Stories From My Life


Today I am years old.

    .. where I hit my head on the dining room table as I tried to walk under it.  I'd been able to do this uneventfully the day before, so...

    I remember a small white house on "U" Street:




It's now Pulaski Heights Middle School; "junior high" has fallen from favor..

    The picture was black and white in the advertisement -- but the car crouched there, in sight of the Golden Gate bridge with this elegant looking lady standing next to it:

    I don't remember how I discovered that you could click a switch and listen to shortwave radio -- higher in frequency and a world away from the AM sounds of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis.  I remember sitting on the floor in front of it, reaching up and tuning back and forth listening to Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and other broadcasts in mysterious foreign languages.  It was SO cool! (in the words of (paraphrased) Barbara Mandrell: "I was geek-ish when geek-ish wasn't cool.."

    Shortly, though, the radio was rocked back on its cabinet by a very loud signal.  So loud that you could hear it squawking away far up and down the dial.  As I carefully tuned it in, it was some guy talking to someone else in some kind of jargon.  At least I thought he was talking to someone else -- I could only hear one side of the conversation.  It was fascinating and, I reasoned, the guy must be close by as he had a southern accent and was louder than any other shortwave signal I'd heard. He said his callsign was W5TIZ, his name was Dick and his "QTH" (whatever that meant) was Little Rock.

    When my Dad came home from work, I told him about my new listening adventure.  He said, "Oh, that's probably Dick Freeling up the street."

    Who?

    Dick Freeling lived six houses up the street at 1822 Shadowlane:

    He had two kids (one older (Richie) and one younger (Susan) than I) and I was only vaguely aware of him.  He was, after all, an adult (turns out, only sixteen years older than me) and I was a 14 year-old kid.  Dad said that Dick was a WWII veteran who had lost his sight in combat and was a "ham" radio operator.  Dad wasn't too sure what that meant, but offered to call Dick, tell him I'd heard him and asked if he'd tell me about this nifty radio-thing.  Dick was a great guy (who, sadly, passed away in 2007).  I didn't know then that one of the responsibilities of being a ham radio operator was advancing the hobby by encouraging young folks to get involved.

    BTW, the proper name is "Amateur Radio"; there are dozens of stories of how it got to be nicknamed "Ham Radio" -- I don't think anyone knows for sure which one is true.

    I don't know if you remember your first friendship with an adult other than a family member, but Dick Freeling was mine.  In ham lingo, he was my "Elmer", the one who introduced me to this great hobby, Amateur Radio.

    Dick invited me up the street to see his station (he called it his "rig" and it was in his "ham shack").

    An aside: The now largely defunct national consumer electronics chain "Radio Shack" had its origin selling electronic parts back in the '50s.  Radio Shack came from "ham radio shack".

    In a sunroom off the master bedroom he had a desk set up with a transmitter, a receiver, an amplifier and a bunch of other accessory gizmos:

    The transmitter and receiver were connected via thick black cables to several antennas in the back yard.  Amazingly, Dick (who, remember, was blind) was able to operate the radios by touch!


(Dick at the controls of his "rig")

    My first radio contact was, of course, with friend Dick, W5TIZ, up the street.  But my next was with a ham in Ohio (more than 1,000 miles away!!) and I quickly made contacts all over the country and Canada.  A week or two later I contacted (we call it "worked") a ham in England!  Amazing!

    Hams confirm contacts by mailing postcards (called "QSL" cards) back and forth; many are quite colorful and paper the walls of "ham shacks" world-wide:

    The governing body of ham radio in the US is the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and they provide a number of operating awards to demonstrate proficiency.  The first one most new hams go after is "Worked All States" (WAS).  To earn that one, you have to contact at least one ham in each of the fifty states and receive a QSL card from each state.  The WAS Certificate is just a 8.5x11 piece of paper but, boy, was I proud to earn it!


(Sharp eyes will notice this is the WAS I earned as W4GKF some years later..)


Here's Dick in August 2004



This is what the building looked like in August 2004.


    The bus had been outfitted, used a couple of times and then stored in somebody's barn several years before.  At a club meeting, someone suggested that we ought to take it out, clean it up and make sure it was workable.  It was agreed that the following weekend a group would take the bus to another member's home and we'd clean 'er up.

    Early Saturday morning I was part of the group that went out into the country to the barn to pick up the bus.  Fortunately there was one member of the club who was a truck driver and knew how to operate a manual-transmission, cab-over bus.  On the way we stopped for five gallons of diesel fuel; after all, the bus had been sitting in that barn for more than a year and no one knew how much fuel it had in it when parked there or the condition of that fuel.

    The driver drained the fuel tank (it was mostly fumes) and added our five gallons of fresh fuel.  It started up and ran just fine.  We drove it over to the house of the young ham (my age) whose Dad had agreed to let us clean it up in their driveway.  It was full of cobwebs, dust and deceased small rodents.  The radios hadn't been fired up in a long time.  We spent all afternoon washing, dusting, cleaning and testing the radios.  They were rigged to run off a built-in generator fueled by the bus fuel tank.

    At 5pm we were pretty much done and the homeowner asked that we get the thing out of his driveway.  We looked around and discovered that the driver had left several hours earlier -- leaving just us six teenagers.

    Well, I had a learner's permit (I'm only fifteen, remember) and I had watched the now-absent driver carefully, so I figured, "What the heck?  I can drive the bus back to the barn".

    So I got behind the (very large, mostly horizontal) wheel:

    .. and put my other equally young friends inside the bus at the four corners to spot for me (the bus was BIG!).  I got it started, backed out of the driveway into the street and turned up the hill toward the next major street.  Everything was going great!

    I drove up a short hill to the first cross street and turned left.  It was a short block to the next street which headed the direction I needed to go.  At the stop sign at the end of the street, just before my left turn, the engine died.  It resisted all my attempts to restart it.  The starter cranked but no-go.  The left turn I needed to make was a bit downhill so I eased off the brake and coasted through the turn.  My plan was to roll down the hill and "pop the clutch" to restart the engine as I'd seen my Dad do before with a recalcitrant vehicle (but not a bus).

    We're building up a pretty good head of steam.  I divided my attention between steering, looking out the windshield, flipping various switches on the dashboard and popping the clutch.

    It was HOT in the bus (did I mention it was August?) so I operated the lever that opened the front and rear doors.  You know the kind; the doors open like an accordion from the center and fold back, sticking out to the side of the bus about six inches or so.

    Oh!  Now we need to insert a tutorial in the hydraulic systems of a circa-1950 city bus.  Pay close attention:

   
The diesel engine, in addition to driving the rear wheels and radio generator, also drives a compressor that provides the compressed air that operates two systems: the brakes and the actuator that opens and closes the exterior doors.  Got it?
 

   

    And one more thing.  Did you know that a city bus gets only between two and three miles per gallon?  And remember we put in five gallons?  Oh, and the distance from the barn to the house where we cleaned up the bus was, well, ~fifteen miles.  And we'd used the generator to test the radios...

    So, the reason the bus wouldn't start was that it was out of fuel.  But I didn't know that then.

    Soooo..  I'm engaged in a fruitless engine-restart exercise while rolling ever faster down what is now a very steep hill.  We're going about 40MPH with the doors folded open..

    ..and then I hear "CRUNCH!!! SQUEAL!!! CRUNCH!!!"

    I looked at the door and there was just the opening; the doors themselves were not in evidence.  About then, one of my on-board friends said, "Hey! You hit a car!"

    If I did, it didn't slow the bus down at all -- but it DID rip the doors right off the bus.  I look back up the hill to the right and I see a brand new 1955 Buick Roadmaster:

    .. now looking like an cutaway sculpture of a 1955 Buick Roadmaster .  Almost all the body skin on the left side had been scraped off by the protruding doors of the bus.  And, yet, the bus is still running 40MPH down the hill.

    What would you do? That's right, I hit the brakes.

   
Remember the air compressor that drives the air brakes and the door mechanism?  Turns out that when I opened the doors a while back I used the last bit of air in the tank to do that -- so, with the motor not running to drive the compressor, there was no air left to operate the air-brakes.
 

    We hurtled on.

    Until we reached the bottom of the hill and then (ZOOM!) momentum took us up the next hill.

    We went about half way up the hill and then, mercifully we ran out of momentum and the bus stopped.  Well, "stopped" is an overstatement.  It must have stopped since it changed direction and now began rolling backwards back down the hill to the bottom -- and then continued (backwards) up the hill toward the stripped Buick.  I'm actually getting pretty good at steering forwards and backwards by this point.

    Thankfully it ran out of steam before reaching the Buick and stopped -- and started rolling forward again back down the hill.

    We kept this up for a few more (shorter) cycles until the bus came to a rest at the bottom of the two hills.  By now, a crowd had gathered led by the chap who owned the Buick.  Turns out he'd just picked it up from the dealer the day before (it still had the paper tag).  He was not happy.  And the rest of the crowd wasn't all that happy either.

    I had a few moments to ask my bus-riding compatriots why they didn't do a better spotting job since THAT'S ALL THEY HAD TO DO!!!!!!! but I didn't get much in the way of satisfactory answers.

    Across the street was the home of a friend from high school.  I ran over and rang the bell and was admitted to use their phone to call my Dad.  No one answered at home.

    Since my parents only had one set of friends I called over there and they were there.  I asked their friend David to put Dad on the phone and he did.

      Me: "Dad? I wrecked a bus.  No one is hurt."

      Me: "Hello?"

      Dad: (sighing)"Where are you?"

    About ten minutes later the cops arrived.  Another ten minutes later my Dad and his friend David arrived.  David was laughing his ass off.  He was the ONLY one.

    Things were eventually sorted out.  My Dad let me believe that our insurance wouldn't cover all the replacement cost for the Buick and that my hard-earned $189.50 that I had for my new transmitter would have to go into the pot.

    He let me believe that for a month until finally relenting.  Turns out the insurance covered the Buick.  When the radio club approached Dad to pay for the damage to the bus, I cannot tell you the words he used as he refused.  I COULD tell you -- but I don't use that kind of language.

    A Shocking Development

    I sent my (returned) $189.50 off to Heathkit and shortly thereafter a big heavy box of parts arrived.  I liked Heathkits but I wasn't very good at building them.  My goal was always to FINISH the thing; I didn't get much joy out of the building exercise and, regrettably, I often rushed the soldering:


Notice my use of a soldering GUN rather than a proper soldering iron...'nuff said?

   
A Model T spark coil develops about 20,000 volts at nearly no current.  This can generate a substantial shock but with no danger of any serious harm.
 

   


..redux

Are you $%#@@%^kidding me?


Omigawd!!  Is that a pocket protector?!?!?
    This little public-service adventure did end my Ham Radio experiences in high school.  In June 1957 I graduated, and by the fall was ensconced at Georgia Tech (a more forgiving environment for techno-geeks).

    Three months later everyone knew about Little Rock Central High School.  School integration came to America that fall and Little Rock was one of the most visible test cases.  The Arkansas National Guard, Governor Orval Faubus:

    .. the "Little Rock Nine", Justice Department and all.  Though I wasn't there, I left behind a girlfriend (remember Ann?) who was a senior that year.  She said (newspaper accounts notwithstanding) that the only real problem was this:

   
The National Guardsmen deployed at the school soon figured out the shower schedule for the girls gym and PE classes -- and chose those times to run inspections...
 

   

Click HERE!

    In August 1957 I boarded a Delta Convair 440

    (my first airplane trip) from Little Rock to Atlanta.  No one visited colleges before actually matriculating there in those days; at least no one we knew did.  I had a pretty good idea that Georgia Tech was in Georgia (the name was kind of a giveaway..) but I didn't know it was in Atlanta, just that the nearest airport was there.

    During the summer I'd been rushed by my Dad's fraternity Phi Epsilon Pi:

    Dad had gone to the University of Illinois for two years and had pledged Phi Ep.  I think it was the only Jewish fraternity at Illinois in 1919.  That made me what was called a "legacy"; if your Dad was a member of a fraternity, it was expected that you'd be offered to pledge that one when you went to college.

    There were three Jewish fraternities at Georgia Tech with Alpha Epsilon Pi being the biggest, PhiEp the second and Tau Epsilon Phi the third.  Since I was a PhiEp legacy, it was assumed that that's the one I'd pledge -- so I didn't get much attention from the other two.  During that summer of '57 I was in letter contact with one of the brothers, Phil Weiss.  Phil had drawn me to rush because he was from Kansas City which was as close as anyone in the chapter lived to Little Rock.  He said that he'd meet my plane and bring me to Tech.  Cool.

    When I got off the plane in Atlanta, there was Phil in his black MGA:


That's fraternity brother Howard Green standing behind Phil in his MGA.

    A college man AND a sports car driver!  Sports cars weren't all that prevalent in 1957 and there were approximately zero in Little Rock.  I had shipped a trunk ahead to the dorm so my suitcase fit nicely on my lap.  Top down, off we flew.

    I felt as though I knew Phil from our correspondence and felt really comfortable.  Little Rock didn't have a very large Jewish community and none of my friends in High School were Jewish.  There was only one Jewish boy besides myself in my Temple Confirmation class.  In high school and before, I don't remember any anti-Semitism at all -- all the time I was growing up.  And I still haven't encountered any, personally.

    It was driving north from the airport with Phil that I discovered that Georgia Tech was in downtown Atlanta.  He brought me to my assigned dormitory, Harrison Hall:

    .. where I found I'd been assigned to Room 106:

    My roommate, another Jewish fellow (not a coincidence I learned) David Somerstein, was from Charleston, SC.  He hadn't arrived yet so I had the whole "enormous" room to myself.  Definition of enormous: 8' x 16'.  And in that room there were two beds, two desks and two standalone closets.  The beds were bunks built into the wall.  I was able to choose the lower by virtue of arriving first.

    Tech had rules-aplenty for freshmen, among them was no student cars and the requirement to live in the dorm for at least your freshman year.  I dropped my bag off, picked up my orientation stuff and Phil took me to the Phi Ep fraternity house.

    I know fraternities are out of favor these days but it was the way to go 'way back then.

    The PhiEp house was on the corner of Sixth street and Fowler, an easy walk to the rest of the campus:

    The house was a long, two-story, flat-topped ranch-style house with fourteen bedrooms upstairs and common areas downstairs.  I remember that a large replica of the Phi Ep fraternity pin was inlaid into the entry hall floor.

    Everyone was very friendly (Duh!  Rush week was just beginning..) and I felt pretty much at home though this was my first encounter with Jewish young men in quantity.

    My new roommate in the dorm, Dave Somerstein, wasn't interested in fraternity so I don't think he participated in Rush.  I did get to know the other Jewish freshmen as we were shuttled among the three possible fraternities for parties, smokers and such.  Of course all the Rush girls were also Jewish.  It sounds odd today but there was no such thing as a Jewish member of any non-Jewish fraternities then -- and vice versa.

    Rush week was a lot of fun and, at the following Sunday, those Rushees who'd received pledge cards chose from among them (if they received more than one) and walked to their new fraternity house.  It was a fairly emotional thing for the brothers because that's when they knew whether their sales pitch had been effective.  New pledges are the lifeblood of a fraternity and if you have a bad rush year, the cost for existing brothers has to go up to support the house.

    Our pledge class consisted of Bill Arnowich, Ed Belin, Steve Brenner, Dick Levin, Darryl Mexic, Mark Rosen, Dick Schwartz, Art Ziff and me.  We thought that now that we'd pledged, we'd be "in", full-fledged members of Phi Epsilon Pi.  Wrong (we were so naïve..).

    In recent years, there has been a lot on the news about hazing fraternity pledges.  Georgia Tech had strict rules about that and the hazing was pretty mild.  But it was unpleasant and somewhat humiliating and I never really got the point.

    Anyway, you were a pledge from that Sunday for most of the school year.  Those who stuck it out (and whose grades were acceptable) were initiated in the Spring.

    Georgia Tech had some other traditions that are gone today.  Freshmen were required to buy an old-gold colored billed cap (called a "Rat Cap") and were required to wear it at all times outdoors.  Here's me in mine:

    The cap bill was folded up in the front and lettered with your name, class year and home town.  Any upperclassman could give you crap and you had to take it.  The rat caps were worn for the entire Fall Quarter -- unless Tech beat Georgia in football on Thanksgiving Saturday.  We were fortunate in my year and we won.  Rat caps came off and were destroyed just after Thanksgiving.

    What about classes?  Most have heard about the school orientation meeting where someone says to look at the person to your left and right because two of the three of you would not be here in twelve months.  That really happened at our orientation.  There were about 4,000 freshmen in the class of '61 (as I recall) and only about 1,500 graduated.

    The class schedule was daunting and every freshman had the same courses regardless of intended major.  Tech was on the quarter system where the school year was three quarters rather than two semesters.  Freshmen carried 21 hours.  That meant that we went to classes each week to earn 21 hours of credit.  But many classes met longer than three hours a week.  My fall quarter freshmen schedule:

      • Math 101
      • Chemistry 101
      • Honors English (more about this later)
      • Mechanical Drawing 101
      • Social Science 101 (elective)
      • Geology 101 (elective)

    Math and Chemistry met five times each week and English met three times each week; but Chemistry also had a three hour lab as well.

    Mechanical Drawing was two three-hour labs each week.

    Classes started at 8am and labs were usually 3pm-6pm.

    There were half-day Saturday sections, too, depending on your schedule.

    The electives were three-hour credit for the most part.

    But when you add it all up we were in class maybe 60% of each weekday and three hours on Saturday.  And the rest of the time we were free -- to study.

    Why did I pick Geology as an elective you might ask?  It was reportedly a "crip course" -- easy material with true/false quizzes.  I was misled.

    Good story on my Dad, though.  When he attended the University of Illinois for those two years (1919-1920) he, too, was in search of a crip course to fill out his schedule.  He was advised to take Psychology because all the quizzes were true/false and, just by the law of averages, you'd get half right without studying.

    Dad was good at many things but logic wasn't one of them.

    He took the course, never studied, got half the questions right (as advertised), got a 50 in the course and flunked because, of course, "50" is a failing grade!

    But Tech wasn't all work.  At least for me it wasn't, because I proceeded to fail Math 101 and Chemistry 101.  I'd never failed a class in my life before.  I put it down to two things:

      1. I had no study ethic; high school was a breeze for me and I never developed good study habits.  The freedom of college life led me to "enjoy the experience" much more than I should have.  Shame on me.

      2. Central High did not prepare me properly for college-level math and science.

    Central High did prepare me well for the English curriculum.  I aced honors English (which helped prevent me from flunking out).  I owe that success almost entirely to Ms. Blanche Bowen, my senior year English teacher at Central High:

THIS!

    I stopped dead in my tracks and looked around for the source of this "SOUND" I'd never heard before.  There on the back of a flatbed truck were four guys with a standup drum set, bass, guitar, trumpet and trombone and all of this music pouring out.


The Four Freshmen!

"I was so ugly, my parents moved away and didn't tell me!" Rimshot..

    They had decided to move and were going to surprise me (tomorrow) when they picked me up at the airport and drove me to the new house.

    Yeah, right.

    I guess if they were trying to ditch me they made a poor job of it by retaining their old phone number -- so I suppose I believed it.

    They came to get me, drove me to our new home at 51 Sherrill Heights:

    .. (it was only a few hundred dollars more) -- but to no avail.  Still, I reasoned that even a bottom-of-the-line Chevy was better than no car at all.  I was able to get him to spring for whitewalls and wheel covers instead of hubcaps (an extra $50 as I recall) but that was the limit.

    So Dad, Steve and I went down to Bale Chevrolet to pick out my first ride.  Dad did fleet business with Bale for his trucks and company cars so he had a good financial arrangement with them.  We met with the sales manager and looked over the inventory.  Just about the only choice was a gray coupe with a blue interior that they had in stock:

    I'm sure I hid my disappointment well in this perfectly charisma-free automobile; we waited for them to clean it up.

    We walked down to the service area to watch them wash it.  Over in the corner was a car covered in dust and stuck-on shipping paper.  Making conversation, Dad asked the sales manager what the story was.  He said that it was special order car that the buyer didn't show up to take and they were stuck with it.  They were stuck because it was ordered with options that no one wanted.

    I could see that it was an Impala coupe, black with red plaid interior and the body style that Chevy called a "hardtop convertible."  This didn't mean that the top went down (Ford actually had a true "retractable hardtop") but it meant there were no "B" pillars and when the windows were down there was no obstruction -- just like a convertible with the top up.  We strolled over to look at it and it had a 348HP V8 and four-speed, floor-mounted shifter (what everyone called "four-on-the-floor").

Oh....My...Gawd!


    She took it well.

    We headed over to the bowling alley and started the tournament.  We were going along pretty well when I turned and saw her.  My highschool sweetheart, Ann!

    We had broken up during my sophomore year at Tech when she went off to the University of Arkansas and found another guy.  That was the first time my heart had been broken; she and I had been going together since my junior year in High school (and her sophomore year).  We were inseparable and both thought we'd be together forever.  Ah, young (first) love...

    She had broken up with what's-his-name and saw my name in the paper when they published the teams that were going to compete.  And there she was.  I was not dating anyone seriously so I was very glad to see her; she looked awesome.  Blew my concentration on the bowling, I can tell you.

    After being roundly thrashed in the current game, I left with Ann in her car leaving the boyz to find their way home in mine.  When I returned to the house the following morning I found them sleeping in the car; they got home late and didn't want to wake my parents (and answer questions as to where I was).  Can't speak for them but I had a great time.

    On the way back to Atlanta we ran out of gas coming down Monteagle mountain in Tennessee; coasted about five miles to find an open gas station.  Very lucky.

    The End of Bowling as we know it

    The final chapter in my bowling story concerns one of those all-weekend jackpot games.  Somehow, early Monday morning it came down to me and one other guy.  We were bowling in the last game.  Whoever won that game won all the money.

    I rolled a 266.  That's right; a 266!

    He rolled a 279.  I lost by thirteen pins with one of the highest games I'd ever rolled.

    I went out behind O'Neal's Bowl-O-Rama and threw my ball off the cliff back there.  I never bowled again.  Go look; it's probably still there.  It has "CC" engraved above the finger holes.

Are you $%#@@%^kidding me?!!?


    That was unusual on the face of it.  When I got there they were all pressed against the front windows looking out.  There, parked on Sixth street in front of the house, was a yellow VW convertible with the top down:

    In the car was Joe and a very beautiful blonde girl doing -- well, "it".

    Sunday, broad daylight, city street, top down, a freakin' VOLKSWAGEN -- the whole works.  We gathered in the upstairs bathroom of the fraternity house and watched; it didn't take long.

    Knowing Joe, we could only conclude that either she was a paid professional -- or she was nuts.

    Turns out the latter was true.  As the story unfolded it was learned that her name was Julie and she was married to a student who was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at Emory University across town.  And, somehow, she found Joe very appealing.  Sufficiently appealing to have sex in an open car with him; and heck, it was her Volkswagen!

    We looked at Joe with new, well, "respect" may not be the word, but certainly with new eyes.  The affair went on for weeks.  He brought her to fraternity parties, etc.  etc.  None of us could figure it out.

    Then I had an idea.  In one of my classes I sat next to a red-shirt football player named Paul.  Paul was a lineman, a pulling guard as I recall.  Together we set up a scenario where, Paul, posing as Julie's husband, would drive to a screeching halt in the street in front of the house just before dinnertime (where we typically all sat around on the porch).  He'd leave the door open, car in the middle of the street, and storm up the street screaming for Joe, saying he'd tear him limb from limb.

    Fort Lauderdale was packed.  Teenage boys and girls as far as the eye could see.

    One morning I ran into Joyce, a girl I knew from Little Rock (believe or not) and we joined her and some other girls on the beach.  The swimsuit fashion at that time was a one-piece suit that was heavily boned in the front and was backless.  A string went around the girl's neck.  Well, you wouldn't want that string to block the sun and interfere with your tan -- so Joyce had untied hers and tucked the string into the top of her suit in order to evade the dreaded tan line.


(Hover your mouse for a second over this image..)

    If you recall, my 1960 'Vette had a removable hardtop but no soft top (remember the rain coming home from seeing "Rock City")?  The '61 was outfitted the same way.  You'd think I'd have learned my lesson about removable hardtops after this experience, but, no.  To lower the price in order to close the deal, I had them take off the fuel injection manifold and replace it with a 4-barrel carburetor.  Yeah, I know, dumb..


Bye-Bye, '60

    But I drove out in a brand new Corvette with a brand-new car payment.  Yay.

    Shortly thereafter there was a "negative Corvette incident".  Read on...

    OK.  So it got to be October, 1961 and was time for Homecoming Weekend at Georgia Tech.  Hey, I’m a big shot COLLEGE GRADUATE WITH A BRAND NEW CORVETTE (and a girlfriend at Emory University in Atlanta) so I headed on over to Atlanta to snow the underclassmen – and the girl.  A fine time was had by all.  A very fine time...

    It's now midnight, Sunday.  Tech beat the Duke Blue Devils 21-0 and it’s time to go home.  I have to be at work at 8:30a in the morning and (at that time) it took 3+ hours to drive back to Greenville on good old US 29.  It was a beautiful clear night.  I mean "clear".  Very clear.  Very.

    This was just barely before the interstate highway system was built.  The road then from Atlanta to Greenville was US 29, two-lane blacktop.  I was heading north and the moon was full.  The night was cold, crisp and the visibility was unlimited.  I was happy.  I was going fast.  Very fast.  Very, very fast.  It was glorious.  Just glorious.

    The moonlight was bright but not quite so bright as the red flasher I noticed in my rearview: Two Georgia State troopers.  They were exceedingly polite and quite impressed with my car.  I thought for a while that we’d just have a nice 1:15am chat on the side of the road and that I’d be allowed to go on my way.  Well, I was young and naïve.  They thought it better that I follow them into Carnesville, GA (just a few miles back down the road toward Atlanta) and meet the local sheriff.  No problem.  I had no trouble following them; they weren’t going all that fast.

    We reached Carnesville in due course and they accompanied me to the front door of a small house on the town square and rang the doorbell.  It was five minutes before the door was opened by a giant in a nightshirt.  Imagine a really tall Charlie Daniels look-alike in a long nightshirt – with his badge pinned to his chest.

    Apparently being awakened in the middle of the night by the State Patrol was routine for the Sheriff.  He directed us to the basement entrance and said he’d meet us there.  We walked down and around to the back of the house and the Sheriff met us at an outside door.  We (the Sheriff and I) bid goodnight to the two troopers and they drove away.  And left me there.  With the man-mountain.

    He turned out to be a cordial man.  We sat down in his basement office which was pretty much like the set in the old Andy Griffith Show.

    There were two empty jail cells (doors open) on the far wall.  We had a nice chat. 

    Sheriff: "Well, son, the troopers clocked you at 95 in a 50 zone.  Does that sound about right?"
    Chaz: "If that’s what they said, sir, I guess it’s true."
    Sheriff: "The fine for 45mph over the limit is $90.  Just pay the fine and you’re free to go."
    Chaz: "Sheriff, I’d be happy to pay that fine but I’ve been in Atlanta all weekend and all the cash I have is $15.  But I’d be happy to write you a check."
    Sheriff: "Son, this is a small town but I’m not a fool.  It’s cash on the barrel-head or you can spend the night here in my jail."
    Chaz: "But if I stay here I won’t have the money in the morning, either.  Isn’t there another way?"
    Sheriff: "Well, you could call your boss and have him bring the money down."
    Chaz: "I just reported for work in Greenville a few weeks ago.  I don’t think my career would survive waking up an IBM branch manager in the middle of the night to drive the money for a speeding ticket fine down to Carnesville."
    Sheriff: "I can understand that.  Tell you what: why don’t you leave your spare tire here so I can be sure you’ll come back with the fine?"
    Chaz: "Sheriff, I really appreciate that.  But the way my luck’s running I’d get ten miles out of town, have a flat and spend the night on the side of the road.  But I’ll tell you what I CAN do.  In my car I have a Gibson LG-3 flattop guitar worth more than $300.  Suppose I leave it here and come back next week to pay the fine?"
    Sheriff: "Go get it, son."
    I was back in a flash with my guitar.

    Sheriff: "You play that?"
    I rejected my first three wise-ass answers.

    Chaz: "I play a little."
    Sheriff: "Play me somethin’."
    Chaz: "It’s almost two o’clock in the morning!"
    Sheriff: "Play me somethin’."
    So I sat down on the bunk in one of the cells and played a few folk songs (remember this was 1961…) So help me, he went upstairs, woke his wife and two small sons and I sat there and played Kingston Trio songs for a half-hour.  Little boys about four and six rubbing the sleep from their eyes.  All four of them just sittin’ and listenin’ while I was pickin’ and a-grinnin’.

    Eventually they let me stop.  We put the guitar into its case, put the case on the bunk...

    ...and he locked it up (clang!).  I got into my car and drove (observing the speed limit carefully) back to Greenville and fell into bed.

    Fast-forward forty-eight hours to Tuesday afternoon.  At lunch, I went to the bank, got $90 in cash and, after work, headed on down to Carnesville just as it began to get dark.  Remember now, I was on my way to pay a speeding ticket.  Would ANYONE speed under those circumstances?  No, and neither would I.  I was driving south on US 29 at a sedate 55 miles per hour.

    As I approached the Georgia State line I noticed a sign that said "Interstate Highway 85 Open".  Wow!  I can get to Carnesville and back much faster!  I got onto the new interstate.  It was beautiful, four lanes as far as the eye could see with a nice median.  But I set it carefully on the double-nickel and it was a great road.  I noticed that there wasn’t any signage yet and there weren’t any lines painted but it was a full moon (remember) and visibility was great.

    Great, that is, until I topped a little rise (going 55 mph) and found that I-85 ended and there was a 90 degree cutback to the left back to US 29.  Seems that they hadn’t yet gotten around to building the bridge over Lake Hartwell.

    I spun the wheel and braked and downshifted furiously and succeeded in getting the ‘Vette turned a few degrees to the left – and then we went down a 20 foot embankment into Lake Hartwell.  I remember thinking that Corvettes, being plastic, might float.  Sigh.

    The only thing keeping me from converting the 'Vette into a fiberglass inboard runabout was a stump in the water about a foot below the surface.  We struck it and stopped immediately.  I mean "immediately"!  My glasses flew off and broke the windshield but I was securely belted in and wasn’t injured (the luck of the stupid, I guess).  The car was sitting in about two feet of water and the water was, therefore, about halfway up the side.

    I opened the door a little; water came in so I closed it again.

    I was sitting there dazed and pissed off and then I noticed a revolving red light up on the road behind me.  No, it was a different policeman; this time, a South Carolina State trooper.  He got out of his car, stood behind his door (proper police training), cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled,

    "RUN OFF THE ROAD?"

    I rejected the first half-dozen wise-ass remarks (I was getting good at suppressing wise-ass remarks) and yelled back, "Yes, sir!"

    He walked a rope down and tied it (I learned later) to some apparently fragile part of my rear suspension.

    Note: Hauling a Corvette around by a rope tied to a sensitive rear suspension component is not a good idea.  Not at all.

    He used his prowler to pull us (me and the Corvette) back up onto the road.  A cursory inspection showed cracks in both front fenders and a smashed area below the grill.  But the car started (hallelujah!).  The trooper told me that I was the third one that day.  Later (much later) I tried to get some relief from the DOT, the contractors, the state of South Carolina and the State of Georgia for opening a road with no signage and no barrier to a lake entry by car – but to no avail.

    I thanked the trooper and limped on down to Carnesville.  I visited the sheriff, showed him the damage (a lot of "tsk, tsk-ing"), paid the fine, recovered my guitar and started back to Greenville.

    The suspension felt funny but I was able to make it all the way back to Greenville. 

    Here’s a little-known fact.  Mike Persia Chevrolet (in those days) had a service department that was open 24 hours a day.  I drove the car down a ramp and into the service bay and turned it over to a service writer.  I didn’t get the car back for nine weeks!

    That’s how long it took in those days to obtain all the plastic forward of the windshield from St.  Louis (where Corvettes were built in those days).  The transmission was never quite right after that – and here’s the sad part – I decided to get married while the car was in the shop.

    And my fiancee, who drove a Sunbeam Alpine,

    .. reasoned that we didn’t need two sports cars and that I, of course, would be the one to give his up.  I should have known the marriage wouldn’t work.  So at the age of 22 I was married and Corvette-less.

    Marriage

    After dating for several months, Babe and I decided to get married.  Y'see, in our generation everyone was pretty much programmed from birth:

    • Graduate from high school
    • Graduate from college
    • Get a job
    • Get married
    • Get a house
    • Get a dog
    • Get a barbecue grill
    • Have a baby

    ..  and so on.

    You see where we were on that scale.  We were both too young to marry, but marry we did in May of 1962.

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