Bringing My Car Home

In the fall of the year that I was stationed on Cape Cod, I decided to go home on leave. I had a feeling that my grandfather had died (when my aunt wrote in a letter that he had left them his car, I had a hunch that he was dead!!), and I wanted to bring my car home because I had two vehicles and could one drive one at a time. At the time my enlistment had about 6 months to go (turned out to be less, but that's another post) and I thought I'd bring my car home and then drive the pickup home when I got out of the military.

I managed to get a leave OK'd because I had leave time accrued and I used the excuse that I wanted to go home to see if my grandfather had died. (Later I found out from my brother and others that they didn't notify me as they figured I wouldn't be able to get there for the funeral anyway. Hell, I could have gotten an emergency leave and flown home, and it would have been a break from the stupid military.) Anywho, I took off for home in Oct.

Most of the trip was uneventful, drove across Taxachusetts, and New York to Niagara Falls. Went across Ontario to Port Huron, MI. It was as I was heading toward the bridge that things started to get interesting. I seem to remember it was almost 100 miles south of the Mackinac Bridge that I ran into snow. My little Corvair had summer tires (back in the day of bias ply tires, you needed different tires for summer and winter, all-season tires started after they started making radial tires), but because the car was a rear-engined rear wheel drive, I figured as long as the snow didn't get too bad, I'd be OK. When I got to the bridge, it was icey, but I thought if I could get up to where the metal grating was, I would have enough traction to get over the top. Once I got over the top and was heading down, I thought, "Oh Shit, I got to stop at the toll booth!!" (Side Note: at the time the toll was $3.75 for cars and several years later the license plate fees were raised and the toll dropped to $1.50 for cars.) After the bridge, I had to go across the UP.

The Seney Stretch is 26 miles straight as an arrow through a swamp. Under good conditions it is tiresome. This time it was in the middle of the night and snowing hard. There was enough snow on the road that my car would slide all over when I had all the wheels on the pavement, so I drove with one set of wheels on the shoulder and one set on the pavement. Had to stop on the Seney Stretch to hack out the snow and ice built up in the front wheel wells as it was getting hard to steer. Every once in awhile I would see lights ahead and think I was almost to Seney and it would be an on-coming vehicle.

It was almost daylight by the time I got to Munising and the snowplows were out. Coming out of Munising there is a hill and the plow had scraped one stretch of pavement bare. My rear wheels were spinning coming up the hill and when I hit the bare patch, it almost stalled, but caught and continued up the hill. Several miles down the road, smoke started coming in the car through the heater vents (the car drew warm air from around the air cooled engine for the heater). I knew something was wrong, but there was nowhere to stop. When the idiot light for oil pressure came on, I pulled over on the shoulder. When I checked the oil, there wasn't any on the dipstick, but there was a lot of oil covering the engine. I hitch-hiked to the nearest gas station (I think it was the Laughing Whitefish Trading Post, a combination store, restaurant, and gas station). I got 3 qts of oil and hitched back to the car. I put in two and took off. Got almost to Marquette and put in the last qt. In Marquette I got a two gallon can of cheap oil. I put in a couple of qts. and drove to my cousin's house where I took a nap. Added more oil and drove to my brother's house.

While the car was parked at my brother's house, my nephew managed to break the shaft on the driver's side windshield wiper. Later we convoyed to the 'Ranch' (was an interesting drive as it was sloppy weather, sleeting, snowing and the wiper on the driver's side was missing) and parked the car there. All together it took 13 qts. of oil to go the last 100 or so miles. This was the second time my car broke down while on my way home, but both times was able to limp the cars home.

I then went to the bank where I had my car loan and notified them I was dropping the insurance because the car was parked as it broke down and then refinanced the loan (this was a last resort as I tried to get a loan at a local bank was turned down because I was in the military) to have money to buy my plane ticket back to Cape Cod.

I was going to rebuild the engine after I got home from the military, but sometime after getting back home as a free man, I learned that my best friend from high school had crashed and burned in his Corvair. I still have the car, anyone want to buy a rusted hulk of a car?????

Upstate New York

All this attention to the election in the NY-23 district has reminded me of an enjoyable weekend that I spent in upstate New York and I can still remember parts of it. Some call anyplace out of NYC upstate, but this was really upstate and what I still think of as upstate, the Adirondacks.

A friend whose grandparents lived in upstate NY suggested that we go up there for the weekend. As I had a car, my little Corvair, we would drive up in it. We managed to talk our supervisor into letting us have a long weekend, 3 or 4 days, I forget which, by promising to bring back some fish.


Here is a picture of a '64 Corvair similar to the one I had at the time. This one is a little fancier than mine as my Corvair had plain wheels with dog dish hubcaps.


It was about an eight or ten hour drive from Cape Cod. We drove thru Lake Placid and Saranac Lake to where his grandparents lived. I think he called that place Paul Smith, NY. I know there was a college by the name near there.


Anywho, we did go fishing the next day. We put a rowboat on my car and launched it in a stream. Went upstream and hauled it over a beaver dam into a lake. We did manage to catch a few fish, but they were only hitting one lure. My friend caught a frog and was using that for bait with no luck. When he decided it wasn't working, and released the frog, it started swimming to shore. Just before it reached the shore, there was a big splash and it disappeared.


Another thing we did was some target practice. We had each brought a box of .22 cal. ammunition, which we used in a couple of single shot rifles. A couple of his cousins and their husbands were there also and they had at least 10 times as many .22 cartridges. They were blasting away and not hitting much, whereas we made sure most of our shots hit what we were aiming at. That is the point of target practice after all. Shooting to just burn powder doesn't make much sense.


At night we would go to bars and drink, most of that is fuzzy. One night we went to Rouses Point,NY which is up in the corner where NY, VT and Canada meet. Don't remember much other than that.


We did make it back in time, even tho we got lost in Boston (Damn One-Way Streets). Missed the exit for the Cape and I-90 ended in downtown Boston. When we spotted the Playboy Club, my friend said, "Now I know where we are." After getting our bearings, we got out of Boston and back to the base on the Cape without any more trouble.

Oh Mighty Sun God

Watching Survivor Samoa last week reminded me of something that happened during the summer on Cape Cod. The contestants were complaining about all the rain they were getting. We didn't have rain like that on the Cape, but we did have a long stretch of days without sun, some rain, but mostly overcast and some days just so humid that the sun was just some indistinct blob in the sky.

Anywho, one day a friend of mine, as we were on our way to work said, "Oh Mighty Sun God what have we done wrong. We'll sacrifice a lifer." Still no sun, so on the following day he upped it to two lifers. Nada, and on the third day it was three lifers. Still Nada, so he upped to three lifers and a First Shirt (a senior NCO directly below the Commander in the chain of command). That day the sun came out and afterwards we always said that in order to get what you want you have to throw in a First Shirt as that was the clincher.

Good Eats, Not!!

The food in the chow halls was not very good. I may have gained ten pounds in basic, but that was only because I was eating three meals a day. Before I went in the military I was too busy partying and running around to eat regularly. Anywho, like I said the food in the chow halls wasn't very good and I ate a lot at the BX cafeteria and snack bars on base and had pizzas and other stuff off-base. After I made E-4 I was able to go on 'separate rats' (separate rations) which gave me about forty bucks (whatever they figured it cost for a months worth of meals in the chow hall) a month to eat on and meant if I were to eat at the chow hall, I would have to pay for the meal as I no longer had a meal pass. When I was at Dow Airplane Patch, I used to go for midnight chow fairly often. You had to get a pass from the CQ in the barracks and the chow hall started serving around 10 pm or 10:30 pm. It was basically breakfast and sometimes even the grits were good. Which meant I ate breakfast before going to bed and didn't bother eating in the morning before going to work. I could sleep later.

At K.I. I would go off-base to get pasties (rhymes with nasty, not hasty which would be a nipple covering and they are usually not edible).

As for the meals I ate at the BX, they were mostly hamburgers, chili dogs and other stuff on that order. I still remember the chili on the chili dogs as being super thick from sitting under the lights all day. On the weekends I would get a pizza or something off-base. That is basically how I survived while in the military. When I was at Otis on Cape Cod, I only ate one meal in the chow hall and that was while very hungover on Xmas day because no other place was open on that day. (And that was not the last time I had trouble finding a place to eat on Xmas day. While in Anniston, AL in the mid-80's I had the same problem.)

For my last meal at Otis, I was searching for any and all loose change to come up with enough money to get something at the snack bar because I was broke until I got my final paycheck the next morning along with my discharge.

Cars

Besides the truck and the car I bought for the drivetrain to put in the truck, I also bought a '54 Ford ragtop while stationed on Cape Cod. I had no intention of buying another vehicle, but I was made an offer I couldn't refuse. The guy that followed me from K.I. to Otis had bought a '54 ragtop in addition to the truck he had. Long story short, he got transferred and asked if I wanted the ragtop. I told him I had enough vehicles at the time. He said that he had just bought a new 6 volt battery for the car and would sell the car to me for what the battery cost. (I seem to remember it was only $5 or $10.) I really didn't need or want another car, but I bought it from him just to help him out as he was leaving. I think I fired it up a couple of times and even drove it with the top down once a few blocks on base, but mostly it sat outside of the Auto Hobby Shop on base.

This picture is of a restored car that I found on the intratubes, and not of the car I had.

The car I had was drivable but I didn't have the time to do anything with it. Later on my last day at Otis when I was leaving to go home I gave the car away. I had just cashed my final check at the Credit Union and met one of my co-workers and tossed him the keys and said, "It's parked at the Auto Hobby Shop. It's all yours." Because of the "Early Out" (that's another tale) I had a lots of running around and other things to do in a short period of time and didn't even think about trying to sell the car until it was too late to do anything.

Danny Kaye's

One of the first places I was introduced to on Cape Cod was a place called Danny Kaye's. When I first saw the name on the sign, I thought it belonged to the comedian Danny Kaye. Turned out it was the first names of the couple that owned the restaurant. It was an Italian-American restaurant and I was told that we all were to order our own pizzas. When the pizzas arrived, they were on large serving trays and were oval. I had never seen anything other than a round pizza before and it was cut into diamonds, lots of diamonds. The first time there I wasn't able to eat the entire pizza, maybe there were too many pieces, or maybe it was the fact that I had had a snack shortly before heading out to the restaurant. Almost every payday several of us would go to Danny Kaye's for pizza and after that first time, I was able to eat all of the pizza.

Twenty One years later I was working on Cape Cod at Otis and went looking for my favorite pizza place. The building was still there, but now it was a Chinese restaurant.

Trucks

Like I said before I drove out to Cape Cod in my little Corvair. After driving around there for awhile, I realized that the Corvair was not a good vehicle to drive there. Other cars were always pulling out in front of me, seems like a little white car is almost invisible or just poses no threat to other drivers. That is why I bought the pickup in the picture below. Drivers on Cape Cod had a bad habit of creeping out until they were far enough out into the traffic lane that someone would stop to let them in. Whenever I spotted someone trying to creep out into traffic, I would downshift the truck to second gear and step on the gas. If they still kept coming, I would drift to the right and usually they would back up. Summertime was a miserable time to drive on Cape Cod and that was forty years ago. One town just off-base had about 10,000 year-round residents, on some summer weekends like July 4th it would swell to around 100,000.

Notice the broom sticking up behind the cab. A buddy said every truck had to have a broom and he stuck one there.

The other truck in this picture belonged to another guy in the shop. He followed me out to Cape Cod from K.I. and when he saw my truck, he bought one like it. Mine was a '56 Chevy and his was a '57 Chevy. He had a new Cougar that he bought with his re-enlistment bonus and had already wrecked it once while at K.I. and after seeing the traffic on Cape Cod, didn't want to take a chance on wrecking his car again.

I did a lot of work on the truck. It had a worn-out transmission and the rearend was shot. One of the wheel bearings in the rearend wore out and it was so bad that the axle wore a hole thru the top of the rearend housing. I bought a '56 Chevy car and put the entire drive chain from the car into the truck. There were some exciting moments during the process from getting the car to the base to finishing the project. While towing the car to the base, my buddy popped the clutch and started the car. It had a carburetor from a Caddy and the gas pedal linkage worked the opposite of the Chevy and after it started and he let up on the gas, it revved up and was running wide open. This happened to be on the bridge on to Cape Cod and there was a traffic circle at the bottom end of the bridge. He shut it down and didn't try again the rest of the way to the base.

Looking back, hindsight being 20/20, I might have been better off getting rid of the truck and keeping the car, but for some reason I preferred the truck over the car.