Late one night in 1970, or thereabouts, I was driving my
black 1955 Buick Special northbound on Pleasant Valley Road in Fairmont when I
rounded a curve to see two headlights coming toward me on my side of the road.
I had only a split second to swerve to the right to avoid a dead-on, head-on
collision.
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| James Bond didn't have armor like this. |
Because I did that, the drunk who hit me glanced off one
side of my car, taking out my driver’s side headlight and fender and caving in
part of the door. Fortunately, General Motors saw fit to equip its 1955 Buick
Special with a massive chrome bumper and grille that could break down walls
without sustaining so much as a dent. Had I been driving a smaller, less
“fortified” car, I might have been seriously injured. In my Buick, however, I
escaped unhurt. The other guy was too drunk to know if he was hurt or not, but one
thing was certain: His late ‘60s model Chevy Impala took the worst of the
impact with my chrome-plated Buick and the two torpedoes it carried out front.
So I found a fender in a junk yard and plugged a new
headlight into its socket, but there was no longer a frame to hold the light, so
I tied it in place with yellow speaker wire and went on with my life. And
therein lies this tale.
In March of 1971, Fairmont State’s men’s basketball team was
competing in the NAIA national championship tournament in Kansas City, Mo. It
was a grueling, one-week, 32-team event in which the winner would have to win
five games over six days. On opening night, a Monday, I was in Fluharty’s bar near
Rivesville with 20 or more fraternity brothers drinking beer and listening to
Fairmont’s game on the radio, somehow being played through the juke box.
As the beer flowed, more and more guys came to the
conclusion that if Fairmont State won this game, we would all pile into cars
and drive to KC for the remainder of the tournament. We would do this after
drinking for several hours. With very little money. In the middle of the night.
In winter.
What could possibly go wrong?
As luck would have it, Fairmont won the game on a tip-in at
the final buzzer, but by that time, the number of people headed for Kansas City
had dwindled to three. Only one of us (yours truly) was 21 years old – the legal
drinking age in Missouri in 1971 – and only one of us had his own car, even if
the headlight was held in place with
speaker wire. But off we went. We would not be denied.
First off, my father told me I’d never make it in a ’55 Buick
with unattached spare parts. He said I’d probably get as far as Columbus, Ohio,
if I was lucky, and to sell the car there for the price of a bus ticket and
come back home. Next, I had to wake up a friend who managed a restaurant to
come out and cash a check for me so I’d have money for the trip. There were no
bank cards or ATMs in 1971.
Finally, the three of us set out at midnight for the 16-hour
drive to Kansas City. In Ohio we drove into a blizzard with snow so wet and
heavy that someone had to keep pounding on the inside of the windshield to keep
the wipers from stopping and freezing in place. We got through the storm and
drove all night, hitting St. Louis just in time for noon-hour traffic, when
everybody was driving at least 80 mph on five- and six-lane sections of
Interstate 70. We survived that, too, and arrived in Kansas City around 4 p.m.
on Tuesday.
I could tell you a lot of stories about what happened out
there, but sticking with the car theme, let me just say that one of the guys
with me on the trip was a big football star at Fairmont State. We ran into his
coach in a hotel parking lot, and when he saw the condition of the big black
Buick, he offered to buy his star player a plane ticket to keep him from going
home in my car. The player declined.
So long story short, we stayed Tuesday through Saturday to
watch Fairmont State finish fourth, then took off – again late at night – for
the trip back home. Cops stopped us in Fairmont, Illinois, (oh, the irony) but
let us go. Somewhere around Indiana, the speaker wire began to come loose and
the driver’s side headlight started shining straight up in the air, like a
searchlight or an anti-aircraft beacon. Later, probably in Ohio, it started
shining back toward the driver, and somewhere around Waynesburg, Pa., it flew
off altogether, never to be seen again.
I’ve told this story dozens of times, and people still look
at me like they think I’m making it all up, but there are two guys out there
who were with me on the adventure of a lifetime – at least up to that point in
time – and they’ll verify that every word I wrote is true. I ran into the
football player recently and we told the tale to each other all over again.
My experience with
Fords
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| Fool me once... |
 |
| ...fool me twice. |
This one was silver with black interior, a cool shifter,
chrome dashboard and sport wheels. It was – you guessed it – beautiful to look
at, but in four years it fell completely apart and was basically un-driveable
by 1983. I had to carry quarts of oil everywhere I went and it was badly in
need of a ring job. The rear hatch didn’t fit quite right, which allowed the
trunk compartment to become seriously saturated with 36 inches of melted snow after
sitting for days in front of my apartment in Hagerstown, Md., following a
storm. From that day forward, the car smelled like wet dog.
When I finally limped into a Subaru dealer to trade the car
I couldn’t get it to go faster than about 25 mph. Just before I drove away in
my shiny new Subaru sedan, I asked the salesman what would happen to the
Mustang. “We’ll play with it a little and send it down to some used car lot in
West Virginia,” he told me. “Someone down there will buy it.”
I drove the Subaru for 65,000 miles, switched to Hondas in 1987
and haven’t looked back since. My current car is a 2002 Honda CRV with 99,400
miles on it. It still runs as good as the day we brought it home. (That sound
you hear is me, knocking on wood.) Some years ago, a friend and devoted Ford
owner asked me why I only bought Japanese cars. “You should buy American,” he
told me. “The cars are better now.”
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