[bobbymitch]

The sage of the '55 Chevy rustbucket

When I lived in Shawnee, the next door Taylor brothers and I were good friends. The elder Taylor, George, and I were the same age, but he was a year behind in school since he failed a grade. For his first car, his dad bought him a primer-grey '55 4-door Chevy. And boy did we drive all over the county.

Back then, I-35 ended at SW Blvd and as such, it was the unofficial drag strip going southbound. Since we never knew who was racing when, we would drive that stretch of road a lot. Being kids and easily bored, we needed a distraction. And that came in the form of legal explosives - read Cherry Bombs, Bulldogs, and M-80's. These devices were readily available at Dogpatch on the Bagnell Dam strip. One extremely slow night, we decided to have a little fun and drop them through one of the several rusted out opening on the floorboard. The trick was to time the lighting and dropping of them so that a following car would be right over it when it went off. Good for laughs. At least until, George's Little brother Larry, missed one of the holes. Needless to say, there isn't a lot of room any car to get away from the inevitable blast, but we tried. And we failed. After the explosion, the floating dust was so bad, one couldn't even see out of any window. George got us over to the shoulder so we could breath again and put out a couple of minor fires to the remnants of the original carpeting and a back seat cushion. Yelling at Larry was no good because, he couldn't hear much as the ringing in the ears was to great and we weren't sure if we were actually saying out loud, since we could hear either. We did have a good laugh at each other because 1) we survived and 2) we all looked we all just left a coal mine. We realized that our latest activity wasn't such a good idea and from then on, kept the firework performances in our backyard pond.

However, we decided that since fireworks from cars wasn't good, maybe water balloons would be a lot safer. We did recognize the hazard of hitting a car on the Interstate wasn't good, so we stuck to the slower pace of local roads. Merriam Drive in this case. It was good fun seeing who good nail a windshield versus a fender or, the horrors, miss altogether. Fun it was until, one of us nailed an extremely old pickup truck and it's fender. Fun quickly faded when the fender fell off from being hit and the driver drove over it, no doubt incurring other damage.

Our recklessness faded when we learned about the Drive-in circuit. We would start at Allen's on Johnson Drive, stop by Winstead's on the Plaza, and an third somewhere in between whose name has been lost to time. In time during the circuit, we could notice who was dating whom, who had a new car, hang out a bit and see who perhaps we could pick up. This routine was a Saturday night ritual for a year or so until George decided to show off. Leaving Allen's, he dropped in 1st and instead of getting the automatic handle in Drive, he found Reverse. We wound up with parts from a variety of sources all over Johnson Drive. RIP '55 Chevy Rustbucket.

Considering the number of similar incidents that I managed to live through, no wonder I became a safety professional later in life.