s story:  he lived with  his grandparents in Denver, he was in trouble with the law, he had a court date in a day or two and he was running away. 

     Bill convinced him he needed to return to his worried grandparents, face the music in court, and then to start anew and try to turn his life around.  He took the kid home, had him call his grandparents, kept him until they could get there to pick him up.  Bill also took a trailer and picked up the kids’ broken-down car and kept it until his grandfather could come get it.

     Bill Beamgard behind the wheel of any motor-powered device was an entirely different animal.  Once he dropped a fairly new riding lawn mower into the lake bed while trying to mow too close to the edge of the lake at Lions Park.

     Bill had a competitive spirit which, like al lot of us on the roadways today, turned him into a different breed of animal.  One Christmas long ago, we had been at the country club for some kind of Christmas gathering. 

     The Goodwife and I were in her ’55 Chev.  Bill and Jeanie were in his blue Barracuda.  I made the mistake of getting out of the parking lot ahead of Bill as we left to go  home.  Lake Road parallels the lake shore.  At the northwest point of the lake is a spillway that does double duty as a bridge.  It was built in the 1930’s as a WPA project, I think.

      The spillway bridge is about 100% concrete, concrete floor, concrete posts providing support and serving as railing.  It’s not very wide.  When two cars meet, usually one will stop and wait for the other to clear the bridge before crossing.

     I knew that Bill would have to try to pass me.  I knew the Chev with its little 265 V-8 was no contest for the Barracuda.  I thought maybe I could get to the bridge first and wipe him off there.

    But no, Bill got beside me just as we came to the bridge.  If anybody got wiped off, it would be me.

      There was about Bill the ability to provoke people into doing something they would not ordinarily do.  As a teacher, it was a good thing.  He could goad lackadaisical students out of  their complacency and into attempting something that would help them realize their true potential.   

     This ability to provoke often had a down side.  So it was that rather than backing off and let the Barracuda cross the spillway bridge ahead of me, I held my ground and my speed.  As we entered the narrow bridge side-by-side, the Barracuda’s tail lights were even with the Chev’s door handle. 

      We were probably doing about forty or fifty miles an hour.  It seemed much, much faster.  The Goodwife shied to her left as the cement pillars of the bridge railing whizzed by inches from the Chev’s right window.

      I kept the Barracuda’s fender an inch or two off the Chev’s left side.  I had to let the concrete bridge railing take care of itself.  To glance to the right would have meant dents on my left.  Neither of us applied brakes or backed off the accelerator.

     In the blink of an eye, we zoomed up the incline of the bridge’s west end and out onto the pavement where Bill gunned it and got ahead of me in time to hit the brakes just before the stop sign at the highway.

     He won that one.  It wouldn’t be the last contest we would have.  It was probably the last time our contest would involve automobiles.

     Bill always said, “Never play the other man’s game.  You can’t win at that.”

     I took that lesson to heart, at least when it came to cars.  Bill would always have more powerful, faster vehicles than I cared to have.

     There was another time, years later, when I was on his side in a car.  Involuntarily.  Mark Twain said an innocent bystander was someone who didn’t have sense enough to get out of the way.

     Bill invited Tisha and me to ride to Hoxie with him to a football game.  We were in his fairly new red Omni, I think it was.  It had front wheel drive.  It  had an aluminum flywheel, which allowed it to achieve maximum rpms in a hurry.  It had low-profile tires suitable for racing, but rather rough to ride on.

      The trip over was rather uneventful.  Bill had taught driver’s ed in Nebraska.  He told his students there was only one reason to have a car in front of you:  to pass it.  It was difficult for him to observe that practice on the way to the game because of the long line of traffic headed to Hoxie and the numerous yellow-lined lanes over the hills on the way to Colby.  He had to stay in line.

      He had to do an errand in Colby which put us way behind the crowd for the rest of the trip.  Thus, no cars ahead of us to pass.

     Coming home was a different story.  We weren’t the first out of the gate following the game.  Bill passed a few cars as we headed west towards Colby.  There was one that refused to let us pass.  When Bill started to pull into the left lane, the car sped up.

      It was a big old Ford.  A Ford in front of Bill was a red cape to a bull.  The Ford was driven by Gordon Leadfoot.  He wasn’t about to let us around if he could help it.

     As we approached Colby, Bill realized he would not be able to pass Gordon before we reached Colby.  “I know a shortcut,” he said.

     We turned north and flew over a railroad crossing, past the country club, didn’t observe the stop sign where we turned left on what was the outskirts of Colby in those days.  As we pulled up to the stop sign at Highway 25, Gordon cruised past headed north.

     Bill activated the turbo charger on the red car and we were soon tailgating Gordon.  When we finally reached the flats a few miles north of Colby, Bill made his move.  With no traffic coming south, Bill pulled into the south bound lane and spurred his horse. 

      We pulled up beside Gordon, but it wasn’t a cakewalk.  I could hear the Ford’s tailpipe absolutely gushing, as Gordon had his foot in the carburetor, as we used to say.  It was a matter of some tense seconds before we pulled ahead far enough to return to the north bound lane.

     When we got back in our lane, Gordon conceded and backed off the old Ford.  Bill too slowed down to a more sensible eighty miles an hour, which got us home pretty quickly.    

     When my heartbeat slowed down some, I asked, “Bill, how fast were you going?”

     “I don’t know," he said.  "The speedometer only goes to 120.”

Beamgard’s Nail

     Bill loved gadgets and always wanted to be first to have them.  He was among the first to try computers, which led him to migrate from the math department at school to start the computer classes.

      One of the gadgets he bought was a nail gun.  This was in the days before air nailers took over.  His nail gun used a .22 shell to drive a nail.

     He got the idea from a local carpenter-contractor who had one, so he wasn’t first in that department, but he had to have one.  His nail gun was a single shot model. 

     You had to load the nail in the barrel, like a muzzle-loading gun.  The nails came in different lengths and sizes.  There were different size .22 shells to use for different size nails.

     Each nail had a colored plastic fin on the tip.  Each size nail had a different color.  You sized the shell by the color of the plastic fin.

     One of the biggest nails had a blue fin.  The plastic fin, slightly larger than the barrel diameter, held the nail in place until you set the powder off and embedded the nail in the timber, quite handy, especially if you were nailing with the gun pointing down.

     You fired the gun by striking it with a hammer, like a punch or chisel.  Put the muzzle of the gun where you wanted the nail, strike the  hammer, and voila! You had driven a nail with one light stroke of the hammer.  Be sure to wear ear plugs.  It was a gun firing, after all.

     The plastic fin that started out on the tip of the nail became sort of a washer between the wood and the nail head.  You could also tell what size nail you had used by the color of the fin still visible mashed in the wood around the nail head.

     Bill had the gun, but no project or place to use it.  I was working on putting a bathroom in the basement of our Page Street house.  It was an open basement with no walls when we moved in.  We needed to nail some furring strips to the cinder block exterior basement walls.  The power nails worked fairly well. 

      There was also a steel I-beam running lengthwise down the center of the basement to support the center of the house.  The I-beam was supported by 4-inch steel pipes.  I needed to fasten a 2 X 4 to that pipe to support a wall and a pocket door for the bathroom

     Bill insisted I use the power hammer on the block walls.  He couldn’t be there when I first tried out the power hammer.  When he arrived, I suggested we try fastening a 2 X 4 to the steel pipe using the power hammer.

     He was all for that.  He also wanted to try out his newest gadget for himself.  I busied myself working elsewhere in the small bathroom while Bill worked to nail the 2 X 4 to the pipe, or try to, anyway.

     After a while, the gun fired.  The 2 X 4 slowly leaned to one side and threatened to fall down.  The nail had failed to connect wood with steel.

     Then I looked more closely.  Instead of the tip of the nail being bent or broken projecting through the 2 X 4, what I saw was the nail sticking a way out of the 2 X 4 on the gun side.

     The blue fin of the nail was right there, intact, unfazed, still in perfect shape.  And still on the tip of the nail.

     The head of the nail was embedded in the 2 X 4, maybe half or three-quarters of an inch into the wood.

     Bill, never one to read directions, had put the nail wrong-end-to into the gun barrel.  Most of the nail stuck out from the 2 X 4 as if sticking its tongue out at us.

      We tried again with the nail in the gun the right way, but the nails were no match for the steel pipe.  I don’t remember how I fastened the 2 X 4 to the pipe.

     What I do remember is that Bill had to leave.  It was too good of a chance.  I got some paper and made a sign, “Beamgard’s Nail” printed in bold black letters, with an arrow pointing up.  I hung the paper on the nail, still with the blue fin and nail tip protruding out of the 2 X 4, the black arrow on the sign clearly leading the eye to the nail, the nail with the wrong end stuck in the wood.

     I took a picture.  I don’t remember the circumstances, but a few weeks later, after I got the film developed (you remember those olden days when you had to mail in your roll of film and wait for it to be returned by Kodak or some other developer) I showed it to Bill.

     I am sure I did it when it would embarrass Bill as much as possible.  Sure enough, he was embarrassed.  He wanted to destroy the picture, but I assured him I had the negatives.

     In the end, I guess he got even with me when he turned the mag switch off and on while we flying the Aeronca Champ.

     What are friends for?