A Well-Written Life is as Rare as a Well-Spent One.
version 1.7.5 21Jan2008
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- ∗Do You Want to Go See the Rocket Sled?
- The Amazing Disappearing Bird
- Dumpster Digging at China Lake
- Debaters' Prank
- Roy Drops a Video Tape Recorder
- Why I Use Valvoline Motor Oil
- The Gift of a Pool of Oil
- ∗Exploding Food and Other College Pranks
- Bachelor Chow
- The Falling Blind Neighbor
- ∗ Rudy's Bean Casserole
- The Surprise Naked Visitor
- ∗ Bryce, I'm Done!
- Zapping Electronics
- ∗ Roy and Rudy Electrocute Each Other
- ∗ Only the Finest Paint Job
- ∗Let's Burn Ourselves Alive
- Frank Grober's 1957 Ford
- Let's Make Sure the Buggy Gets Stuck
- Two Rude Awakenings
- Riding My Bicycle Through The Flood
- The Chief Mechanic's Last Choice
- Rolla's Transporter Loses a Wheel
- BBQ Sauce, and Hand Cleaners Made of People
- How Much STP in The Oil?
- Burning Spectators and Destroying TV Equipment
- ∗Salt Walther's Girlfriend
- A Day's Pay For a Day's Work
- ∗ How to Impress a Lady
- Rolla's Transporter Gets Inspected
- ∗ We Win the Race of Champions
- Pouring Water on Phil Threshie
- Car Polish Tastes Better
- Rolla's Pickup Loses an A-Arm
- Roy Drives an Indy Car
- Roy Smashes an Electric Meter
- Roy Walks Straight Into The Lake
- The Chief Mechanic's Moonshine
- We Run Over Jimmy Thrall
- ∗How to Deal With a Scam
- Was I Responsible for New Coke?
- Mini Meet Photo Contest
- ∗Your Album is a Shingle
- Exercising a Horse
- Non-Housebroken Cat
- Centrifuge the Spaghetti
- I Get His Boots!
- Old Trucks, Old Racers, & Old Jokes
- Del Taco vs. Taco Bell
- Wisconsin Genes
- Who Eats Salad?
- Grandpa Roy's Midnight Snack
- Mountain Fresh Water?
- ∗Tommy the Tiger Does a Loop
- ∗Sunburned up Their Short Skirts
- The High Cost of Race Cars
- ∗Dick Simon Crashes an Airplane
- David Ruddell's Navy stories
- Where Are my Men?!
- ∗Racers Injure Themselves
- ∗Let's Steal Something Heavy
- Ty-Wrap Tony to The Fence
- The Boss's Nephew
- Onry the Cat
- Dumb Possums
- ∗Jimmy Thrall Builds a Fake Control Panel
- ∗Americans Eat Radioactive Candy
Early on the morning of a firing, our parents would ask me and my twin brother Dave if we wanted to "go see the rocket sled." We'd both say, "Yeah! We wanna go see the rocket sleds!" We'd all pile into the family's 1955 Chevy station wagon and drive a few miles across the Mojave desert to the track. My brother and I were 3 or 4 years old, and we stayed in our one-piece fuzzy pajamas.
A siren would sound a slow descending glissando for 5 or 10 minutes before the test, warning all to get a long ways from the track. My mom, brother, and I were on the outdoor observation deck next to the control tower. Do you know how loud a large rocket is? Did you know that one of the reasons open-air spectators were kept 10 miles away from a Saturn V launch was that the sound level up close was fatal? When one of those rocket sleds was ignited, the mighty roar would scare my brother and me so badly, we'd scream and cry and hug our mom's legs!
The next time there was to be a test, our parents would ask me and my brother if we wanted to "go see the rocket sled," and we'd both say, "Yeah! Yeah! We wanna go see the rocket sleds!"
Nowadays, the nanny state probably prohibits civilians from enjoying such an event at close range, and I regret that my own son might never get the opportunity. But I do have some tape recordings my dad made!
Other hunters could be heard all around us behind the trees, but we were the only ones who knew about this wary bird. Our dad had a problem. He couldn't shoot because he was hanging on to the collar of Bruno, who was straining to go after the object of the hunt. Dad didn't want to release the dog because that would flush the critter and everyone else would see it. Ultimately, he let Bruno go, Bruno bounded toward his desire, and the bird launched itself into the air.
Our dad took aim, and as the escaping avian reached about 20 feet altitude, shots rang out from a dozen different directions. The bird vanished, blasted to atoms. We couldn't see any remains falling down. Bruno, casting back and forth, could not sniff out a single smithereen on the ground.
My friends and I would ride through the interconnected alleys on our bikes, look in through the dumpsters' convenient doors for goodies, and climb inside as necessary. The interior could be plenty hot in the desert summer sun, but we were young & tough and used to it. One of our favorite items was old plastic model kits. The Holy Grail of some other kids was Playboy magazines. I still have some G-rated Esquire magazine cartoons in one of my scrapbooks. It got good when someone was moving and cleaned out their house. One such time, I scored a tank-type vacuum cleaner and 2 cameras. I wanted to find 3 more tank-type vacuums and make my own jet airliner.
The dumpsters were picked up one at a time on the back of a special truck that looked a bit like a tow truck. They were taken out into the desert to the south of Dry Lake, (officially Mirror Lake), and dumped in the desert. Occasionally we'd ride our bikes out there and have a look around too. People were always setting the dump on fire, and once my brother and I collected spray cans and put them into the flames. We hid behind a huge pile of shredded newspaper and listened to the explosions. We put some more cans on the fire and waited again, but a couple of adults came along and, cursing, swatted the cans out of the flames. The adults didn't get blown up and they didn't spot us!
Later, there was a "tenant dumping pit" west of Dry Lake. It was OK to throw in anything except kitchen trash and automobiles. I remember scoring several good tires and a huge compound-compensated aircraft generator. One day, I found two hundred or more Marvel Comics scattered over the pit. I collected them all and eagerly phoned my friend Mike Ross, who had lots of Marvel Comics. As I described them to him, he became more and more concerned. He looked for his own collection and discovered his mom had thrown it away! He asked if I had picked up ALL of them, and I said yes, I had been pretty thorough. He was glad to get them back, and wasn't pleased with his mom. Mike became a pretty good cartoonist and did some of the animation on the first Star Wars movie.
My brother Dave and I had an opportunity once to poke through the dump at the SNORT track. We came back with a 3,600 PSI spherical tank and a large conical coil spring. Dave thought it would be great to put the spring on the bottom of a chair. I still use the tank with an air compressor, and I bolted the spring to the bottom of a $5 yard sale dune buggy bucket seat. You can sit in it and rock in any direction. If you tuck your feet in and grab the sides, you can hop around in it like a Pogo Stick! Once, I attached a seat belt, and you could bounce even higher by "flapping" your arms.
During a bit of free time in Bakersfield, two of our debaters, I think they were Tom Gey and Randy Gould, reported they'd rearranged the letters on a billboard. The big sign belonged to a plant nursery next to a major thoroughfare, and it had theater marquee-style changeable letters. Extolling the product of the day, it read "HELP PREVENT CRABGRASS," and Tom & Randy changed it to "HELP PREVENT GRABASS."
After a home football game, I was carrying the huge Craig black & white reel-to-reel video tape recorder down from the film booth on top of the grandstands. Without warning, the carrying handle ripped out of the side of the wooden cabinet! I was halfway down the grandstand and the VTR landed in the exact center of a long wooden bleacher supported only near the two ends, and bounced straight back up into the air, where I hunkered down and caught it in both arms. It was undamaged. Boy, was I lucky!
Afterwards, we never carried those machines by their handles.
The year after I graduated, I heard the school had a new Sony portable reel-to-reel deck that was much smaller. Some students were up on the roof making a video and accidentally dropped it to the ground. No one was in a position to catch it, and it was pretty well used up.
Years later, I owned a 4-door MG 1100 work car that sported a loud internal engine rumble because a previous owner had lost the oil filter internal hardware and the filter cartridge was just sitting in the bottom of the can. The main bearings were shot. The back plate of the air cleaner manifold was also missing so the piston rings were nearly gone and it burned a quart of oil a week. I drove it for two years and kept it filled up with a plentiful supply of Valvoline straight 50 weight racing oil drained out of Rolla Vollstedt's Indy cars after races. It was a good match, except during the winter it cranked really slow.
When I finally got around to rebuilding the engine, the main bearings measured .011 clearance. The spindly crank had been flexing even more than normal, so as you might expect, it failed Magnaflux miserably.
During assembly, I accidentally dinged the seal surface slightly on the hydraulic coupling. Having few resources, I didn't fix it. It leaked when the car was done. Not much, but enough to slowly make a mess. From an old refrigerator, I had a big pressed aluminum bottom drawer that I trimmed to fit snugly up around the bellhousing & tailshaft, and I held it in place with a seat belt bolted across the frame rails. It captured all the leaking oil. When the drawer filled up after a few hundred miles, I'd click open the seat belt, drop it down, filter out the dirt & bugs, and pour the oil back into the transmission.
One day I was driving from China Lake to UCSB, and was in a bit of a hurry. I didn't drive over the speed limit, but I did brake hard as I came to a stop at the guard's shack at the east gate to the university. I heard a loud splash under the car. I kept a straight face and said nothing. The guard looked puzzled, but inspected my windshield sticker and waved me through. As I accelerated off to the parking lot, I watched my rear view mirror and saw the guard staring down at the pavement in front of him. I knew I'd left a HUGE puddle of red automatic transmission fluid and dying insects.
The Hydramatic shifted pretty hard from 1st to 2nd after I adjusted the throttle valve linkage to make the trans shift at an RPM I liked. I didn't mind the hard shift, but one day when I was motoring about, the 1st-to-2nd shift sheared the leaf spring perches loose from the rear axle. Perhaps my welder friend who relocated the perches for me didn't get enough penetration. The whole axle assembly counter-rotated, the underslung pinion bottomed the driveshaft out in its slip joint in the back of the transmission, and shoved the engine/transmission assembly forward far enough for a fan blade to catch the radiator yoke. The blade bent out 90 degrees and sliced a big circle out of the radiator. A Rube Goldberg sequence of events. Again I heard large amounts of fluid splattering on the ground.
After re-welding the perches, hammering the fan straight, and borrowing a radiator from a friend who was going to put a 354 hemi into a Metro delivery van, I was back on the road.
Perps would put a firecracker in a heap of uneaten food, light the fuse, put the tray on the belt near the exit, then leave. The belt had tables of students on both sides, and when the explosive went off somewhere down the line, it would shower people with hunks of chow. My hall, Modoc Hall, quickly learned not to sit next to the conveyor belt after we spent 10 minutes grooming each other's long Hippie hair, picking out the splatter from a big bowl of cottage cheese that had gone off behind us.
A student told me a particularly memorable event was when someone arranged 6 little bowls of raspberry pudding on a tray, each with its own firecracker. He pointed to purple splatters on the ceiling.
In spite of what my contemporaneous poster above suggests, I found the food at UCSB's dorm dining commons to be very good. My weight went from 140 pounds to 155 the year I dined there, then dropped back to 140 when I went back to cooking for myself. I was 6 feet tall and needed some more weight.
The food serving areas in Ortega were tile, and the dining area was carpeted. The transition had a standard metal edge molding. During a meal, a cafeteria worker in his white apron & hat wheeled a serving cart with both shelves fully loaded with buckets of freshly washed flatware across the tile. He was pushing the cart sideways instead of pulling it lengthwise. When the wheels hit the molding, the cart tipped over with a huge clatter and he fell over the whole glittering mess! In front of hundreds of fellow students! Several of them helped him pick it all up.
The exploding food pranks inspired me to think of making a fake dynamite stick with a real fuse and put it on top of a heap of food on the conveyor belt, to cause a huge scare. I never did it because it would've been over the top, but I did construct the phony explosive. I taped two empty toilet paper rolls together, made cardboard endcaps, painted it red with the bogus logo "M-800" on the side, and inserted a sparkler for a fuse. It sat on the shelf in my dorm room for months.
One day a student from another hall in my Anacapa Dorm building burst into my room and excalimed, "Quick, I gotta borrow your fake dynamite stick!" I gave it to him, and ran after him as he scurried back to his room. Something was up.
The walls between rooms in the dorms were cinder block, with a shared small rectangular hole about 4 feet up from the floor to accomodate telephone jacks. They had removed the covers to service a phone line, then ended up throwing little firecrackers back and forth through the hole into each other's rooms. The guy who borrowed my bogus bomb lit the fuse, and heaved it through the aperture!
The student in the other room yelled, ran out into the hall, ran into our room, tackled the guy, and started strangling him on the floor! Both of them were smiling and laughing, though, and they returned my mildly used dynamite stick.
I had several giant Sylvania Wabash No. 3 "SuperFlash" flashbulbs I'd bought with Doug Allen for a dime each from the surplus store in our home town, the Naval Weapons Center, China Lake. They were the size of 200-watt bulbs, had a standard Edison base, operated off 3-125 volts, and put out a whopping 110,000 lumen-seconds of light for photographing large venues like banquet halls or missile tests. As a prank, I decided to touch one off during "Night Gallery".
The effect was not as dramatic as I'd hoped for. When the blinding flash went off, there was a little bit of muttering and no action. People just kept on watching the show. The inertia of a crowd. I should've arranged for the TV to shut off simultaneously!
Yes, I took a photo of the cat, but it's kinda gross.
Somebody in my hall had some large firecrackers, so I retrieved a full vacuum cleaner bag a maid had put in a garbage can, and we put a firecracker inside. We set it in the middle of another hall's large communal bathroom, lit the fuse, and left. Walking nonchalantly down the hall, we heard a muffled boom ...
In my audio technology class, our good-natured lecturer Mr. Dale Clark was discussing acoustics. He pointed out the properties of the big lecture hall the 300 of us were in. The side walls were parallel but wavy, with a wavelength of about 12 feet. The front and rear walls were parallel but the back wall had an acoustic grid. All to control echoes. When he said the ceiling was in tiers, I shouted out, "So are we!". Mr. Clark grinned and said, "I'm going to use that in next year's lecture!"
Toward the end of the 1971-1972 school year, Armin Pearson told me that Tom Gey and Charles Sartorius from our high school were going to come down from UC Berkeley to visit him just before finals, and he figured they planned on harrassing him so his grades would suffer. He wanted to conspire with me on how to lead them astray so he could study in peace. First, he said he'd told them a random phony room number in another hall, San Rafael hall. We went over to see whose room it actually was, and it turned out to be the dumpster room! Armin was pleased.
Armin disguised himself just before Tom and Charles arrived. He was an artist as well as a scientist, and used Halloween makeup to darken his complexion and hair, made a moustache, and he borrowed my glasses. Not too many hours after the troublemakers arrived, they came to my room and grumbled about the faux room number and how they couldn't find Armin. I said I didn't know where he was. They ended up sleeping on my floor.
At one point, Armin, Tom, Charlie, and I were all in another BHS grad, Jonathan Allan's room, socializing. Armin, in disguise, was sitting on the bed playing a guitar. If Tom and Charlie recognized him, they didn't let on. They departed the campus never having "found" him.
Shortly after moving in, my buddy reported to me that they got a serious case of the munchies one evening, and there was no food in the house except for my gift. In a theatrical manner, he cursed me because they'd gotten so sick gorging on the sugar-laced cereal, especially the gross Pink Panther Flakes!
I pointed to the pot and asked Rudy, "What's this?"
He smiled and said, "It's a bean casserole I made. It was a new recipe, and it didn't work out."
I then asked, "How long has it been here?"
"Two weeks," came the grinning response.
Something was up.
"How come it doesn't stink?" I queried, carefully sniffing the pot's vicinity.
Rudy answered, "It did, so we stirred some Lysol in it."
Bachelors!
We usually put our wet kitchen garbage out in the field behind the garages for the critters to eat, and eventually the bean casserole was dumped there in the grass near an abandoned and heavily vandalized apartment. When we all moved out at the end of the school year in June, the casserole was still there. It was the only thing the animals wouldn't eat.
I joined David and the landlord at the car outside. After a bit, the woman came out and sat down next to the house on a large roll of used rug I had brought home from a visit to Isla Vista. We were going to carpet the attic and make it a party room. We all noticed her, but nobody said anything. A few nervous minutes later, one of us called attention away from the car to the woman. She was still sitting on the carpet roll smiling at us, but had taken all her clothes off! A quick round of three "She's not with me, I thought she was with you!" declarations clued us in that more was amiss than we'd thought. None of us had ever seen her before.
Then Rudy arrived home from the college in his 1970 383 Plymouth Roadrunner. He stopped halfway along the east driveway, engine rumbling, with a stern, disapproving look on his face, glaring at the intruder. I went up to his window and explained the situation. Rudy parked, and we all conferred. David was a psych major, and he said he'd try to talk to her. He couldn't get her to put her clothes back on and leave, but he did persuade her to go into the open 3-car garage he and Rudy shared, sit down on an old wooden chair, and put a blanket around herself. She still hadn't said anything. The landlord departed with a suggestive have fun remark.
We three students conferred again. We didn't want her around. South Pomona wasn't the best neighborhood in Southern California, but this was just plain weird. She was rather nice looking, but she was a total stranger and seemed to be on drugs. Not a proper seduction at all! We decided to call the police.
In the kitchen, David picked up the receiver of the wall-mounted telephone, still holding down the hook. Before releasing the hook to dial, he looked at Rudy and me and asked, "Are you sure you don't want to **** her?" We quickly shook our heads in unison and David put in the call.
After another 20 minutes or so of tinkering with the landlord's car, a couple of officers arrived. We filled them in on the case, and they decided to take her in. She appeared to be unable to care for herself. The policemen asked if she could keep our blanket on, and we readily assented. They hauled her off. The woman had never stopped smiling and hadn't spoken a single word.
A few days later, I was in David & Rudy's garage, and I noticed for the first time a stain on the seat of the wooden chair. I asked if the crazy woman had done it. They both said yuchh, no, that was a motor oil stain that had been there a long time!
Housemate David, in telling the story in later years, referred to the surprise visitor as "Wonder Woman."
Some time later, there was a weak knock at the bottom of the door, and a voice down there said tremulously, "Bryce, I'm done!". Bryce opened the door and we beheld the guy lying in a pool of puke on the concrete, shivering from the cold in his soaked T-shirt. Bryce felt sorry for him and dragged him back in onto a throw rug to let him sleep inside. The line "Bryce, I'm done!" became an in joke at Chaffey's automotive department.
We hooked up a pair of old screwdrivers with large alligator clips to the battery, one to each terminal, and sat down on opposite sides of the table, with shorts, overloads, and assorted mayhem in mind. We each picked out places to touch our screwdrivers simultaneously, and the more spectacular the explosions, the more gleeful our laughter.
It often happened that all or part of the secondary ignition system would get wet, and we'd have to dry it to get the engine to start or run on all cylinders. This time, Rudy's 383 started up, but it was missing. No problem, Rudy started pulling the plug wires off one at a time to see which plug wasn't firing. He carefuly stood away from the fender so he wasn't grounded and wouldn't get shocked. I was leaning on a rear fender, standing on the wet concrete with wet tennis shoes like Rudy. When Rudy pulled off the first plug wire, both of us leapt in the air! Then without saying a word, we started laughing because we both realized what had occurred: The spark went through Rudy, his wet tennis shoes, the wet concrete pad, my wet tennis shoes, me, then back to the car. The two of us had made a circuit around the rubber tires! I had sabotaged Rudy's careful precautions!
Very little was said when our case came up. The judge examined the landlord's photos of the exterior of the once-grand house showing the boarded-up windows, peeling paint, & collapsing siding.
His honor merely said, "Give them their money back."
The slumlord protested, "But don't you want to see the movie I made?"
The judge calmly repeated, "Give them their money back."
While we were whiling away the hours in the courtroom waiting for our short-lived case to come up, we had to sit through several other disputes. One of them was memorable. A redneck had brought suit against a carwash for damaging the paint on his car. Representing the carwash was an Hispanic who spoke English so poorly I understood almost nothing of what little he said. The plaintiff said the paint had come off the car in great patches, and he suggested perhaps the soap hadn't been sufficiently diluted and had attacked the finish. He mentioned the car had just been given a brand new paint job.
The judge asked, "Who painted it?"
The redneck drawled, "Earl Scheib."
The courtroom dissolved in laughter. His honor made an heroic but ultimately unsuccessful effort to suppress a smile.
We never heard who won because the judge made an appointment with the combatants to examine the car in the court's parking lot at lunchtime, which was after our case.
For those of you who didn't live in Southern California in the 70's, Earl Scheib was a chain of auto body shops that advertised their $29.95 paint job heavily on television.
Some months later, I visited the old homestead. The landlord hadn't demolished the raggedy mansion, he'd rented it to some Mexicans and they were raising pigs in the largest garage.
When I used Google Earth's spy satellite to look at the neighborhood in May of 2006, the house was gone and an apartment building was finally there.
Several houses in the area had converted from oil heat, and there were some abandoned 150-or-so gallon oval outdoor oil tanks on stands free for the taking. We rescued one and cut a square foot hole down on one end for a door and a round hole high up at the other end for a chimney. We positioned the tank inside the garage next to a broken window and ran some stovepipe out and up. Doug's army base, Fort Lewis, had converted from coal heat, and the unwanted leftover coal had been piled into a huge mountain outside in the rain. We drove up to it in Doug's Corvair and filled up the trunk with lumps of coal.
The system worked well. We'd put coal in the homemade wood stove, dribble on some leftover heating oil we'd found in the tanks, light it, and enjoy a warm garage. The big chunks of coal burned for many hours, longer than we expected ...
One morning we wanted to continue a car project from the previous night, so we piled more coal onto the ashes and decanted oil onto it. A strange fog rose up inside the tank. We didn't realize what this meant. Doug put in a match. KA-WHOOOMP, flames shot 2 feet out the chimney and 4 feet out the door, all over Doug!
Doug couldn't back up because there was a car behind him. He couldn't escape to his right because there was a workbench there. I was to his left. He ran over me.
We felt pretty stupid. The previous night's coal was still burning under the ashes, and the mysterious fog was our heating oil being fried and vaporized. Fortunately, Doug only lost some hair, I wasn't seriously trampled, and the bricolage stove remained intact. The fire settled down and began to warm the chilly garage.
The engine was rather weak and had lots of sludge in it. I discovered the right side rocker arms of the Y-block V8 hadn't been getting any oil, and most of the rocker arms were grinding through their bottoms, leaving dry little conical piles of powdered metal underneath. They weren't opening the valves very far, if at all. Both pushrods for cylinder #2 had fallen out and one was broken in half. Some research at my own college revealed the oil passages to the rocker arm shafts on that engine take a 90 degree turn along the head gaskets and are very prone to clogging. We got another rocker arm assembly and some pushrods from a local junkyard. We purchased some copper tubing and some fittings from a hardware store and piped oil from an oil galley plug on the side of the block down through a hole I made in the rocker arm cover to a convenient fitting on a rocker arm shaft stand.
The engine ran strong on all 8 after the kluge, and Frank was amazed at how much more power it had, especially when I chirped the tires shifting from low to drive. I found out later my repair was a very common one, even to the point of outside oiler kits being available from parts stores at one time.
Later, the engine would crank but wouldn't start. There was no spark. The distributor rotor wasn't turning because the centrifical advance mechanism had fallen apart! It was a quick fix.
I was riding with Frank in a rain storm, and the vacuum-operated wipers weren't working right. They'd move outward smartly, then take forever to move back to the center. I picked up an empty Coke bottle off the floor, leaned forward, put my whole arm out through the vent window, and shoved the wiper back with the bottle each time it moved out. Frank was pleased and said I was the only person he knew of that would do that!
Some months later, the engine suddenly got so weak it couldn't climb up out of the parking lot at Frank's UCR dorm. Turned out the timing chain was so loose it had skipped a couple of teeth and the valve timing was massively retarded. I replaced the chain and the car ran great again.
Frank's Ford slowly developed an automatic transmission fluid leak large enough to tax his college student finances. I decided it was coming from the torque converter seal, and I found out in my automatic transmissions class at Chaffey that it was a weakness of the Cruise-O-Matic. Those trannies routinely wore out the torque converter bushing, then the seal couldn't follow the wobbling seal surface. Fixing it would be a major repair, and it wouldn't necessarily last a long time.
I noticed that the iron bellhousing was full circle and had a close-fitting sheet metal cover on the forward bottom side. So I removed the cover and reinstalled it with sealer. I drilled and tapped the drip hole in the bottom of the bellhousing 1/8 NPT and screwed in a right angle fitting. I ran a hose from the fitting up through the firewall to the lid of a 2-quart glass jar I hung under the dashboard. I ran another hose from the lid to the intake manifold. That way, engine vacuum sucked the leaking fluid from the inside of the bellhousing into the jar. It was easy to see when it needed to be unscrewed & poured back into the transmission, and Frank was saved much oil money.
One day when I was driving the car, I picked up a speeding tailgater. I grabbed the glass jar of ATF and turned it upside down so the oil went into the combustion chambers. The tailgater disappeared in a cloud of white smoke!
Towards the end of the school year, the car wouldn't start again. Frank had driven it from Riverside to Ridgecrest, and he said the engine oil light came on about a half hour from home. The car made it to his family's house and he shut it off with the key, but when he put oil in it in the morning and tried to start it, it would only crank. I took a look, and noted that the distributor rotor again wasn't turning. The centrifical advance mechanism was OK, so I took off the rocker arm covers. Only one exhaust pushrod at the very front of the engine was moving up & down! The engine's camshaft or oil pump had seized and the cam broke in two when Frank cranked it. This was a bigger repair than I was prepared to take on.
The car sat around for a while until Frank's sister Carla sold it to a junkyard for $5.
We came across a dune buggy in trouble. It had been driving around the base of a big dune and was slipping sideways downhill, not usually a problem, but this dune had a hard soil ravine at the bottom instead of a smooth transition to level sand. The driver had stopped driving forward before it sideslipped enough to fall into the ditch. There were hundreds of other vehicles on the sand that day, and several came to the rescue. Unfortunately, they had a poor idea of what to do.
Part of the problem was the buggy was a classic "doodlebug," made from thick steel tubing, water pipe perhaps, with a cast iron mid-fifties American V8 in the front, an automatic transmission, and solid axles. It was pretty heavy. A VW-based buggy might've light-footed its way out of the situation, but hey, it was probably fun to drive and cheaper. It just got into a bad spot not duplicated elsewhere on Pismo Beach.
One would-be rescuer tried towing the doodlebug forward. The doodlebug sideslipped further toward the ravine, and they aborted the attempt. A big 8-seat tube frame dune buggy powered by a 348 Chevy hooked up and tried to pull the bug sideways uphill. The big buggy pulled hard and broke its rear U-joint. The driver had a spare and coasted away for repairs. Two SUVs parked uphill and tried to use their winches simultaneously to pull the bug up. Their little electric winches couldn't pull hard enough.
About this time, I tried to talk the people into doing something different. I pointed out that the doodlebug had no problem going forward, it could do that all by itself. What they needed to do was keep it from slipping downhill. I suggested they run their cables downhill from the big buggy or the SUVs to the doodlebug and not try to haul it up the hill, just act as an anchor while it drove forward in an arc far enough, about 40 feet, to get past the ravine out onto level sand. They didn't want to listen. Maybe they didn't like my long hair. Dumb hippie on dope.
My brother and I had been watching this act for about an hour, and it was time to move on. The sand enthusiasts' efforts finally put the buggy into the ravine as we were leaving, and I took the above picture of the forlorn victim. In later years, I worked in the Vehicle Dynamics Department at Dan Gurney's All American Racers and retold this story to my coworkers' knowing laughter.
I don't remember if it was this occasion or another time I went to the beach with Dave, but when turning around on the pavement, he dropped one rear wheel of his '72 Vega GT Wagon (which I later put an aluminum 215 Olsmobile V8 in) off into the sand and got stuck. He didn't have a limited slip differential. I asked him if he had any rope, and he did. I tied one end to the exposed part of the parking brake cable going to the wheel in the sand, and stood about 20 feet off to the side. I pulled on the rope to apply that brake only and signalled Dave to drive out. It worked perfectly and Dave was again impressed with my automotive insight.
I wanted to raise my queen extra-long bed off the floor for more storage. Out back, there was an unused chicken coop falling down. I gathered up some nice 2x4's to build a bedframe. The house had 12-foot ceilings so I decided to put the top of the mattress up at 9 feet, leaving 3 feet above, and allowing me to stand underneath. In race car class at college, Kent Fisk was teaching us about space frames. Simple 2x4 diagonals on every side of the bed's frame made it very rigid.
I built no railing, and my first night up there, I was scared to death of falling out of bed. I huddled against the wall. I got used to it quickly though, and slept soundly the second night & thereafter, and never rolled off. I've always been in the habit of reading myself to sleep, and when I got drowsy, I'd reach over and gingerly unscrew the bulb in the ceiling's light fixture.
A year later when I moved into a house in Upland, California with the same pair of housemates, I built a much less sophisticated bedframe. I merely set two wooden pallets on end and laid an old door and a twin mattress on top. A single small diagonal in back was the only thing keeping it from falling over. It worked fine, even with a girlfriend in bed with me, except the lone diagonal would slowly work loose and I'd have to hammer its two nails back in every couple of months.
I left the bed there when I moved out, and a fellow named James something moved in. Nobody told him about tightening up the diagonal hiding behind the bed he inherited. Eventually one of the nails finished working its way out in the middle of the night while he was asleep. The bed was free to lean over until the foot end contacted the wall. Then the pallet at the head end of the mattress fell down, dropping that end of the bed 3 feet to the floor. James and the mattress slid off, and his head was slammed hard into the opposite wall! He cursed my poor design & workmanship. After laughing when told what happened, our housemate Rudy stood up for me and described to him the rather nice frame I'd built in Pomona.
Several students had put on their swim suits and were having fun riding into the water at high speed, making huge splashes. I didn't know how long the water would be there and I couldn't let this opportunity go by, so I returned to my apartment, changed into a swimsuit, and rode back to join in. Theoretical chemistry could come later, for now I was going to romp in megamoles of H2O.
It was a blast. After speeding into the water several times then pedaling hard all the way across, I heard that all three of the underpasses were flooded, so I visited the others. Sure enough, they were flooded to a similar depth and I rode into and through them too. Later, the news reported that the rainstorm had been so sudden and intense that it clogged the drains with debris and the pump motors shut down.
One of the underpasses was different in that instead of the bike path leading straight into it, there was a sharp 45 or so degree right turn immediately before the bike path went down, blocking the view of the water. The sun had come out, and hundreds of students appeared on the bike paths, heading to IV after their last classes of the week. Perhaps many were eager to party, and were in a hurry. Many were unaware of the torrential downpour that had occurred while they were in class and didn't think the crowd of people and bikes stopped around the sunny entrance to the underpass meant anything wrong. Riding at high speed, oblivious to possible danger, they blundered, skidded, and crashed into the water, fully dressed and loaded down with notebooks and textbooks.
One guy on a ten speed saw the water, but he was holding his books under his left arm and was going pretty fast. He couldn't brake hard enough with only one hand on the handlebars, so he steered left up the landscaped embankment and crashed in the flowers instead of the water. A girl who simply didn't see the water in time at her high rate of speed fell down when she hit the brakes, and she and her bike slid into the murk separately. One of the swimsuited revelers helped the crying girl out of the water while two others fished around in the depths to find her bike and her books.
It was a lot of fun to watch the mayhem, and I noted that no one was exactly shouting warnings. I wonder if anyone present ever described the spectacle in a graduate thesis on natural selection?
The next day, I spent several hours completely disassembling my bike to clean the water out of all the bearings. The lube in the Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub had turned into a yucky oil-water emulsion! Such care is one of the reasons I still have the bike as I write this in 2006. One just sold on eBay for $405. I bought mine new for $35 with my allowance.
One of my ankles hurt, and I went to the Student Health Center. The doctor said he'd seen me pedaling hard through the deep water and figured I'd be coming in to see him. He examined me and said I'd strained my ankle and I'd be fine in a day or two. As long as I didn't need to run away from any saber-tooth cats!
Not long after, I added a mountain gear to the bike.
In early 1978, I was working as an electronic schematic draftsman in China Lake on the Navy's new Applicon 870 Interactive Graphics System. I drove to Upland, California to visit my friend David Ruddell. I was surprised to find Paul Diatlovich lying on the couch. He was from Long Island, New York, and had been in some of my automotive classes at Chaffey College a couple of years before. He explained that the big truck and trailer outside was the race car transporter for Vollstedt Enterprises, the Indy car team he was the chief mechanic for. The previous year, he had worked for the team when they had the Bryant Heating and Cooling sponsorship and brought Janet Guthrie to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Janet had recommended Paul because he had worked with her in a lower form of racing.
Paul was staying at Rudy's for several days because the Datsun Twin 200s Indy Car Race the previous weekend at nearby Ontario Motor Speedway had been postponed due to rain. He had spent some of the time looking for another employee. The race team consisted only of the owner, the driver, & him, and they'd already run the Phoenix spring race that way, with some free help. He had talked to several people in the area who had shown competence at Chaffey College, but they all asked the wrong question, "How much does it pay?" They were not impressed with the owner's offer of $600 per month. They were making much more at the mundane jobs they already had. (A frequent joke was it amounted to 25 cents an hour.) Paul was not in a good mood. All his top choices had turned him down.
And there I was. A Chaffey student grinning like a baked possum who got good grades but who he didn't particularly like. He offered me the job, and I jumped on it. I didn't care how much it paid, I wanted to go to be on an Indy car team.
I moved to Portland, Oregon, my first race was the Indy 500, and we qualified 10th. I hadn't paid any dues at all!
Paul immediately slowed down, pulled over, and brought the 12-ton Gerhardt race car transporter to a stop. The fire had gone out, but the wheel had a lot of negative camber. We got out a 20-ton bottle jack and when we jacked the truck up for further inspection, the heavy 22 inch tire, wheel, brake drum, & hub assembly fell off all by itself and tipped over onto the grass, forcing me to jump out of the way!
The wheel bearings had expired, and as the hub had worn up through the spindle, the increasing friction on the bottom brake shoe had overheated it and set it on fire. The hub had a history of troubles, in fact, the inner bearing bore in the hub had been built up with brazing and remachined on Rolla's lathe a few weeks earlier. It looked like we could do a quick & dirty repair to get to the Speedway, then a full repair after the big race.
Through the CB radio, we got word to the garages at Indy that we were delayed, and got ahold of a mobile repair truck. A cutting torch was used to cut the stuck outer bearing inner race off the spindle. The mobile repair guy said we could get replacement bearings off an old truck similar to ours on his farm. About this time, our driver Dick Simon arrived from the Indy garage in Vollstedt's '72 GMC 3/4-ton pickup. When he saw us, he executed several donuts in the middle of the rain-slickened freeway!
At the repair guy's farm, we disassembled the right front of his abandoned truck. When the brake drum was pulled off, it revealed a nest of mice living inside. Understandably, the farmer hated mice, and cursing, he fiercely smashed most of them with a large wrench!
We got the right front buttoned back up, and the truck made it to the track with no further problems. Interestingly, during the Indy 500, our Vollstedt/Offy lost its right front wheel bearings too.
It didn't. No matter how much I scrubbed, the Stoddard solvent that would remove grease and oil from car parts had no effect on Speedway BBQ sauce. I was doomed! What was this stuff? What was it doing to my insides? I shared my predicament with the other mechanics before I remembered my high school chemistry regarding solvent systems, and went to the bathroom to use soap and water. I was saved!
Sponsors passed out an awful lot of free stuff at the Indy 500. Three times during the month of May, relatively unknown manufacturers of hand cleaners came to the garages and gave samples of their inferior products to each team. One lard-like hand cleaner was so gross and ineffective, I decided these people were just trying to find a market for some unwanted industrial byproduct. We put their barely used can in the trash. At quitting time, as we walked through Gasoline Alley toward the southeast gate to the parking lot, I looked in each garage's big outside trash can. Three other teams had promptly thrown out their free lard sample too.
Maybe I should've collected all the cans and taken them to the Speedway cafeteria so they could use it to fry up some catfish & hush puppies for us.
In the mid-to-late 90's, Simple Green was a sponsor in the CART Indy Car series. Their cleaning products were pretty good, nevertheless it occurred to me I could as a prank stage my own public arrest in the pits, and as the officers hauled me away in handcuffs, I would be shouting, "SIMPLE GREEN IS MADE OF PEOPLE!!"
He checked off on the Ideal Hose Clamps decal on the car and the Ideal Hose Clamps in various locations on our Vollstedt/Offenhauser. He checked off the Goodyear decal and the Goodyear tires on our rims. He checked off the STP decal and asked Paul Diatlovich, the chief mechanic, if there was STP in the car's oil tank. Paul said no. The official handed Paul a can of STP. Paul opened it, dripped a dollop into the oil tank, and put the can aside. The official instructed Paul to put the whole can in, it was required. Paul said there was no way! A long argument ensued, where the official said the contracts required the whole can of STP, and Paul angrily argued that he wasn't going to put a whole can of that **** in his car, and USAC didn't say how many Ideal hose clamps had to be on the car or how many Premier Supertanium fasteners or quarts of Valvoline motor oil, and he had put in all the STP he was going to put in.
Eventually, the official signed us off, and we ran the Indy 500 with about 1 teaspoon of STP in our 5 gallons of Valvoline FR-50.
Between the pits and Gasoline Alley is a crowded pedestrain pass-through, with guards to keep the uncredentialed out and to hold back pedestrian traffic when a race car needed to cross over. The guards didn't have a chance to clear a path as Al dashed headlong through the crowd. The smoking hot front hub assembly brushed several bodies and arms, leaving painful burns. Al said later he particularly remembered the big cups of Coke flying through the air.
A year or so before, I'm told, Jimmy Thrall plunged through the same area for similar reasons during the big race. Back then, the broadcast people walking around televising the spectacle were using a sizeable camera with big cables looping back to a second man carrying a huge backpack. The second guy had enough time to shout "You can't ... " before Jimmy thundered between them and tore out all the cables.
In 1978 or 1979, I was down near the turn one end of the pits, and I had observed that Salt Walther's girlfriend was standing with him in pit lane while his Dayton-Walther no. 77 was being readied for practice or qualifying. The woman was wearing a tight hot pink gown festooned with large hot pink feathers. It looked very out-of-place. I walked by a couple of grizzled railbirds sitting on the wall, each wearing their "Speedway Old Timers" ball caps, and overheard one of them say, "Y'know, I don't mind them lettin' women in the pits, but that's a fire hazard!"
Paul was somewhat abusive, and often gave Dick a hard time. One day we were all in garage 3 on various projects, and Dick had enough. He told Paul, "I come in here every day and work my *** off, and all I get is ****!" Paul smiled because he loved to cause trouble. I piped up and remarked, "A Day's Pay For a Day's Work!" Dick suddenly looked very hurt; I hadn't harrassed him before. I immediately said, "I'm sorry, I couldn't resist the joke. I'm actually glad to have you here!"
Another day, Dick was having a lot of trouble assembling a Dana joint. They were notoriously difficult to put together, so hard, Dick said his Travelodge team never took them apart, they cleaned and regreased them as a unit. I walked over to Dick's bench and gave it a try. I did it on the first attempt, a first for me. Dick looked a little hurt! I told him, "Dick, that's the only time I've done that!"
Rolla's truck had as usual been hastily packed to the gills with a variety of beat-up crates and decaying cardboard boxes of spare parts, tools, and pit equipment. You couldn't even see the car. As Dick pawed through the boxes, a big rig accelerated by and a voice on the CB radio said, "Same guy that inspected me!" A second big rig drove by, and a second voice said, "Look, it's full of junk!"
Nine cars were wrecked and a few of them limped around to the pits where some of the mechanics saw their chance to play stock car and pounced on the battered Escorts with wheel hammers, pounding fenders out away from tires. Wheel hammers hadn't seen such an opportunity in years.
There was no more racing and Dick Simon was declared the winner because he got to the bottom of the hill first, before the red flag, sliding on his roof! He and his wife Melanie got to ride around the track on the victory car, with a big winner's wreath around his neck, smiling and waving to the cheering crowd.
I pulled over to have a look. A blade had come off the aftermarket fan and had done serious damage to the radiator. I found the blade in the engine compartment and tossed it into the cab. I drove on, stopping at the nearest source of water. I topped up the badly leaking radiator and filled up a spare empty 5-gallon Valvoline 50wt racing oil plastic bucket that was in the back. We used those empty buckets for all sorts of chores. By alternately stopping to fill the radiator with the bucket and stopping to fill up everything at gas stations and any other available water source every half mile or so, I made it to the airport and back to Gasoline Alley with the needed parts without overheating the engine.
After the radiator was replaced, I was on another errand with the old pickup, driving south on Georgetown Road, right outside the main straightaway of the Brickyard. I could see Phil Threshie, the driver of our old prototype Lightning Offy that year, coming up fast behind me in one of his family's dealership's new Diesel GM pickups. He pulled alongside on my left and razzed me, making like he wanted to race. The 5-gallon bucket of water was on the passenger's side of the cab, still nearly full. I grabbed the bucket and flung the entire contents on his windshield! Once his wipers cleared his view, I could see him laughing heartily.
That's how to put the damper on street racing!
Fortunately, the road curved to the left, the truck was aimed right at a gas station, and there was a big gap in the traffic. I pulled in, or should I say, the truck pulled in, and I shut it off. An inspection quickly revealed the whole right front wheel assembly was tucked up underneath the engine! The U-bolt holding the front of the lower control arm had broken when I braked and let the arm rotate horizontally.
I reasoned that power braking the truck in reverse would bring the wheel back where it belonged. It worked, and I lashed it in position with rope that was in the bed of the truck. Note some of the rope passing through the vacated holes in the K-member in the above picture. I drove back to Gasoline Alley at no more than 15 MPH, using only the parking brake to stop.
Turned out that U-bolt was a known weak item, and later production trucks had bigger ones. I replaced the badly bottomed-out upper ball joint, twisted the upper control arm straight again using the old ball joint welded into the end of a 5-foot piece of pipe, installed a new set of 4 of the bigger U-bolts, and the truck soldiered on.
When he finally got the poor thing running, he arranged to test it on the Indianapolis Raceway Park oval, and invited Dick Simon, the chief Paul Diatlovich, me, and Frank Fiore Jr. to come along. Dick owed Bob some kind favor from way back, I hear, and had agreed to drive it on its maiden run. It actually made it around the track several times, then Paul got to take a turn while the ecstatic owner/designer/builder fidgeted happily, taking pictures and making a tape recording of the big event. When it was my turn to drive, it was getting dark and we didn't know where the switch box for the race track's lights was, so Diatlovich drove behind me in Vollstedt's '72 GMC 3/4 ton pickup with the high beams on so I could see. I was sitting in an inch of alcohol from a fuel leak somewhere. The car had never been strung, the left front wheel was bent and cracked, and the right front brake was disconnected. The handling was awful. The Voelker engine, as prepared by Olmstead, felt like it had maybe 100 lbs-ft on the bottom end, and no midrange or top end at all. It didn't have enough power to get the LG500 gearbox out of second gear. (Dick Simon had been able to get it into 3rd, but he was the only pro driver among us!) Diat had no trouble at all keeping up with me in the pickup, a tow vehicle with more than 200,000 hard miles on it.
Especially considering the cockpit fuel puddle, it was probably one of the most dangerous things I've ever done, but what the heck, I can say I drove an Indy car once.
Lacking a way to hold the truck on a hill with the engine running, the mechanics always kept short 4x4s handy to chock a wheel, and some of them were left on the ground. One night, I was parking the transporter at the Taylor's Ferry Road shop in Portland, Oregon. We usually parked it right in front of the two garage doors, inches away, to leave the small parking lot open for other vehicles and block the doors to help keep booglers out. I was nearly done, backing up dead slow, watching the shop's vulnerable electric meter in an outside rear view mirror. I was 2 or 3 inches out from the meter, perfect. Then the outside rear duals ran over one of the 4x4s. The whole truck tilted over, smashed the meter flat against the wall in a shower of sparks, and all the lights went out in the shop. My parents were there watching.
I was sure PGE was going to charge us for the meter, but when they came the next day, they replaced it gratis with a smile.
Before drinking it, Chad took it over to the Valvoline fuel shack. Indy car rules required that the racing fuel be methyl alcohol with no additives other than up to 15% water absorbed from the atmosphere. To enforce this rule, the fuel shack was equipped with a Perkin Elmer mass spectrometer. Bear's mountain dew was analyzed, and he returned to our garage with a long computer printout.
It was a daunting list of chemicals the mass spec found in the 'shine, and I wish I had a copy. I recall ethyl alcohol was the main ingredient, and ranking next in amount was a low single digit percentage of methyl alcohol. Below, there were notable amounts of lead, tin, and antimony, suggesting the distiller used a car radiator for a condenser.
Chad sipped some of the white lightnin' himself, and it tasted like gasoline. So he gave it to a British team, and they loved it. I didn't try any.
In May 2006, I heard the Indy 500 was going to switch from methyl alcohol to 100% ethyl alcohol to please the ecoterrorists. No denaturant? Shades of MIG-25 crews. I see a rich field for jokes. Well, they do call it the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. It lends a new meaning to weaving in & out of traffic. Those corn-fed Hoosiers are going to have a stalk car race. Will the engines be drunk with power?
The turbocharger rules had changed yet again, and our 209 AMC had insufficient horsepower. Not only was the boost pressure lower, the dyno program had tuned the engine for higher boost and now it couldn't use the lower pressure as well as it might have. We proved our only problem was the manifold pressure by surreptitiously running a few laps at the original higher pressure. The engine was very crisp and strong running "illegally". It would be futile to attempt a qualifying run, nevertheless, strategy, politics, and potential deal-making considerations led Rolla to tell Jimmy Thrall and Kurt Hannis to put the car into the qualifying line. He told them to just hold their position, don't bother to keep the engine warm or actually have the car ready to go out on the track. Jimmy wasn't comfortable with this inactivity and lack of preparedness, but he followed the instructions.
I don't know what strategy was involved, but strategies change. Hours later, as the car neared the front of the line, Rolla suddenly ordered a qualifying attempt. Hasty preparations were made, and Dick Simon jumped into the cockpit. The engine started and Dick was waved out onto pit lane, but the AMC wouldn't run right. It sputtered & died and the Indy car came to a stop about 700 feet down pit lane. How ignominious.
Kurt Hannis had our Wheel Horse tractor and tow rope already down pit lane nearer the stalled car. I think he had just finished bringing out the already-qualified Lightning/Offy for a practice session. He hooked up to the back of the McLaren and began towing it backwards up pit lane to its pit. I jogged down to meet the car and jumped onto the left side. I grabbed the rollover bar as Dick warned me that the freshly waxed paint was slippery and he didn't want me to slide off. Dick was sitting on the right side holding onto the other side of the rollover bar and was steering the car as it rolled backwards. I asked Dick what happened. He grumbled that the engine was stone cold and all the spark plugs had fouled.
Then Jimmy jogged down and jumped onto the right side of the moving car, ahead of Dick. Jimmy asked what happened and just as Dick was warning him about the slick paint, Jimmy slid down the wedge-shaped car and the right front tire grabbed a leg!
The car pulled both his legs down between the rear of the tire and the front of the monocoque. Being a fast thinker, I stayed on the car, adding my own weight to Jimmy's woes. It was a rough ride as the tire ran over both of Jimmy's legs and the Foyt Coyote-style nose came down on them. Jimmy had flung himself to the side and rolled with the car to minimize his injuries. Kurt Hannis was too far ahead of us at the end of the long tow tope to know what was happening, and as Jimmy later described, the car spat him out.
The newspaper clipping at the right is from the Indianapolis Star newspaper. At the left wearing glasses and a Diehard hat is Roy Gardner, in the middle with a beard is Kurt Hannis, and at the far right is Dick Simon administering first aid. The caption reads:
Getting Help
Race driver Dick Simon (far right) attends to Jim Thrall, a member of his pit crew who suffered a leg injury Sunday when he was run over by Simon's car as it was being pulled back to the start of the qualifying line. The car had died leaving the pits as Simon was attempting to qualify for the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race. Thrall was treated at the track hospital. Simon was unable to continue because of damages to the car incurred in the accident. (Star Photo)
At the gate, the guard refused entrance to Jimmy. The hospital staff had cut the legs off his uniform pants during his treatment, and the rules prohibited shorts in the garage area! Rolla explained the situation to the Old Timer and promised Jimmy would change into a fresh pair of pants the moment they got back to their garage. Rolla was a well-known car owner, and the guard let them through. Jimmy could be the only person who's ever "gotten away with" wearing short pants in Gasoline Alley!
Jimmy walked into garage #3 and took in the scene. Nobody was doing anything. He growled, "Why aren't you FIXING the car?!" and immediately went to work disassembling the nose, still wearing the sawn-off pants. We slowly joined in, glad that Jimmy was still his old self.
Not long after, during an early evening at home, I got a phone call asking if it was OK if a couple of gals came over and told me about a fantastic new music program. I turned to my girlfriend Dawn Kaufman, told her the situation, and she nodded yes. She was aware of the scam too, and was financially astute. I said come on over.
A while later, two girls in their middle teens arrived with a large briefcase. I invited them in, offered them seats, and they began their sales pitch. They showed me their catalog of music cassettes and said I could get any music I wanted. They demonstrated the inferiority and inconvenience of LPs & reel-to-reel tapes by pulling out of the briefcase and waving around a fantastically warped 12" LP and a 7" reel of tape that had been teased into an impressive Afro. They explained how Philips audio cassettes were the highest quality source of prerecorded music available.
I begged to differ with them. I suggested that LPs were the finest media I could purchase, and I would show them. At the time, I had a Garrard SL-55 turntable on its third motor, Grado's cheapest cartridge, an Eico ST-70 integrated tube amp with serious power supply buzz from dessicated filter caps, and a pair of mismatched box speakers inherited from two different relatives' mono Hi-Fi systems that had been replaced with stereos. (It wasn't until later I had a decent High-End system, but I might've had some inspiring copies of "The Absolute Sound" magazine lying around the living room.)
I invited the girls to listen to a fine LP.
I put on William Shatner singing "Proud Mary".
The look of agony on their faces was almost worth the $1500! Then again, maybe I could've forced them to give me all the money they'd taken from others. They didn't leave, though. Would I have to showcase Mrs. Miller singing "These Boots Are Made For Walking" or put on some Biff Rose? Would I have to bring in Doctor Demento as my second?
I looked through their "comprehensive" catalog and noted that it was pretty much all recent pop music. Not a whole lot of Ira Gershwin, Les Elgart, or Antonio Soler. I decided my most convenient excuse to not sign up was to insist on something they were highly unlikely to ever have in stock. I specifically requested Gary Usher's 1965 album "The Sounds of The Silly Surfers," flipside "The Sounds of The Weird-ohs," a title meant to creep out the sales ladies, but secretly an album with pretty good music. My original LP was worn out and warped. They made vague promises. They looked more and more like they thought they were in the lair of a mass murderer. Insert a video here of Jonathan Winters crying "He's crazy! He's going to kill us! Waa-aaa-aa-ah!!"
After a total of perhaps 30 minutes, they pushed me for a signature. The paperwork they offered had letterheads that had been crossed out and new info written on. My girlfriend pretended to be taken in and vacuously urged me to go for it. At first, I didn't realize what she was doing, and I suddenly felt doomed. I stuck to my guns though, and insisted on my "Silly Surfers." At this point, one of the girls asked to use the telephone.
Her body language said she didn't want me to hear what she was saying, but I did hear, and it amounted to "We've been here a half hour and he won't sign! What do we do now?" Their boss wanted to talk to me in person. He was the brains behind the scam and was much more oily- and dangerous-sounding. He asked what they could do to get me to participate in their Cassette Club. I quizzed him about the altered letterheads and he explained it away. I told him I wanted "The Silly Surfers" as per their promise I could get "any" music, and he admitted he couldn't provide it.
Dawn and I ended up bidding the two disappointed sales girls adieu, and they left slowly with big upside-down smiles. They were departing without my $1500 for their troubles and they looked as if their boss was going to beat them.
And you thought you had a lousy job.
So, who committed the greater crime, the 2 girls and their pimp, me, or William Shatner?
One day I got caught, but it sounded interesting. They wanted me to step inside their office and give my opinions on several different cola soft drinks. Oh boy! Free Coke!
I sampled a half dozen or so little cups of cola, each with a somewhat different taste. I didn't die and I gave my opinions. The survey taker dutifully filled out her forms and thanked me.
Months later, "New Coke" was announced to the world. The world didn't like it. I didn't like it. I wondered if I was in any way responsible for the debacle.
When John returned from the meet, he gave me the photo back and said he didn't put it in with the banquet door prizes. I was disappointed, but before I could ask why, he said the meet had a photo contest we didn't know about ahead of time, and he entered the photo in that instead. Then he handed me two trophy plaques and told me I'd won an HONORABLE MENTION and PEOPLES CHOICE!
Later, when I was telling it to Ruth, she looked incredulous and lectured, "You're supposed to exercise a horse by RIDING it!"
I had a flash of brilliance, said "Wait here, I'll be right back!", took both our plates, and disappeared into the kitchen. After a few minutes, I returned with our spaghetti minus much of the sauce and said, "Try it now." We agreed it was now plenty tasty, and Ruth asked, "How did you get the sauce out?" I replied, "I used the salad spinner and centrifuged it!"
One day, Don Clarke discovered some transgression and stomped out of the lab toward the shop floor, announcing he was going to knock some heads together. Less than a minute later, there was a resounding metallic crash from that direction, and I called out to my wide-eyed coworkers, "I GET HIS LAPTOP!" Someone else, I think it was Dan Levens, looked at me and protested, "He's not even COLD yet!"
Actually, it was just one of the big garage doors being closed too quickly by a wind gust, and Don made his point without being dispatched.
Automobile parking was at a premium at the main building, and parking spaces eventually had to be assigned. A block away at "Annex Two," there was a large surplus of parking spaces that begged for people to walk just a little ways to work. I took advantage of the situation by storing my 1957 GMC pickup truck at Annex Two inside a parking lot section that had a fence and a locked gate. I didn't drive it very much, only when I needed to haul something.
Jimmy Thrall advised me, "You and I know your truck is a fine piece mechanically, but it doesn't look so good. Once in a long while, VIPs from (our sponsor) Toyota go down to Annex Two, and I recommend you get a car cover." That was sage advice, and I quickly bought a custom fit cover and threw it over the truck to disguise it.
Occasionally, AAR coworkers who knew what my truck looked like and knew there was nothing on the outside worth shielding from the weather would ask why the heck I put a high-falutin' car cover on it. My reply was, "The cover isn't to protect the truck from the world. It's to protect the world from ... " and they'd grin and chime in with me, "...THE TRUCK!"
When I first got my truck, the previous owner apologized for the paint job. He said he had loaned the truck to his mentally retarded brother, and to show his gratitude, before returning it, his sibling painted it inside & out with pinkish-beige house paint using a brush. You could see desert sand and bugs in the streaky finish. Shortly after, I scraped the paint off the dashboard gauges so I could see them. I never did much else about the paint because any time I thought about it, I'd do some kind of mechanical work instead. I did find that the paint could be removed with oven cleaner, leaving the original red enamel relatively untouched. About 1993, I entered my truck in the Portland, Oregon Beater Car Club's "Beater Picnic," which was a parody of the nearby Forest Grove Concours d'Elegance, much like the Doo Dah Parade is a parody of the Pasadena Rose Parade. I was hoping to win the trophy for "BEST PAINT," but it turned out they didn't have that category that year. Instead I won two trophies, one for "BEST (WORST) TRUCK," and one for "MOST INTIMIDATING!" My truck was featured that night on the KPTV Channel 12 Evening News. 15 seconds of fame. 
Working on one of the Indy cars out on the shop floor one day, one of the mechanics asked, "How long have you had your truck?" Thinking about my '56 Chevy wagon I got back in 1970, I replied, "Oh, not long, since about 1977." The mechanic laughed and said, "I wasn't even born then!"
Another day while turning wrenches and talking, someone remarked how young kids didn't always have the background to understand old jokes. As an example I offered the old statement, "That's about as useful as a slick page in a Sears catalog!" The 48-or-so-year-old crew chief Gary Martin laughed. The 20-year-old mechanics looked uncomprehendingly at each other and said, "Huh?", which only made Gary laugh more.
They discussed plans for the days ahead. When he said they'd be going to Del Taco, she asked "What's Del Taco?" He replied, "It's like Taco Bell, only cooler!"
Later, we had some time off and I went to a mall. Again, it was odd to see nothing but white people. Very different from the Carson Mall one day years before in Southern California, where my date and I were the only white folk. I noticed that many of the people in the mall were in wheel chairs, and many looked deformed. I thought, "This state needs an influx of different genes! Black, Hispanic, Polynesian Islander, anything!"
Back in the Santa Ana, California shop of AAR, a new guy on the team, Albert Grey, was working around the data truck and asked me, "Where's the black guy?" I knew he meant Stretch Baker and he hadn't had time to learn everybody's name, but I couldn't resist having a little fun. I replied, "You mean the guy who drives the truck, refuels the car during pit stops, and drives the Porsche 914-6?" The new guy looked at me a bit bewildered and asked again, "No, I mean the black guy." I persevered, "You mean the truck driver, and the loadmaster, and the guy who's into CB and HAM radio, and refuels the race car, and is 6 foot 7 inches tall, and drives a 914-6 Porsche he built the engine for himself, and has a black belt in karate?" Before the overloaded and stunned new guy could make his request again, I admitted, "I'm kidding you. Stretch is in the front office." I pointed north, and Al headed that way.
I like referring to someone by their accomplishments instead of their appearance.
Across the street from a place I used to work was a restaurant called the "Dairy Depot." It was a one-off place with a variety of food and a little bit of railroad decoration. I usually ate a sack lunch at work but maybe once every two months I'd eat out. The Dairy Depot had a salad bar. Yum.
The first time I went in for lunch, the salad bar was filled up and the items were a bit dried out on top. It was if no one had touched it all day. I made myself a big salad to go with a sandwich & milk, and it was good.
A month or two later when I went in, the salad ingredients were laid out, but there were no dressings. I asked for them, and a cheerful employee quickly brought them out. I took a look around the restaurant to see what the other dozen or so customers were eating. They all had a double cheeseburger, large fries, and a large Coke, or the equivalent. No fish, no milk, no salad.
The third time I went in, the salad bar was completely empty. I asked about it, and a cheerful employee quickly brought out all the items for me. I looked around again, and as before, the other 15 or so diners all had burgers, fries, and soda. They looked pale and pudgy, with their John Deere ball caps on. They looked like they could use a salad.
The last time I patronized the Dairy Depot, even the salad bar fixtures were gone. They had given up. It must have been a losing proposition offering healthy food choices to Americans. I ordered fish and chips for lunch and had an extra large helping of salad at home that night at dinner.
In the 1980's, I had lunch every workday in the Building 58 cafeteria at Tektronix in Beaverton, Oregon. They had a good salad bar.
I recall a study about how the colors of foods strongly influence our perception of their palatability. Subjects were served meals that were identical except some were artificially colored to look quite different from normal. The oddly hued food was rated as far less tasty, even nauseating.
At Tektronix, the glass panels on the salad bar protecting the ingredients from our sniffles & sneezes weren't clear, they were colored a sort of smoky purple. This made the ingredients look a long way from vibrant and fresh, even yucky, and I wonder how many customers it deterred?
The school was the College of the Pacific, and their mascot was Tommy the Tiger. For a parade there in Stockton, California, my dad said he and his friends put a couple pieces of lumber up each side of his car and fashioned a swing for Tommy to sit on. It worked well, with Tommy swinging back & forth and waving to the crowd. Then there was a stoppage in the parade, and my dad had to hit the brakes. He couldn't understand why the crowd went wild with cheers and applause. Afterward, Tommy told him he had done a complete loop!
The Hurst Shifter Company was present along with other vendors hawking their wares and assisting the racers, and one day they flew in a bevy of beauties to pass out catalogs and posters. The gals were dressed in miniskirts. After several hours, they acquired a stiff legged gait and complained that they were sunburned in places they'd never been sunburned before. They had to be helped onto an earlier flight home than Hurst had planned.
On Dick's way back, the engine quit, and he had to make an emergency landing. He was gliding in to a farmer's field when he collected a power line which shorted and welded a burned-off end of one of the wires to the landing gear. The plane was forced to fly in a huge arc, and Dick only had up-down control. He was going to hit a barn before making a full circle, so with what little control he had left, he chose to hit the barn at about 6 feet altitude to avoid smashing into any heavy equipment parked inside or into any sizable roof timbers. Turned out it was empty, and Dick was unscathed, but the barn and plane were pretty well used up. Tore the wings off, and the fuselage came out the other side. Dick was standing beside the wreckage when the farmer came running up and asked, "Is anybody hurt?" Dick said, "I don't know, I just got here!
The farmer said he didn't care about the barn, it was about to be torn down, but later he sued and Dick had to buy him a new metal one.
One day, some swabs on a deck crane wanted to get it further down into a hold, but a safety limit switch was turning off the electric motor. So they disconnected the switch, and got the crane down where they wanted it. However, the vertical pivot at the base of the crane had a large clutch pack in it to safely arrest any downward movement past the limit switches in case the drives broke and the crane fell. The combined weight of the crane and the power of the motors locked up the clutch tighter than the motor could lift the crane back up! The swabs were forced to laboriously disassemble the pivot to unload the clutch.
When in port, the ship was usually hooked up to shore power. It was a rule that the crane operator had to turn on the two crane motors one at a time, otherwise the electrical supply system would be overloaded. One day, an operator threw both switches on simultaneously. The two motors struggled to reach operating speed, but couldn't, and a circuit breaker below tripped. Immediately, the two automatic emergency diesel generators cranked and started, but they labored under the load and couldn't reach operating speed. The seaman on watch at the electrical panels observed the tripped circuit breaker, and reconnected it. Shore power was now connected directly to generator power, and the two were seriously out of phase. The mismatch motored both generators backwards, blew up the engines, and ripped both generator sets loose from their deck mountings!
Turned out there was a small trashcan fire upstairs that had already been put out. The fire chief's query became an in joke and stock phrase around the shop.
It started with one mechanic telling how he had accidentally turned Rolla Vollstedt's right angle drill motor on while he had the chuck key in, winding his fingers up painfully. We agreed that the very long butterfly-handle switch on that tool had caused the same injury to all of us at one time or another.
Next, John Martin, who was driving the Grey Ghost for us, told about the time he was working as a mechanic at a car dealership in the stall next to a detail guy polishing a car. The guy was using one of those big two-handled rotary power buffers. His long shirt tails were hanging out. After the buffer took a real strong liking to the shirt tails, John and the other mechanics had to cut him out of the instant strait jacket that was created.
Then Rolla said he had a story to top everyone's. Years before, when he was running a front-engine car, he was doing some maintenance work on it in his shop. He had the spark plugs out and was going to crank it over to get up oil pressure. Indy cars don't have their own starter motors, and back then the crews used external inertia starters adapted from WWII aircraft. You crouched down in front of the car with this big starter, plug it into the crankshaft, let its electric motor wind up a flywheel, then engage its clutch to spin the engine energetically.
Problem was, the car was in gear.
The starter rammed into Rolla's stomach and stuffed him under a workbench along the wall. He couldn't shut it off, you have to wait for the starter's flywheel to run down. He couldn't pull the starter out, the slowly churning rear tires were making sure of that. The engine man, Keith Randol, was paralyzed with laughter. The chief mechanic, Hal Sperb, grumbled irritably and walked over to grab the shifter and yank it out of gear. With the car rolled away from the wall, Rolla crawled out from under the bench, bruised but otherwise unhurt.
No one could top the story.
When I related this story to John O'Malley, he said he used to work with spools like that, and they weigh a minimum of 3,000 pounds, and usually more like 14,000.
The photo in the paper showed the bed of the pickup smashed down into the pavement and the thief long gone.
Speaking of stealing something heavy, in 1978 or 1979 Kurt Vollstedt and I were working in Rolla Vollstedt's Taylor's Ferry Road shop when someone noisily rolled a medium-size safe by the front windows on a hand truck.
We shared the building with a plumbing company & a body shop, and there was an apartment that was being rented to some drug dealers. We thought that because the 2 or 3 young raggedy males that lived there sometimes had a dozen different cars drive in throughout the day and only stay for 4 or 5 minutes. Also, one day they were out on their 2nd story deck throwing a knife at a piece of plywood and missed, almost hitting Chad Rogers. To add insult to almost-injury, they asked him to toss it back to them! Later, we saw the plywood in the dumpster. On it, they had drawn a crude picture of a policeman and written his name underneath.
Not many minutes after the safe trundled by, one of the kids came into our shop. None of them had ever visited us before. He asked us if we had a torch we could cut open a safe with. Kurt and I glanced nervously at each other ... this was something we didn't want to get involved in. I quickly thought of a good excuse and spoke up. I told the drug diddler that we built only Indy Cars in the shop, they were very lightweight, and all our tools were for thin materials. I lamented that our little acetylene torch would only warm up a safe and couldn't begin to cut through it. He believed me and left.
Months later, we heard the kids had used a shotgun to take the safe from a rival drug dealer. They had finally pried the safe open, hoping to score lots of cocaine, but were very disappointed that it held only $1,000 cash.
One day, Chuck Looper had had enough. Tony simply would not leave and would not stop yakking. Looper grabbed Tony and Ty-Wrapped him to the chain link fence outside. He took the gas can for the Wheel Horse tractor and poured gasoline all around Tony. He struck a match. Tony ripped loose from the Ty-Wraps and took off. He didn't come bother Looper so much after that.
At another time I hear, chief mechanic Phil Casey walked into his garage and found Tony sitting in the cockpit of his Indy car. This just isn't something you do with someone else's race car. Phil took some firecrackers out of his toolbox and began tossing them lit one by one into the cockpit. Tony beat himself up pretty good scrambling out of the tight confines.
One day, the nephew blasted the vise off the shaper. Smooth move.
Another day, an emergency order came in for two large shafts with multiple diameters for various bearings and other attachments. A pair of billets about 2 feet long and about 8 inches in diameter were quickly sawn, and Rudy & the nephew were put on the job, each with their own lathe. An impromptu contest developed to see who would finish first. Rudy rough cut his whole shaft first, then made his final cuts, knowing the shaft would most likely warp with so much initial material being hogged off. The nephew made all his final cuts simultaneously to save time, and finished first. However, his shaft was warped .011" and was unusable! Disqualified! Fortunately, he had measured wrong and all his cuts were .011" too large! So Rudy took over and redid all the finish cuts removing the excess material, and two good shafts were delivered in a timely fashion to the customer.
Some time before that job, Rudy was working at a steel foundry in McMinnville, Oregon. Of all the equipment and activities in the mill, the caster had the highest priority because it fed all the other processes. One day, there wasn't anything for Rudy to do for a while, so he machined up a pair of thin wedges to put between the rear axle and leaf springs of his 1949 Ford pickup to change the pinion angle, or the "caster" angle. A supervisor happened by, and quick to stop employees from doing G-jobs, he demanded, "What are those?"
Rudy calmly replied, "Caster wedges."
Not wanting to stop an obviously high-priority project, the supervisor went away.
One day, a huge ladle of molten steel was being moved across the foundry, and the operator spilled it all onto the employees' toolbox area. The toolboxes were encased in solid steel, but fortunately no one was there and there were no injuries.
Some years later, when Rudy was working at an Oklahoma Gas & Electric power generating station, there was a memorable mishap. A cable carrying the full output of the 1,000 megawatt coal-fired power plant fell away, and created an 8-foot long arc about a foot in diameter. It made a heck of a lot of noise and light before the plant was shut down.
When the OGE plant was down for a routine overhaul, Rudy got to show his machining skills. One of the systems being rebuilt was the water sprayers for the furnace. They were long pipes with sprinklers that rolled into the furnace through ports while it was burning to routinely remove deposits. In the furnace, they were supported by concavely curved rollers. Those rollers needed replacing, and the salesman from Combustion Engineering put them on his list. Rudy said he could make them. The salesman said he'd seen their machine shop, and they didn't have the equipment. Rudy mounted a turntable sideways on the bed of a horizontal boring bar with a cutter the diameter of the concave feature, chucked up some billets in the turntable, and cut a fine set of rollers, saving OGE a significant chunk of change.
Onry attacked and chased big dogs that had the misfortune of wandering onto the property. He would drag in animals as big as he was to eat and then just lay there forever and sleep. I noted that Onry's favorite place to snooze was on top of piles of metal chips from the machine tools that had been swept up on the concrete floor.
Rudy told me later that one day they were pushing a Chevelle across the floor. Its big block Chevy engine was in the engine room being souped up. They unintentionally pushed the car over Onry, who was asleep on top of one of those piles of metal shavings. Rudy took the cat to the vet, where its internal organs were pushed back into position, and the cat recovered fully to continue his dominance of the neighborhood.
One of Chad's coworkers on the day shift had been urging him to stay late and "see how dumb the possums are." So Chad hung around one morning to take him up on the offer. The guy got a double barrelled shotgun out of his car, walked out into the open field, and sat down on the ground with his legs out straight and the gun's barrel resting on his toes. Chad stood behind him.
Soon, possums trundled out of the bushes and wandered around the field eating up the yummy toasted June bugs. After a while, one of the possums ambled up to the muzzle of the shotgun and commenced to sniffing it. Chad's coworker looked up over his shoulder at him with a broad smile and pulled both triggers, never moving the gun. There was a loud B-BOOM and a pink cloud with little legs twirling through the air.
That's how dumb possums are.
A strategy meeting among the higher ups from both organizations resulted in Jimmy and his workmates building a fake control panel out of junk parts that was locked over the real panel at the hospital. The only key was given to the hospital administrator, and the impressive array of bogus controls and blinking & flashing lights kept the floor polishers amused and happy.
At one track, the jar was filled with Atomic Fireball candy. A major Toyota VIP from Japan was present at the race, accompanied by his wife and 3-year-old daughter. They walked by the hospitality area, and the daughter took one of the candies, dropped the wrapper on the ground, and popped the red hot cinnamon jawbreaker in her mouth. Within seconds, she couldn't stand it, spit it out, and almost started crying. Her dad went back and picked up the wrapper. After studying the words & icons of radioactivity on it, the concerned father exclaimed angrily in a Japanese accent, "They even eat the stuff!!"
Armin Pearson illustrated for me in 1972 his theory on why I am the way I am.